The Great Geek Manual

1959
Robert Noyce of Texas Instruments conceives the idea of an integrated circuit. In 1968, Noyce will found Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

1983
According to Twin Galaxies, Ed O’Neil scores a record-setting 252,114,350 points playing the Williams Electronics arcade game Robotron at the Outer Limits arcade in Durham, North Carolina. Visit the official Twin Galaxies website.

The action television series The A-Team premieres on the NBC network with the episode “Mexican Slayride.” The series will become a cultural icon of the eighties, garnering a significant cult following. The series will run for ninety-eight episodes over five seasons. TV.com entry
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What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true.

Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.

- “What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology” by Tim Maudlin, January 2012.
Originally published by The Atlantic.

1889
The Columbia Phonograph Company is formed in Washington, D.C. as a successor to the Volta Graphophone Company. The company will go on to become the first record company to produce pre-recorded records rather than just blank cylinders.

1908
Edouard Bélin uses his Bélinographe, a system able to send remote photographs over telephone and telegraphic networks, to transmit a photograph 1,700km from Paris to Bordeaux to Lyon then back. The historical event takes twenty-two minutes.
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…any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Nature. … Basically, either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.

This vote has consequences. If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then this answer is equally profound. It amounts to saying that the universe provides us with a picture of the ultimate end-point of technological development. In the Great Silence, we see the future of technology, and it lies in achieving greater and greater efficiencies, until our machines approach the thermodynamic equilibria of their environment, and our economics is replaced by an ecology where nothing is wasted. After all, SETI is essentially a search for technological waste products: waste heat, waste light, waste electromagnetic signals. We merely have to posit that successful civilizations don’t produce such waste, and the failure of SETI is explained.

- “The Deepening Paradox” by Karl Schroeder, November 2011.
Originally posted to Kschroeder.com.

1789
The first American novel, The Power of Sympathy or the Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth by William Hill Brown, is published in Boston, Massachusetts by Isaiah Thomas.

1888
Charles Babbage’s son, Henry Provost Babbage, uses the mill portion of the Analytical Engine he constructed from his father’s drawings to compute multiples of Pi in order to prove that the design is functional.

1920
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a non-profit organization that defends and the constitutional rights of individuals, is formed. The organization will have a significant impact on a number of fundamental issues surrounding the internet, the media, and the communication industry in general. Visit the official ACLU website.
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The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.

- Charles Bukowski

Art

• 9 pulpy science fiction movie posters from an alternate cinematic universe
• Beautiful Portraits of Game Characters
• Calvin and Hobbes / Spider-Man Mash-Up
• Check out this amazing Stormtrooper Cake
• The Magic of Man
• Make a greeting card with a Mechanical Iris for all your steampunk events!

Comics

• Fox News expose: sex sells in comics and is destroying our children
• The great ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ web-shooter debate
• One Way To Reduce Piracy: Improve The LCS Experience
• The Top 5 Science Fiction Comics

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1885
La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York is issued the first US patent for a roller coaster, the “Gravity Pleasure Switchback Railway,” which he had built at Coney Island in New York City in 1884. (US No. 332,762) For five cents a ride, passengers sit sideways in cars that travel a six hundred foot wooden railway, at a top speed of six miles per hour. Thompson, who will later be dubbed “the father of gravity,” will earn back his original US$1,600 investment within just three weeks.

1929
The Fox Film Corporation releases the western film “In Old Arizona,” directed by Irving Cummings and starring Warner Baxter, Edmund Lowe, and Dorothy Burgess, to US theaters. It is the first full-length talking motion picture to be shot outdoors on location in the US. IMDB listing Running time: 1 hr 35 mins

1930
The first episode of “Lone Ranger” is broadcast from radio station WXYZ-Detroit. The series will be enormously influential on future comic books.

1969
Astronomers at the University of Arizona establish the first optical identification of a pulsar, which is located in the Crab Nebula.

1981
The inauguration speech of US President Ronald Reagan is broadcast. It is the world’s first broadcast to feature live teletext subtitles for the hearing impaired.
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