105 A.D. In China, Ts’ai Lun, an official of the Han Dynasty Chinese Imperial Court, invents the world’s first paper from a mixture of bamboo, fish nets, mulberry, and rags. He will eventually become wealthy after he present his paper to the Emperor Han Ho Ti. 1702 The first regularly pr...

1797 Thomas Jefferson presents a paper on the Megalonyx to the American Philosophical Society. It will be published as “A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia,” Transactions of American Philosophical Society 4:255-256...

Art Gizmodo just concluded a Photoshop contest in which contestants were invited to submit Ways to Hilariously Ruin the Watchmen Movie. My favorite is the shot with Jar Jar. I don’t know which I enjoy more: the idea of Jar Jar dying or the way every new hit film dredges up the old bitterness. ...

1497 Nicolaus Copernicus first begins to record his astronomical observations. 1611 Dutch astronomer Johannes Fabricius becomes the first person to observe sunspots as he observes the rising sun through his telescope. Observing the Sun becomes painful, so Fabricius and his father will soon switch to...

1618 Johannes Kepler formulates the Third Law of Planetary Motion. The third law states that, “The squares of the orbital periods of planets are directly proportional to the cubes of the semi-major axis of the orbits.” In other words, the period of a planet’s orbit around the Sun i...

Stood in firelight, sweltering. Bloodstain on chest like map of violent new continent. Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night. Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating...

1876 Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for an “Improvement in Telegraphy,” which will later come to be known as the telephone. (US No. 174,465) The patent application was submitted on February 14, just hours ahead of Elisha Gray. This first telephone has only one transducer for bot...

Movie: Watchmen Taglines: Justice is coming to all of us. No matter what we do. Rating: Rated R for… being the Watchmen Release: March 6, 2009 Running Time: 163 minutes Starring: Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, & Patrick Wilson… IM...

Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder...

1646 The very first patent in the the New World (America) is issued by the General Court of Massachusetts to Joseph Jenkes, to protect his scyth mill engine from competition. The patent is granted for fourteen years. The patent comes four years before the first US corporate charter, which will also ...