Geeky Holidays Party excuses for the geek in everyone.

Geek events to celebrate on March 25:

1807 – The Swansea and Mumbles Railway, then known as the Oystermouth Railway, becomes the first passenger carrying railway in the world.

1948 – The first successful tornado forecast predicts that a tornado will strike Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma.

1979 – The first fully functional space shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.

1995 – WikiWikiWeb, the world’s first wiki, and part of the Portland Pattern Repository, is made public by Ward Cunningham.

March 25 birthdays of geeky note:

1643 – Louis Moréri, French encylopedist (d. 1680)

1928 – Jim Lovell, American astronaut

1946 – Maurice Krafft, French vulcanologist (d. 1991)

Science/Technology Holiday: Ada Lovelace Day

Geek Events to celebrate on March 24:

1896 – A. A. Popov makes the first radio signal transmission in history

Math Holiday: Pi Day

Geek events to celebrate on March 14:

1794 – Eli Whitney is granted a patent for the cotton gin.

1994 – Linux kernel version 1.0.0 is released.

1995 – Norman Thagard becomes the first American astronaut to ride to space on-board a Russian launch vehicle.

March 14 birthdays of geeky note:

1862 – Vilhelm Bjerknes, Norwegian physicist (d. 1951) who was a pioneer of modern weather forecasting. You know, taking it from reading frog guts under a full moon to using equations and climate models.

1879 – Albert Einstein, German-born physicist and Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1955). Maybe you’ve heard of him?

Geek events to celebrate on February 4:

1936 – Radium becomes the first radioactive element to be made synthetically.

1957 – The first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus (SSN-571), logs its 60,000th nautical mile, matching the endurance of the fictional Nautilus described in Jules Verne‘s novel “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”.

2004 – Facebook, a mainstream online social network is founded by Mark Zuckerberg. Just because it’s mainstream and even your mom is on Facebook now, it was still created by a geeky guy. Zuckerberg likely still has a solid geek core despite all the money and fame. Geeks shall not inherit the earth, my friends. They are taking it by underground force.

February 4 birthdays of geeky note:

1725 – Dru Drury, one of the foremost English entomologists of his time (d. January 15, 1804). He was a prolific collector with a bug collection comprised over 11,000 specimens. They were likely meticulously cataloged, as well.

Geek events to celebrate on February 3:

1966 – The unmanned Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft makes the first controlled rocket-assisted landing on the Moon.

February 3 birthdays of geeky note:

1905 – Arne Beurling, Swedish-American mathematician (d. November 20, 1986). In the summer of 1940 he single-handedly deciphered and reverse-engineered an early version of the Siemens and Halske T52 also known as the Geheimfernschreiber (secret teletypewriter) used by Nazi Germany in World War II for sending ciphered messages.

Standard Holiday: Groundhog Day (USA and Canada)

1887 – In Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania the first Groundhog Day is observed.

Geek Events to celebrate on February 2:

1935 – Leonarde Keeler tests the first polygraph machine. That’s a fact.

February 2 birthdays of geeky note:

1522 – Lodovico Ferrari, Italian mathematician (d. 1565). Ferrari is attributed with the discovery of the solution to the quartic in 1540, but since this solution, like all algebraic solutions of the quartic, requires the solution of a cubic to be found, it couldn’t be published immediately. The solution of the quartic was published together with that of the cubic by Ferrari’s mentor Gerolamo Cardano in the book Ars Magna (1545). He has nothing to do with the car manufacturer.