Thursday, August 25, 2011

August 25, 2011

Good morning! It's The Nerd's Almanac for Thursday, August 25, 2011.

In spite of the lack of resemblance between today's date and the first of April, today is the anniversary of the Great Moon Hoax of 1835. Animals, trees, oceans, beaches -- you would certainly need "an immense telescope of an entirely new principle". Other than that, sounds totally plausible to me!

It appears to be Voyager 2 week and the news continues: it was on this date in 1989 that the probe made its closest approach to Neptune. And because they were getting near the end of the solar system, they even went joyriding over to Neptune's moon, Triton.

And continuing with operating system news, today marks the anniversary of a certain usenet post...

 From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) 
 Newsgroups: comp.os.minix 
 Subject: What would you like to see most in minix? 
 Summary: small poll for my new operating system 
 Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI> 
 Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT 
 Organization: University of Helsinki 
 Hello everybody out there using minix - 
 I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and 
 professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones. This has been brewing 
 since april, and is starting to get ready.I'd like any feedback on 
 ...

Yes, on this date in 1991, Linus Torvalds announced to the Minix news group that he was working on what would become Linux. As I type these words, I'm using an Ubuntu distro on an old Dell laptop. It certainly has come a long, long way!

It's Sean Connery's birthday today! He was the original James Bond in the movies. And anybody -- real or fictional -- with such cool gadgets has to have a tremendous nerd following! And isn't he everybody's favorite Bond? Yeah, I thought so!

Here is a quote for today...
"Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all."
-- Linus Torvalds

And that's the almanac for today. Nerds of the world, we salute you!

Sources:
Wikipedia: August 25
Wikipedia: Great Moon Hoax
Wikipedia: Voyager 2
Ragib Hasan: History of Linux
Wikipedia: Sean Connery
Wikipedia: James Bond (character)
BrainyQuote: Linus Torvalds

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