Happy Square Day!

[owlice]

Last one of the year; if I had cupcakes, I'd share them with you to celebrate!

[neufer]

<<Towel Day is celebrated every 25 May as a tribute by fans of the late author Douglas Adams. On this day, fans carry a towel with them to demonstrate their love for the books and the author, as referenced in Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The commemoration was first held in 2001, two weeks after Adams's death on 11 May 2001.

The original quotation that referenced the importance of towels is found in Chapter 3 of Adams's work The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

“A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-bogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost". What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is." (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

• May 25, 240 BC – First recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
  
  May 25, 1521 – The Diet of Worms ends when Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, issues the Edict of Worms, declaring Martin Luther an outlaw.
  
  May 25, 1925 – Scopes Trial: John T. Scopes is indicted for teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
  
  May 25, 1955 – First ascent of Kangchenjunga (8,586 m.), the third highest mountain in the world, by a British expedition led by Joe Brown and George Band.
  
  May 25, 1961 – Apollo program: U.S. President John F. Kennedy announces before a special joint session of the Congress his goal to initiate a project to put a "man on the Moon" before the end of the decade.
  
  May 25, 1966 – Explorer program: Explorer 32 launches.

Spanish Friki reading in a comic shop

<<Geek Pride Day is an initiative which claims the right of every person to be a nerd or a geek. It has been celebrated on May 25 since 2006, celebrating the premiere of the first Star Wars film in 1977.

It shares the same day as three other science-fiction fan 'holidays' - Towel Day, for fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy by Douglas Adams, Star Wars Day, and the Glorious 25 May, for fans of Terry Pratchett's Discworld.

Tim McEachern organized events called Geek Pride Festival and/or Geek Pride Day 1998 to 2000 at a bar in Albany, New York. In 2006, this day was celebrated for the first time all over Spain. The biggest concentration took place in Madrid, where 300 Geeks demonstrated their pride together with a human pacman.

In 2008, Geek Pride Day crossed the Atlantic, and was officially celebrated in America, where it was heralded by numerous bloggers, coalescing around the launch of the GeekPrideDay website. Math author, Euler Book Prize winner, and geek blogger John Derbyshire not only did a shout out, but announced that he would be appearing in the Fifth Avenue parade, dressed as number 57, on the prime number float - prompting some bloggers to say they'd be looking for him.

By 2009, acknowledgment of the day had reached the Science Channel, with special programming on May 25 to celebrate.
2009 Geek Pride Day comes to Ottawa, Canada

In Nova Scotia it has been confirmed that there will be a gathering of the nerds in the central of Halifax.

2010 Geek Pride Day will also be celebrated in Tel Aviv, Israel at the Dancing Camel Brewery. Special "Raging Bill" cocktails with a midnight reading of the Geek Manifesto (see below).

In the UK, Geek Pride Day is fast becoming a well known event as http://www.iwantoneofthose.com celebrate the day on 25th May. They are encouraging as many of their geeks to get involved and celebrate in any way possible, whilst the Nottingham HackSpace will be celebrating Geek Pride Day on their usual public Wednesday Open Hack Night.

Basic rights and responsibilities of geeks

A manifesto was created to celebrate the first Geek Pride Day which included the following list of basic rights and responsibilities of geeks.

Rights:

• The right to be even geekier.
  The right to not leave your house.
  The right to not like football or any other sport.
  The right to associate with other nerds.
  The right to have few friends (or none at all).
  The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
  The right to be out of style.
  The right to be overweight and near-sighted.
  The right to show off your geekiness.
  The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

• Be a geek, no matter what.
  Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
  If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
  To save and protect all geeky material.
  Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a "museum of geekiness."
  Don't be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
  Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
  Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
  Don’t waste your time on anything not related to geekdom.
  Try to take over the world!

[owlice]

I have my towel, too. Still no cupcakes, though.

[neufer]

15² Decades ago: May 25, 240 BC
– First recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.

<<The 240 B.C. observation coincides with Halley's computed orbit, but its exact date is a matter of some imprecision. The existing Chinese record is the Records of the Grand Historian, or Shiji (or Shi Chi), written more than a century later around 100 B.C. What the Chinese called a "broom star," because of its bristly tail, appeared first in the east and then later in the north. The text adds that it was also seen in the west during the lunar month of May 24 to June 23. Several astronomers calculated in the 1980s that the comet's closest approach to the sun was between March 22 and May 25 of 240 B.C. Those calculations also confirmed its apparent motion from east to north to west. March 30 is frequently given as the likely date for its first, though not necessarily the brightest, sighting.

Every subsequent passage of the comet was observed and recorded by astronomers in the Middle East, Asia and, eventually Europe. The 1066 appearance coincided with the Battle of Hastings, and an image of the comet was woven into the Bayeux Tapestry. Contemporary accounts say the comet looked to be four times bigger than Venus. >>