Success does not come to those who wait… and it does not wait for anyone to come to it. ~Anonymous
1924 – Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming is elected the first female governor in the United States.
Nellie Tayloe Ross was an American politician, the 14th Governor of Wyoming from 1925 to 1927, and director of the United States Mint from 1933 to 1953. She was the first woman to be elected governor of a U.S. state, and remains the only woman to have served as governor of Wyoming. She was a staunch supporter of Prohibition during the 1920s.
1929 – Shakuntala Devi, Indian mathematician and astrologer is born.
Shakuntala Devi was an Indian writer and mental calculator, popularly known as the “human computer”. A child prodigy, her talents eventually earned her a place in the 1982 edition of The Guinness Book of World Records. As a writer, Devi wrote a number of books, including novels and non-fiction texts about mathematics, puzzles, and astrology. She also wrote what is considered the first study of homosexuality in India; it treated homosexuality in an understanding light and is considered pioneering…
In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she was asked to give the 23rd root of a 201-digit number; she answered in 50 seconds. Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.
On 18 June 1980, she demonstrated the multiplication of two 13-digit numbers—7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779—picked at random by the Computer Department of Imperial College, London. She correctly answered 18,947,668,177,995,426,462,773,730 in 28 seconds. This event is mentioned in the 1982 Guinness Book of Records. Writer Steven Smith states that the result is “so far superior to anything previously reported that it can only be described as unbelievable”.
1933 – Charles K. Kao, Chinese physicist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate is born.
The Honourable Sir Charles Kuen Kao, is a Chinese-born Hong Kong, American and British electrical engineer and physicist who pioneered in the development and use of fiber optics in telecommunications. Kao, known as the “Godfather of Broadband”, “Father of Fiber Optics” or “Father of Fiber Optic Communications”, was jointly awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for “groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication”. Kao holds multiple citizenship of Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and the United States.
1942 – Patricia Bath, American ophthalmologist and academic is born.
Patricia Era Bath is an American ophthalmologist, inventor and academic. She has broken ground for women and African Americans in a number of areas. Prior to Bath, no woman had served on the staff of the Jules Stein Eye Institute, headed a post-graduate training program in ophthalmology or been elected to the honorary staff of the UCLA Medical Center (an honor bestowed on her after her retirement). Before Bath, no black person had served as a resident in ophthalmology at New York University and no black woman had ever served on staff as a surgeon at the UCLA Medical Center. Bath is the first African-American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical purpose. Her Laserphaco Probe is used to treat cataracts. The holder of four patents, she is also the founder of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness in Washington, D.C.
1973 – The Netherlands experiences the first Car Free Sunday caused by the 1973 oil crisis. Highways are deserted and are used only by cyclists and roller skaters.
A Car-Free Day encourages motorists to give up their cars for a day. Organized events are held in some cities and countries. September 22 is World Car Free Day. According to The Washington Post, the event “promotes improvement of mass transit, cycling and walking, and the development of communities where jobs are closer to home and where shopping is within walking distance”.
The events, which vary by location, give motorists and commuterists an idea of their locality with fewer cars. While projects along these lines had taken place from time to time on an ad hoc basis starting with the 1973 oil crisis, it was only in October 1994 that a structured call for such projects was issued in a keynote speech by Eric Britton at the International Ciudades Accessibles (Accessible Cities) Conference held in Toledo (Spain).
2008 – Barack Obama becomes the first man of African-American descent to be elected President of the United States.
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States, and the first African American to hold the office. Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, running unsuccessfully for the United States House of Representatives in 2000.
2010 – The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $3,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers
Back in 2010 we had our first contest- a $3000 prize for the first person to hack a Kinect!
Hi from team Adafruit, we’re going to do our first ever “X prize” type project. Hack the Kinect for Xbox 360 and claim the $2,000 bounty! NOW $3,000
Anyone around the world can work on this, including Microsoft 🙂 Upload your code, examples and documentation to GitHub. First person / group to get RGB out with distance values being used wins, you’re smart – you know what would be useful for the community out there. All the code needs to be open source and/or public domain. Email us a link to the repository, we and some “other” Kinect for Xbox 360 hackers will check it out – if it’s good to go, you’ll get the $3,000 bounty!
