Daily Bread: September 19, 2008

Good morning, Whitewater

There are no public meetings scheduled for the city today. You stay private, Whitewater! (Hat tip to the fine screenwriters of Anchorman.)

The National Weather Service forecasts sunny weather, with temperature of 79 degrees. The Farmers’ Almanac predicts that pleasant conditions will continue.

Yesterday’s better prediction: Even. An FA forecast of pleasant weather coincides with the NWS predictions over the last few days.

In our schools, it’s activity night at the Middle School at 7 p.m.

In Wisconsin history on this date, in 1832, according to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the conclusion of the Black Hawk war led the Fox and Sauk to cede land near modern-day Iowa:

On this date Sauk and Fox Indians signed the treaty ending the Black Hawk War. The treaty demanded that the Sauk cede some six million acres of land that ran the length of the eastern boundary of modern-day Iowa. The Sauk and Fox were given until June 1, 1833 to leave the area and never return to the surrendered lands. Some sources place the date as September 21.

Wired reports that on this date in 1982, Scott Fahlman became the creator of the emoticon:

At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman : -)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:
: -)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:
: -(

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over….

Fahlman’s original post was lost for a couple of decades and believed gone for good, until it was retrieved from an old backup tape, thus cementing his claim of priority.

: -)