Good afternoon. This website is a demonstration of smart content rendering. The content updates continuously without the help of Internet monkeys. All the information was current at the time you arrived here. Today is Monday, the 13th day of July and the 193rd day of 2026. Most of the United States is under Daylight Saving Time (DST) at the moment. It will end on November 1st at 2:00 AM when clocks "fall back" one hour. While many countries observe DST, the beginning and ending times vary, as with the Sun as we see it, of course.
On the Jewish calendar, today is the 28th day of Tammuz in the year 5786.
We are approaching a new moon. At the time you accessed this page, its exact age was 28 days, 21 hours, and 38 minutes. We will be under a new moon again on Tuesday, July 14th at 8:27 AM. The next full moon will occur on Wednesday, July 29th at 2:49 AM. For now, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are visible in the night sky. Mercury can be seen in the eastern sky just before dawn. Looking into the night sky, far beyond our Lunar and Solar System neighbors, we see that we are under the constellation of Cancer.
For today, our sunrise and sunset times (at -96.852/32.847) are
6:23 AM
and
8:25 PM,
giving us 14 hours and 2 minutes of daylight.
On this day in 1923, the Hollywood Sign was officially dedicated in the hills above Los Angeles. It first read "Hollywoodland," but was shortened after 1949 renovations.
Today we celebrate the birthdays of Julius Caesar (100 BC), Pope Clement X (1590), Nathan Bedford Forrest (1821), John Jacob Astor IV (1864), Dave Garroway (1913), Ernest Gold (1921), Charles Scribner, Jr. (1921), Bob Crane (1928), Jack Kemp (1935), Patrick Stewart (1940), Harrison Ford (1942), Erno Rubik (1944), Robert Underwood (1948), Cheech Marin (1946), and Jean Loc Picard (2305).
Today in History: US Patent No. 1 is Issued
It was on this day in 1802 that John Ruggles of Thomaston, Maine was granted US Patent No. 1 for his "new and useful improvement or improvements on locomotive-engines used on railroads and common roads by which inclined planes and hills may be ascended and heavy loads drawn up the same with more facility and economy than heretofore, and by which the evil effects of frost, ice, snows, and mud on the rail causing the wheels to slide are obviated."
The whole concept of granting inventors sole rights to their inventions was a novel idea in the early days of our country. In earlier times, rights were granted--or declined--by monarchs or required a special act to be passed. In 1790 George Washington signed a bill that laid the foundations for our patent system, although the details were not specified. The first US patent was granted in 1790. Thomas Jefferson inspected the prototype, signed the hand written patent document, then passed it on to the Secretary of War, the Secretary of State, and finally to President Washington for their signatures. The system worked smoothly until the sheer number of applications made it necessary to establish the US Patent Office in 1802, re-assigning responsibilities to civil servants.
The Patent Act of July 4, 1836 set up the system for numbering the patents, of which there were about 10,000 at the time. Patents issued prior to the new Patent Act were given numbers with an "X" prefix and were numbered according to the issue date. Thus, John Ruggles followed the 10,000 inventors who had received patents, but he was the first be assigned a "non-X" number. Tragically, a fire broke out in the Patent Office in December of 1836, following its opening earlier in the year, and some of the original documents were lost. Copies of several original documents are incomplete because they could only be restored in part after the fire.
Editor's note: The layout of today's patents is virtually identical to the early patents that were granted after the 1836 law. The diagram style is pretty much the same, and in several ways is unique to US patent documents. Then and now, the sentences are long and often hard to match up with the lettered labels on the diagrams... perhaps because patent attorneys are the ones who craft the words. And for whatever it's worth, patents are issued only on Tuesdays. Why? Because it's always been that way. On Tuesday, January 3, 2012, there were 4474 patents issued. The last patent of the day was No. 8,087,094 for a "shirt having form-fitting mid-section support." Yes, Virginia, we 21st Century humans find exercise and diet too bothersome, so mid-section support seems to be the latest "as seen on TV" fix. If belly flattening is not a big enough incentive to call the toll-free number and have your order sent discretely to you, those who act "now" usually get two for the price of one.
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
Douglas Adams (1952-2001)
Last Chance to See
The Technology
This site is a working demonstration of on-demand PHP scripting. The code tightly integrates computed and imported data with text, spewing forth natural-sounding narrative output with flawless grammar and syntax. The birthdays, history section and the text below--which all change daily--are from an in-house database. Raw data used in the financial and weather sections is imported at page generation time. All the other data, particularly the celestial stuff, is derived and rendered by several hundred lines of code at the time the page is generated at the Linux/Apache server.
Contact Information
Email: tony@tonysartain.com
Cell: 903-360-0002
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