The Great Geek Manual

This video is a bit dated, but it still cracks me up… “hold my breath for 10, my pee for 20″

1006
Supernova (SN) 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, in the southern constellation Lupus, near the star Beta Lupi. Chinese and Arabic astronomers note the supernova, but the speed of the still-expanding shock wave won’t be measured for nearly a millennium. It was also recorded by observers in Switzerland, Italy, Japan, Egypt, and Iraq. From the careful descriptions of the Chinese astronomers of how the light varies, the Supernova is apparently yellow in color and visible for over a year, possibly reaching a magnitude of up -9.

1665
Samuel Pepys makes his first diary reference to the Great Plague in London. “Great fears of the sicknesses here in the City, it being said that two or three houses are already shut up. God preserve us all.” The diary entries continue throughout the year, documenting the terrible conditions in the city as many thousands die, until Winter’s freezing cold reduces the number of fleas that spread the disease. The symptoms of the plague begin like those of a bad cold. A high fever follows, with vomiting and painful black swellings, called buboes appearing in the groin and under the armpits. His diaries will cover a period from January 1660 to May 1669. In them, he will also write about the Great Fire of London in 1666.
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Film

• According to Cinematical, the ‘Superman’ Sequel Might Reveal an “Angry God”.
• Popular Mechanics weighs in on the decline of science fiction in the article Hollywood Sci-Fi’s Bronze Age: Are Comics to Blame?

Internet

• Infoaddict presents Top 10 Lists From the Distant Future.
• Slice of SciFi suggests The Top 7 Most Embarrassing Moments in Science Fiction. In my opinion, they don’t dig deep enough, because science fiction is fraught with embarrassing moments.

Literature

• Author Richard Morgan puts forth the question “What the hell is wrong with us?” in an ovation-worthy rant entitled Sound and Fury, Signifying …?
• Free Fiction: Del Rey will be offering Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal, as a free downloadable PDF, audio book, and eBook from today through midnight on Tuesday, May 13.
• Free Fiction: Tor is continuing to post quality books online. Their latest release is Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.
• Interview: An interview with Ursula K. Le Guin is featured on this week’s The Book Show.

Television

• AXCentral’s Maureen Ryan makes some excellent points in her look at How to fix Fox’s ‘Terminator’ series. More robot fights
• BattleStar Galactica theories are running thicker than Harry-Snape slash fic, but Lisa Paitz Spindler has rounded up the Thirteen Hints we Know about the Final Cylon.
• Great news! It looks like Fox’s next soon-to-be-discontinued series, Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse, will be critically acclaimed.

1879
Electric arc lamps are used for the first time in the United States, as street lights in Cleveland, Ohio.

1953
An episode of the science fiction series Space Patrol becomes the first experimental three-dimensional television broadcast in the US when it is transmitted by ABC affiliate KECA-TV in Los Angeles, California.

1957
The first military nuclear power plant is dedicated at Fort Belvoir in Virginia.

1959
The UNIVAC picks four out of six winners at the Churchill Downs races in Louisville, Kentucky, setting a record for the correct choices in a horse race.

1964
The monster movie Mothra vs. Godzilla is released.
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So last night, I watched Half Baked and Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic back to back last night, and it got me to thinking…

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Films
Three films open in theaters nationwide this Friday, May 2nd, and Redbelt will receive a limited release.

• Iron Man (PG-13) If you don’t know what this film is about, you may want to clean out your internet connection. After months of leading us on, Iron man finally hits theaters this Friday!
• Made of Honor (PG-13) Chick flick alert. A guy falls in love with an engaged woman… etc., etc.
• Redbelt (R) A self-defense instructor who teaches his students for survival rather than competition skills is forced into a competition.
• Son of Rambow (PG-13) Inspired by Rambo: First Blood, two boys set out to make their own action film. This one has been on the net for weeks, receiving favorable reviews across the blogosphere.

Home Video

• The Golden Compass (PG-13)
• Hero Wanted (R)

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1922
Radio station WOI in Ames, Iowa becomes the first educational radio station to be licensed in the United States.

1926
The term “wave mechanics” is coined by nuclear physicist Erwin Schrödinger in a letter to Albert Einstein. The term is used to describe the newly emerging branch of physics which interprets the behavior of subatomic particles according to a mathematical description of a wave motion.

1932
Ultra short wave (7.3m) television is demonstrated for the first time in Britain.

1967
Bell Laboratories announces the development of a new “light knife” which allows surgeons to use the focused beam of a laser as a scalpel.

1986
Russia makes the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, which occured on April 26, public knowledge. Visit the official United Nations Chernobyl website.
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1946
The first commercial ship to be equipped with a radar system, the SS African Star, goes into service.

1953
Professional wrestler Freddie Blassie first coins the term “Pencil neck geek.”

1961
NASA launches the Explorer 11 spacecraft into Earth orbit equipped with the first gamma ray telescope aboard a Juno II rocket. Visit the official NASA website for the Explorer 11.

1970
At an American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., the discovery of element 105, Hahnium. The discovery was achieved primarily through the work of Albert Ghiorso of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The element has an atomic mass of 260, and it was named for the German physicist Otto Hahn.
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1882
Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter demonstrate the photophone, a device in which a mirrored silver disc is made to vibrate by speech from a speaking tube. Light reflected off the disc is captured in a parabolic dish and focused onto a selenium cell, where variations in the reflected light are converted into the electrical signals that are carried to headphones. The laser disc and CD of the seventies will work on a remarkably similar principle.

1900
Guglielmo Marconi is granted a patent for a system of tuned coupled circuits that allow simultaneous transmissions on different frequencies, allowing adjacent stations to operate without interfering with one another. (UK patent 7777)
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Full summer is nearly upon us and now is the time to stock up on t-shirts! And how better to express yourself than with a shirt representing your fandom! With these two tees you’ve got a choice of gloating as your nefarious plots come to fruition or thumbing your nose at the most lethal robots in prime time.

These two t-shirts are available from Glarkware. Each of them costs US$20 and is available in sizes ranging from small to 3X-Large.

The crew over at Topless Robot, one of my favorite blogs, recently posted what must be the geekiest Craigslist ad ever… and maybe the most romantic for those gamer girls out there (where ever you’re hiding). It was posted on March 11th for the University Mall in Chapel Hill, North Carolina under the title “GameStop Girl, I want to kill robotic zombie terrorists with you - m4w”.

Dearest GameStop Girl,

When I walked into your store that fateful Tuesday, I expected only to find a smattering of half-decent titles tucked back there amongst the used 360 games. Instead I found you, surrounded by a beam of light, halfway between Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty 3. Your gorgeous dark hair was radiant in contrast with the rainbow of colors on the deluxe Bioshock behind you. The Game of the Year held no interest for me when I saw you look up and smile, even though both could hold me in Rapture.

You commanded the register when it was my turn to check out with the Orange Box. Yes, I was finally getting to play Portal. Lucky me, you said with the cutest smile. Lucky me, I thought, and then knew you had the Portal to my heart. I could care less if the cake is a lie, I’d still want to share it with you.

Oh GameStop Girl, how you make my heart meter skip a beat. If you were being held captive in a mountain fortress by a ruthless mutant mafia gangboss and I had to fight my way through 16 levels of fire-breathing undead ninjas with swords the size of small ponies, I would find a way, even if, after every level, a small man continued to taunt me by saying that you were in another castle. EVEN IF.

So, yes, GameStop Girl, I want to kill robotic zombie terrorists with you. You can even have the deluxe shotgun with explosive scattershot. I’ll just use this knife over here. I’ll do anything for you, just for the small, slightest chance that someday - someday - you and me could be a Wii.

Source: Craigslist via Kotaku

• Bootstrapper lists 50 Fun Ways to Use the Wayback Machine.
• For the more ambitious webmasters and pirates out there, it turns out that you can create a YouTorrent clone in 1 Hour.
• From BBSpot, the top eleven Things You Don’t Want to Hear on a Tech Support Call with Mom and Dad.
• Grand Theft Auto IV has already hit the web, five days before its official release.
• Joshua Hoffine’s chilling horror photography is worth a look. I’m will to bet that the kids who participated in these photo shoots required serious therapy.
• Remember the interactive text game Zork? Well, now you can play it online, if only to appreciate how much video game technology has progressed.
• Six Revisions point you to 7 Incredibly Useful Tools for Evaluating a Web Design.
• The Top 10 Sexually Suggestive Lines in the Original Star Wars Trilogy makes you realizes just how many double entendres there are in the sci-fi classics.
• Vandelay Website Designs has rounded up 50 Essential Photoshop Text Tutorials, which includes a rather versatile range.
• Vous Pensez presents the geekiest pants EVER.
• You think that you’ve seen photos around the internet of hardcore geek tattoos? You haven’t seen anything yet.

1935
The first round-the-world telephone call is made when Walter S. Gifford, president of the AT&T Company, talks with T.G. Miller, vice president in charge of the Long Lines Department, in another room in the same building (32 Sixth Avenue) over a 23,000 mile circuit of wire and radio channels. The phone used in the call will later be preserved at the Smithsonian Institute.

1953
The journal Nature publishes the one page article Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid written by Francis Crick and James D. Watson. In it, Crick and Watson reveal the double helix structure of DNA and explains how DNA transmits hereditary information between cells and generations. Their work will earn them a Nobel Prize in 1962.

“This structure has two helical chains each coiled around the same axis… Both chains follow right-handed helices… The novel feature of the structure is the manner in which the two chains are held together by purine and pyrimidine bases… They are joined together in pairs, a single base from one chain being hydrogen-bonded to a single base from the other chain, so that the two lie side by side with identical z-co-ordinates.”

1957
Robert Noyce is granted a patent for the integrated circuit, precipitating a prolonged controversy between Noyce and Jack Kilby over the rights to the patent. Kilby invented a germanium version of the circuit, while Noyce developed the silicon integrated circuit. Integrated circuits will eventually replace transistors in computers, allowing the machines to be manufactured in increasingly smaller sizes.
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