The Great Geek Manual

Perhaps some future [D&D] variation may even take a cue from recursive movies like “Being John Malkovich” and the “Scream” series. In it, you’d play a game-company vice president with the Bard-like name of Dancey. To win, you’d need to regain the trust of e mbittered former loyalists and guide them through the bizarre Astral Plane known as the Internet — where a cruel kingdom called Microsoft battles a guild of gnome-like tinkerers and their nebbishy leader, a sorcerer from faraway Finland, the one with an unpronounceable name and a magic penguin.

- Wagner James Au, Gaming blogger and Tech writer

1611
Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione (Narration on Spots Observed on the Sun and their Apparent Rotation with the Sun), a publication concerning the newly discovered phenomenon of sunspots is dedicated. This first publication on such observations, is the work of Johannes Fabricius, a Dutch astronomer who was perhaps the first ever to observe sunspots. On March 9, 1611, at dawn, Johannes had used his telescope to view the rising sun and had seen several dark spots on it. He called his father to investigate this new phenomenon with him. The brightness of the Sun’s center was very painful, and the two quickly switched to a projection method of observation, by means of a camera obscura.

1925
Charles Francis Jenkins gives the first public demonstration of the first mechanical television system that transmits “readily recognizable moving objects” from the Naval radio station NOF at Anacostia to his laboratory, both in Washington D.C. He calls his system “visions by radio.” It transmits images at a resolution of forty-eight scanning lines to depict a model of a Dutch windmill with turning blades.

1944
Marvin Camras is granted several patents for the wire recorder, an early precursor of the later magnetic tape recorder. (US No. 2,351,004; -11)

1983
The US space probe Pioneer 10 crosses the orbit of Neptune, becoming the first man-made object to leave the Solar System. It was launched on March 2, 1972 in a straight line away from the Sun at a constant velocity of about 12 km/sec toward the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of the constellation Taurus (The Bull).
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Comics

• AMC’s Nick Nadel argues that Green Lantern Could Be the Next Iron Man.
• ComicMix has written a guide to 10 Comics you Must Read Before you see The Incredible Hulk film this weekend. It’s a bit strange that he doesn’t include any books from the Hulk’s first series, but I supposed you’d be hard pressed to find them anyway.
• Randy Queen of “Dark Chylde” fame is working on a new Top Cow comic series called Starfall which will follow a crew of space pirates who have crash landed on an uncharted jungle planet where they - and this is the good part - unleash nanobots that transform the planet’s dinosaur and cannibal population into zombies!

Film

• CNN asks for William Shatner’s thoughts on the upcoming Star Trek movie.
• Entertainment Weekly lists 17 Sci-Fi Misfires, with Jumper and Vanilla Sky topping the list.
• Interview: Cinematical interviews M. Night Shyamalan, director of The Happening.
• M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening: the critics will hate it. Duh.

Literature

• ClarkesWorld Magazine has an interesting editorial defending the state of short fiction, entitled Chicken Little and the Death of Short Fiction.
• Free Fiction: Feed Books has posted “The Day of the Boomer Dukes” by Frederik Pohl.
• Free Fiction: Strange Horizons has posted the short story Alone in the House of Mims by Barth Anderson.
• Interview: Tor Books Blog interviews Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother.
• The List Universe has compiled a list of Top 10 Most Controversial Non-Fiction Books, with the Bible coming in at number one.

Television

• Blake’s 7 is back. The sci-fi classic from which many of Star Trek’s gadgets and plot devices are… stolen? borrowed? homaged? …will soon be coming to Britain’s Sky One.

There is nothing more dangerous than a resourceful idiot.

- Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

1897
The Swiss Army Knife is patented by Carl Elsener. Beginning in 1891, regular Swiss army soldiers will receive a version of the knife containing a thick knife blade, two screwdrivers, a can opener, and an awl, otherwise known as a punch. Officers will receive swiss army knives also containing a corkscrew.

1906
The concept of sound movies is patented by John Ballance. (US No. 823,022)

1913
Pathé Frères studios releases the first animated cartoon made in the US with modern techniques, Dachshund (also known as The Artist’s Dream). John Randolph Bray invented and patented the process while producing the film. In it, a dog eats sausages until it explodes. Bray began his career as an artist for a newspaper. He patented many of his improvements on the animation process, realizing early on the business potential of these developments. One of these innovations was the use of translucent paper to make it easier to position objects in successive drawings.
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Source: Fun LOL

1889
Thomas Alva EdisonThomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for an “Electrical Distribution System.” (U.S. No. 404,902)

1895
The first US patent for a gasoline-driven automobile by a US inventor is issued to Charles E. Duryea. (US No. 540,648)

1901
Thomas Alva Edison was granted a patent for a “Phonographic Recording Apparatus.” (US No. 676,225)

1928
A rocket is attached to an aircraft for the first time. The aircraft is a glider, and the experiment is directed by German aircraft designer Alexander Lippisch. The glider launches under the power of one rocket and an elastic launching rope that acts as a slingshot. Once it is in flight a second rocket is fired. The glider manages to fly a mile before falling apart in the air and crashing. Although the pilot survives, the experiment marks an inauspicious start to the era of rocket-powered flight.
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Here lies a toppled God -
His fall was not a small one.
We did but build his pedestal,
A narrow and a tall one.

- “Tleilaxu Epigram”
Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert

Once upon time, the IRC was the Internet’s hottest scene. Its labyrinthine assortment of networks and channels attracted the most dedicated and interesting computer users around the globe into one massive community even as its strictly enforced etiquettes filtered out the clueless masses.

Those day are long past, as are the days of raucous newsgroups and open, botless chatrooms. There remain, however, small followings of hardcore users who cleave to medium as the last refuge of the old skool leet. They’re the geeks who swap old Phrack magazines despite the fact that they all own cellphones, the nerds who argue the merits of the various recipes found in the Anarchists Cookbook in a climate where discussing explosives publicly can get your front door kicked down, and the pirates who’ve been swapping files since before Napster. The last remnant of the crowd that lured the children of the eighties onto the web in the first place. Among these users, corners of IRC still flourish.
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My pick for this week’s t-shirt bears the boxart for the 1982 Atari 2600 game Pitfall. The art is just old enough to qualify as “retro” without passing into “obscure,” and definitely makes a statement about the consummate gamer’s love for arcade classic!

This shirt comes from 80s Tees, which specializes in the retro chic look. The print comes on green t-shirts in sizes ranging from small to adult 2XL for US$22.00. Get yours now or check out the rest of their gaming selection.

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

- Howard Aiken, Early computer pioneer

1837
The electric “Five Needle Telegraph” is patented in London by Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke. (UK No. 7,390) The instrument requires six wires between each of its stations. In the Wheatstone system, letters on a board are indicated by the deflection of five needles, and a calling device is incorporated to draw the attention of the operator. Cooke and Wheatstone will be granted a patent in the US just ten days before Morse will receive his, but, historically, Morse is given priority as the first inventor. The Morse patent describes a prototype of his famous dot-dash code. Wheatstone and Cooke will have the priority in the UK. Their telegraph had no means of recording messages, which Morse regarded as a great disadvantage.

1854
G.F. Bernhard Riemann proposes that space is curved in a lecture entitled “Über die Hypothesen welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen.” He describes the old-fashioned Euclidean plane geometry and solid geometry, respectively, as two-, and three-dimensional examples of what we now call Riemann spaces with zero curvature. Saying that the space is curved, rather than flat or Euclidean, is another way saying that the familiar properties of Euclidean geometry, such as the Pythagorean theorem, do not hold. He went on to suggest that all physical laws become simpler when expressed in higher dimensions. Einstein will use Rieman’s work in his theory of General Relativity, which incorporated time as the fourth dimension, in 1915.
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Film

• Science Friday’s Ira Flatow talks to M. Night Shyamalan about the intersection of real en environment issues and his upcoming film, The Happening. Is Mother Nature out to kill us?

Literature

• Book Stove offers up 10 Obscure, Thought Provoking Reads.
• Fantasy author Ursula Le Guin spoke briefly last week on why you must read Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.
• Free Reading: Tor is offering the fantasy novel Orphans of Chaos by John C. Wright.
• Free Reading: You can download all the works of Robert E. Howard at Arthur’s Classic Novels, including his Conan novels, his El Borak stories, and Solomon Kane.
• Interview: The Courier Journal has a great interview with Ray Bradbury.
• Interview: PopMatters interviews The Name of the Wind author Patrick Rotheuss.
• The Library Journal has posted an excellent article on urban fantasy, complete with a list of recommended reading.
• Neil Gaiman thinks that labeling books with an age range is “deeply stupid.” A billion Harry Potter fans chorus their agreement.

Television

• Jeremiah Tolbert of Fantasy Magazine contemplates the mainstreaming of science fiction on television, using Lost as an example.
• Scary Good! TV’s 15 Best Fright Nights.

Video Games

• Is there no end to Wikipedia’s usefulness. Now it features a List of commercial games released as freeware.

Anime

• Bleach Uncut Box Set, Vol. 1: Substitute
• Burst Angel: Box Set and Ova
• GaoGaiGar King of Braves - Premium Box Collection
• Naruto Uncut Box Set, Vol. 8: Special Edition

Books

• The Adoration of Jenna Fox by Mary E.Pearson
  Henry Holt. (ISBN: 978-0-8050-7668-4) Hardcover. Length: 266 pp
  A young adult science fiction novel set in the near-future young-adult following a seventeen year old girl who wakes from a coma with amnesia.
• Bad Moon Rising by Jonathan Maberry
  Pinnacle. (ISBN: 978-0-7860-1817-8) Mass Market Paperback. Length: 608 pp
  A horror novel about a Pennsylvania town famous for its annual Halloween Festival and a monstrous evil that threatens it.

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