The Great Geek Manual

A photo gallery of Snicker-Worthy Divorce Cakes.

Before Max Brooks wrote The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z, he was giving lectures on how to survive Zombies uprisings.

Eight things you didn’t know you could do with FireFox 3.

FYI: Refrain from hugging your friendly neighborhood police officers.

io0 has drawn up a chart of just who has slept with who on BattleStar Galactica.

Is it just me, or would this bank make a great set for a sci-fi film?

Learn What this Financial Crisis is all about, once and for all.

Richard Stallman prepares for world’s biggest I-Told-You-So, warns of Cloud computing dangers.

Try guessing The 25 Most Influential People on the Web before reading the article.

What would Geeks do with $700 Billion dollars of bailout money?

Art

• Got a thousand dollars lying about? Why not buy your very own Cylon Raider Artisan Replica?
• These amazing works of art are all made entirely out of paper, but they aren’t origami.

Comics

• Spider-Man and Stephen Colbert will team up in Amazing Spider-Man 573. The end of comics as we known them?

Film

• The Green Lantern movie is back on Minus Jack Black! Woohoo! The early concept art looks promising.

Internet

• io9 counts down the Twelve Coolest Deaths in Science Fiction History, quite decently not spoiling Anathem for those of us who haven’t read it yet.
• Tor premiered its new webcomic this weekend, Better Zombies through Physics.
• Yeah, you’ve seen it, but it’s always worth another gawk: A Map of The Simpsons Springfield.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Download “The Vampire” by Jan Neruda now at Feedbooks.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “How The World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth” by Rachel Swirsky at Escape Pod.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Fable of the Ostrich” by Peter S. Beagle at PodCastle.
• Philip Pullman speaks out on censorship and religion.

Television

• Is it just me, or should the first episode have been included in this list of The Top 20 Simpsons episodes?
• GameTrailer has posted a video looking at the Top 10 Games for Adult Eyes Only.

1882
The world’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States. Powered by a water wheel, a single dynamo provides 12.5 kilowatts, just enough for 180 lights of ten candlepower each which will light Rogers’ home, the plant itself, and a nearby building. Appleton paper manufacturer H.F. Rogers had been inspired by Thomas Edison’s plans for a steam-powered electricity production station in New York. He had financial support from a personal friend of Edison’s and two other men.

1889
The Bundy Manufacturing Co., a maker of time recording equipment, is incorporated. It is the first of many components that eventually became the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, Inc. (C-T-R), which will later become International Business Machines Corporation (IBM).

1890
Thomas Alva Edison is granted a patent for telegraphy, a phonograph, a phonograph-recorder, a “Method of Making Phonograph Blanks,” a “Propelling Device for Electrical Cars,” and a phonogram blank. (US No. 437422 -9)
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…mathematics is very much like poetry… what makes a good poem — a great poem — is that there is a large amount of thought expressed in very few words. In this sense formulas like or are poems.

- Lipman Bers in More Mathematical People, 1994.

Blogger’s note: BTW, that first equation is Euler’s identity. I can’t find a name for the calculus integral. If anyone known of one, comment below, please.

Comic Book

I’m likely going to be too busy reading Neil Gaiman’s Graveyard Book to take much notice of the comic rack this week, but I’m a sucker for stranded-in-space plots, so I’ll likely be picking up a copy of Image comic’s ZERO G #1… or reading it in-store.

Zero G, which looks suspiciously like a cross between the eighties film Abyss and the video game Doom, is set on an asteroid rich in minerals that the nations of Earth desperately need. The U.S. crew arrives only to discover that the mining camp has been abandoned. When things begin to go wrong and sabotage is discovered, it becomes clear that the team isn’t alone. Stranded, they struggle to survive, find a way home, and save Earth from the asteroid’s impact, but in doing so, they uncover a dark secret that may hold the key to both their destruction and to their salvation. Price: US$2.99

The following are the highlights of the comics that will be shipping Wednesday October 1st, 2008 and on shelves by Thursday. See a complete list of this week’s comic releases organized by publisher at Diamond Comics Previews.

Comics

Alter Ego 81
Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Laughing Corpse 1
Army @ Love The Art of War 3
Authority 3
Batman 680
Battlestar Galactica Origins 10
Boys 23
Cable 7
City of Dust 1
Civil War House of M 2
DC Universe Decisions 2
Doktor Sleepless 9
El Diablo 2
Eternals 5
Four Eyes 1
Futurama Comics 39 Read the rest of this entry » » »

Nothing ground-shaking is coming out this Friday, October 3rd, but there do seem to be a shower of mid-list draws, including the comedy Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (PG-13), the nerd-worthy drama based on true events Flash of Genius (PG-13), and the sci-fi thriller Blindness (R), which, to me, looks a lot like The Day of the Triffids. Of course, none of that matters, because everyone with time to kill will be going to How to Lose Friends & Alienate People (R) in the hope of catching a glimpse of Megan Fox partially nude.

Video Releases

• Iron Man (PG13) [Blu-ray]
• Mindscape of Alan Moore

Television

• Beauty and the Beast: The Complete Series
• The Mr. Bean: Best of, Vol. 2

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Science and mathematics
Run parallel to reality, they symbolize it, they squint at it,
They never touch it: consider what an explosion
Would rock the bones of men into little white fragments and unsky the world
If any mind for a moment touch truth.

- The Beginning and the End and Other Poems by Robinson Jeffers, 1963.

1887
Émile Berliner receives a patent for the gramophone, which is the first music playing device to use a flat disk record. (US Patent 372,786) In 1898, he will founds the Berliner Grammophon Gesellschaft record company.

1891
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a “Process of and Apparatus for Generating Electricity” and for a “Phonogram-Blank Carrier.” (US No. 460,122 and 460,123)

1914
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for a “Phonograph-Record.” (US No. 1,111,999)

1915
A demonstration of a transcontinental radio telephone is given in New York City. Speech is transmitted over 2,500 miles via Arlington, Virginia to Mare Island in San Francisco, California. In a second demonstration the same night, speech is also transmitted to Honolulu, Hawaii.

1920
Ready-made wireless receivers are offered for the first time as little as US$10 at the Joseph Home Company department store in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.
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1858
Donati’s comet discovered by Giovanni Battista Donati, becomes the first comet to be photographed. It is a bright comet that developed a spectacular curved dust tail with two thin gas tails, captured by an English commercial photographer, William Usherwood, using a portrait camera.

1944
The first musical comedy on television, Boys from Boise, is broadcast in the U.S.

1950
The first made for television movie, Dinner Date with Death, in the UK is screened by broadcast on the BBC.

1959
The Explorer VI satellite discovers an intense radiation belt around Earth and takes the first remote television footage of Earth’s meteorological conditions.
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Facts are ventriloquist’s dummies.
Sitting on a wise man’s knee they may be made to utter words of wisdom;
elsewhere, they say nothing, or talk nonsense, or indulge in sheer diabolism.

- Time Must Have a Stop by Aldous Huxley, 1944.

1822
Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta stone.

1825
The first locomotive to haul a passenger train is operated by George Stephenson’s Stockton & Darlington line in England. The engine “Locomotion No. 1″ pulls thirty-four wagons and one solitary coach on its journey of twenty-one miles from Shildon, via Darlington to Stockton in County Durham.

1854
The steamship Arctic sinks with three hundred people on board, becoming the first great disaster in the Atlantic Ocean.

1905
The journal Annalen der Physik publishes the physics paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” by Albert Einstein, which first introduces the famous mass–energy equivalence equation E=MC².
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