The Great Geek Manual

New Releases

The much anticipated, much promoted Anathem hits shelves this week, and its almost certain to be the next must-read science fiction classic.

• 39 Clues: Maze Of Bones by Rick Riordan
  Scholastic Press. (ISBN-13: 978-0545060394) Hardcover. Length: 240 pages
  Minutes before she died Grace Cahill changed her will, leaving her descendants an impossible decision: “You have a choice – one million dollars or a clue.” Grace is the last matriarch of the Cahills, the world’s most powerful family. Everyone from Napoleon to Houdini is related to the Cahills, yet the source of the family power is lost.
  Release: September 9
• Anathem by Neal Stephenson
  William Morrow. (ISBN-13: 978-0061474095) Hardcover. Length: 960 pages
  The long awaited, much promoted science fiction novel in which a group of academics must race to save the planet Arbre from annihilation.
  Release: September 9

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This Friday, September 12th, Burn After Reading (R), The Family That Preys (PG-13), and Righteous Kill (R) will be hitting the theaters. Not great geek pickings, but you really can’t expect too much geek on the screen with the summer winding down and the streets back in control of the adults.

Video Releases

• Felon (R)
  A family man convicted of killing an intruder must cope with life afterward in the violent penal system.
• Juncture (R)
  Diagnosed with a terminal illness, a woman uses her final three months to enact some vigilante justice, furiously tracking down vicious criminals.
• Legend of the Shadowless Sword (R)
  The kingdom of the land has been conquered, and the ruler’s only remaining descendant is the exiled Prince Jung-Hyun. Unaware of the darkness that has fallen over his homeland, Soha guides him toward his royal destiny.

Television

• Smallville: The Complete Seventh Season [DVD] [Blu-ray]

Re-Releases & New Formats

• Day Watch [Blu-ray] (R)
• Pumpkinhead Collector’s Edition [WS]
• Night Watch [Blu-ray] (R)

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Video Games

Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore. Spore… Did anyone else notice that they’ve released Spore this week? You would have to Amish not to have noticed. Someone ought to develop a new simulation game where players manage a video game marketing department, then have to escape from the enraged customers they deceived with their slick advertising.

Sunday, September 7

Spore (Mac, PC)
A simulation game created by Will Wright that allows players to control various life forms from the cellular to the galactic level.

Spore Creatures DS (DS)
A simulation game created by Will Wright that allows players to control various life forms from the cellular to the galactic level.

Spore Galactic Edition (Mac, PC)
A simulation game created by Will Wright that allows players to control various life forms from the cellular to the galactic level.
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1855
Dr. J. M. Taupenot announces his development of a dry collodion photographic plate.

1871
Dr. Richard Leach Maddox announces his invention of a silver bromide gelatine photographic emulsion, which significantly reduces photograph exposure times.

1930
3M of St. Paul, Minnesota begins marketing Scotch brand cellulose tape, the first waterproof, transparent, pressure-sensitive tape.

1945
The first bus in the US with a two-way radio is put into service in Washington, D.C.

1960
In Huntsville, Alabama, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally dedicates the Marshall Space Flight Center, which NASA had activated on July 1. Visit the Marshall Space Flight Center’s official website.
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It’s strange, you know, the Net is denounced as austere, the product of the engineering mentality, so forth and so on. It’s the most feminine influence that Western civilization has ever allowed itself to fall under the spell of. The troubadors of the fourteenth century were as nothing compared to the boundary-dissolving, feminizing, permitting, nurturing nature of the Net. Maybe that’s why there is an overwhelming male preference for it, in its early form, because that’s where that was needed. But it is Sophia, it is wisdom, it is the penetrating archetypal female logos of the world-soul, leading us away from what was very sharp-edged and uncomfortable and repressive to our creativity and our sexuality and our relationships to each other and to the Earth.

- Terence Kemp McKenna
The seminar “TechnoPagans at the End of History,” 1998.

Listen to a sample of the lecture at Hyperreal.org.

They say that dogs lick their own genitalia because they can.
But I think it’s at least partially because they don’t have the Internet.

- Dilbert blog entry entitled, “My day as a Neanderthal” by Scott Adams, 2006.

1776
The first US submarine built for wartime use, the American Turtle, is used in New York harbor to attach a time bomb to the hull of the flagship of British Admiral Richard Howe, the HMS Eagle. Known as a “torpedo” the weapon is a cask with 150lbs of black powder and a clockwork time fuse. Because it separated from the ship before it exploded, little damage was accomplished, but nonetheless, the event marks the world’s first submarine attack.

1927
The first fully electronic television system is first successfully tested by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, age 21. The first electronic image he produces is of a straight line painted onto a pane of glass. Farnsworth, who was born in a log cabin without electricity in Utah, will later explain that the idea of television first came to him while he was plowing a field when he was fourteen. The plowed rows made him realize that an image could be broken into rows like the field. Read more about at The Farnsworth Chronicles.

1948
Louis Parker for a television receiver he describes as an “intercarrier sound system.” (US No. 2,448,908)

1967
Biosatellite II, the second US biological research satellite, is launched. When it is safely recovered after re-entry, it will become the first successful biological research satellite. It carries thirteen experiments designed to test the effects of cosmic radiation and a stay in space on simple life forms, including: millions of orange head mold spores, thousands of vinegar gnats, hundreds of wasp and amoeba, one hundred twenty frog eggs, dozens of wheat seedlings, dozens of blue wild flowers, flour beetles, and bacteria cells. The satellite’s predecessor, Biosatellite I, failed fire its retrorockets, causing it to burn up in the atmosphere.
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1522
Ferdinand Magellan’s ship, the “Victoria,” returns to Spain, becoming the first ship to successfully circumnavigate the globe.

1879
Telephone Company, Ltd. opens the first public British telephone exchange on Lombard Street in London using Edison’s telephone system. The service will be, in effect an exclusive club, to which members will pay a subscription. At first, the exchange serves just eight subscribers. By the end of the year, there will be about two hundred subscribers, and two more exchanges will open on Leadenhall Street in the City, and at Westminster.

1947
The aircraft-carrier Midway becomes the first US vessel to launch a long-range rocket. The test, which is a part of Operation Sandy, fires a captured German V-2 rocket from the flight deck several hundred miles off the east coast of the US.

1952
CBFT-TV, Canada’s first television station, opens in Montreal, broadcasting programs in both English and French.
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