The Great Geek Manual

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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ABC News mocks Geeks with a story on the “Silliest” Cruises for Seafaring Geeks.

At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts.

Cracked shares these examples of What Campaign Ads Would Look Like If the Voting Age Was 6.

Have an idea to change the world? Google may chip in US$10 million to make it a reality.

It’s eerie how this neat little math trick can “read your mind” until you see the trick.

It’s just good etiquette: the Top 15 things you should never do on Facebook.

Learn Esperanto, the world’s easiest language to learn, with Lernu.

Ten Fascinating Infographics on Love and Sex you have to see.

Ten features that the iPhone will need to triumph over Android in the future.

XKCD has conceived of the ultimate benevolent virus.

Comics

• Everything you’ve ever Wanted to Know about Iron Man’s Suit but were too dull to make up on your own.

Film

• Oh, holy Lucas! Could I Am Legend really be getting a prequel? Nooo!
• Wired’s Ten Favorite Actresses from Geeky Movies.
• With only three months until New Years, there are still 10 Must See Movies Left in 2008.
• You’ve seen every film on offer at the local video bodega and its time to expand your pallet. The solution? Start watching Asian films!

Television

• The Muppet’s Statler & Waldorf on the Presidential debates.
• Topless Robot runs down the The 10 Most Ludicrously Powerful Anime Characters without a single mention of Naruto or the crazy-unkillable villain of Scrapped Princess.

Video Games

• Jalopnik counts down the Ten Greatest Video Game Cars.

For every Man the Crucifier, there has been a Man the Healer; for every Man the Warrior, there has been a Man the Peace-Maker; and if some men have died in an attempt to kill within reach, others have died to save them. In the end, Man may destroy himself and all of life and his world-but he may not.

Lets give him yet another chance and perhaps in space he will find the actual nobility of which many have dreamed and which some have practiced.

- Isaac Asimov in the article “That Moon Plaque: Comments by Science Fiction
Writers,” 1969.

1580
Sir Francis Drake first circumnavigates the globe.

1887
Émile Berliner receives a patent for the Gramophone. (US No. 372,786)

1903
The New Zealand Wireless Telegraphy Act receives Royal Assent from the Governor of New Zealand. The act is a pre-emptive move to give the state a monopoly on wireless operations, as, at this time, there is are no wireless transmissions. The act established that the penalty for unauthorized wireless transmission or reception is £500.

1908
In one of the earliest known examples of software bundling, Edison Phonographs advertised in the Saturday Evening Post come with recordings of the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates.
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Comics

• Topless Robot takes a look at the The 10 Least Terrifying Justice League Villains.

Film

• TC Candler makes a good start rounding up The 100 Greatest Movie Posters, but honestly, some of these films are only list because the quality of the film, not the art of the poster.
• Ten Horror Sequels and Remakes that Top the Originals, beginning with The Blob and climaxing with the 1978 classic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
• Warner Brothers lost their lawsuit, the film Hari Puttar, about a ten-year-old Indian boy who moves to England will move forward.

Internet

• I wouldn’t normally mention this Ten Top Weapons from Sci-Fi, but it cracks me up that a flamethrower wins out over the Green Lanterns ring and a 44 Magnum makes the list but the light saber doesn’t.
• The Top Fifty Hottest Sci-Fi Girls for you to gawk at.

Literature

• Science fiction doesn’t have to be Goomy, but when was the last time happy sci-fi was categorized as a classic? Hell, when was the last time you came across happy science fiction period?
• When Books Could Change Your Life is a really nice essay on Children’s literature. From the article: “if I ever end up holed up in my parents’ farmhouse holding off the bulldozers with a machine gun while listening to Beethoven’s late quartets, it’ll be because of the story “And the Moon Be Still as Bright” from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.”

Video Games

• GameDaily takes a look at The Top 10 Ugliest Game Heroes.
• If I had a nickel for every hour I spent playing these Top Ten Star Wars Games… who am I kidding? I would probably spend it on the next Star Wars game to come out.

Writing

• As if you didn’t already think Robert Heinlein was a genius, it turns out the man had an amazing system for responding to all of his fan mail, too.