The Great Geek Manual

• A useful tools for the paranoid: Has the Large Hadron Collider Destroyed the World Yet?
• The BBC reports that the “Big Bang experiment” has started well.
• Get a first-hand view of the end of the world… I mean, the First Beam via live webcast.
• Has Dr. Gordon Freeman infiltrated the Large Hadron Collider? More importantly, will the LHC trigger an unexpected “resonance cascade?!” Wait. Is that a crowbar?!!
• If you ever get curious about what all those impressive LHC photos are, Knowledge is Power has explained many of them.
• In light of this landmark event, Scientific America asks the hard questions, such as, “How long would it take the LHC to defrost a pizza?“
• Popular Mechanics actually steps in to inject a little science in 5 Things You Need to Know About the Large Hadron Collider Now.
• Stephen Hawking explains why the Large Hadron Collider is vital for humanity, and no, it’s not so we can repel aliens.
• The LHC claimed its first fatality before it even went live when a sixteen year old girl committed suicide in fear of the apocalypse its activation would bring. Let’s hope this isn’t like the suicides at the beginning of those Omen flicks. (Que ominous organ music.)
• To ease your fears, Maxim magazine, leader in all things science, share 8 Fictional Doomsday Devices More Dangerous Than the Large Hadron Collider.
• You can check out even more webcam footage, this time of the Compact Muon Solenoid Experiment.
• You know that the LHC is totally legit, cuz it’s got its own Twitter Feeder
  .

A beautiful gallery of dew drop macro photography from Scienceray.

I’m almost physically incapable of ignoring galleries of Creative Bookshelves. It’s an addiction.

Is this or is this not the most romantic Valentine’s card you’ve ever laid eyes on?

IT Security lists 51 Things You Aren’t Allowed to See on Google Maps.

Run down this list of 10 Most Common Mistakes In Home Cinema Setup before shopping.

TypoeBuddy is a service that lets you search for misspelled eBay listings to so you’re competing with fewer bidders.

Man will never be enslaved by machinery
if the man tending the machine be paid enough.

- Quoted in the the obituary of Karel Capek in the News Chronicles, 1938.

1858
George Mary Searle discovers the asteroid 55 Pandora.

1960
Japan begins transmitting regular color television programming using the NTSC system. It’s the third country to adopt the system after Cuba and the United States.

1983
Infocom publishes Release 18 of the interactive fiction game The Witness for personal computers. It is a murder mystery written in the ZIL programming language.

1984
Alec Jeffreys discovers Genetic fingerprinting accidentally while studying genetic markers across generations as a method of tracking patterns of inherited illness in families.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

A little fiction for Google-lovers: Google turns 20.

A visual breakdown of Craigslist “Missed Connections” geographically, by state.

Does anyone else find Computer Controlled Home Door Locks a dubious proposition?

History buffs will enjoy this in-depth Nintendo chronology that spans 119 years.

Maybe you’ll never need it, but here’s an explanation on How to Read an FBI File.

Play with a very lifelike virtual Tarantula created in Flash.

Sculptor Nemo Gould builds robots out of old junk and trash.

The Top 10 Creative Responses to Junk Mail, including portraits and venetian blinds.

The Top Eleven Reasons a Star Trek Marathon Is a Bad Idea.

Tux Deluxe has a solid article on Learning the Craft of Programming.

Comics

• Den of Geek asks “Can Digital Comics Work?” My answer is that if going digital gets more comics into my hands, then Hells Yeah!

Film

• After one too many Indiana Jones, Rambo, and Star Trek movies, news has finally come that Ghostbusters is finally going to be a trilogy, just like it always should have been.
• Den of Geek asks Can 3D give moviegoing a shot in the arm?
• Director James Cameron says that his next film, Avatar, will blow Titanic out of the water.
• Sam Raimi & Tobey Maguire are signed for Spider-Man 4, but they’re deciding if they’ll be shooting the fourth and fifth installments at the same time.
• SciFi Wire looks at 10 Ways To Destroy New York, with the Stay Puffed Marshmallow man getting robbed at number ten.

Internet

• 80sMusicVids.com is a collection of over a thousand “classic” music videos all collected in one spot for your viewing pleasure.
• Everything I Needed to Know I Learned from Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

Literature

• If you’re really having a hard time waiting for it to hit shelves, several excerpts of Brisingr have been posted online.
• Mike Brotherton talks about Ten Things I Hate About Science Fiction. Not ten things I hate about sci-fi. I personally love sci-fi, but evidently, Brotherton’s got some bones to pick.
• Philip Pullman, author of the Golden Compass, shares his own personal essential reading list.

Television

• Spoler Alert: Den of Geek features a sneak preview of season two of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Underwire meets with the minds behind this fall’s Fringe.
• Wired looks at Star Trek’s 10 Cheesiest Classic Creatures, beginning with episode one.

Video Games

• Wired looks at How Videogames Blind Us With Science.

1839
John Herschel makes the first glass plate photograph. The picture is of the forty foot, forty-eight inch aperture telescope used by his father William Herschel, in Slough, England.

1886
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, developed at the instigation of famed author Victor Hugo, is finalized and joined by ten nations, including the United States. It protects copyright and establishes the rights of an author.

1892
Amalthea, the third moon of Jupiter in order of distance from the planet, is discovered by Edward Emerson Barnard, who names it after a nymph in Greek mythology. Read more about Amalthea at NASA’s website.

1926
The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) is formed in the US as an offshoot of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), shortly after the May 1926 acquisition of the radio network operations of AT&T, which had decided to withdraw from radio. The new NBC network is publicized with full-page ads in numerous publications. The new network’s debut broadcast will be transmitted on November 15, 1926.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

If the world should blow itself up,
the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.

- Peter Ustinov, British actor and writer