The Great Geek Manual

Art

• It was inevitable, someone was going to Steampunk a Storm Trooper. (Preliminary sketch here)
• More Iron Man Concept Art Than You Can Shake a Stick At. The title says it all.

Comics

• Top Five Comic Book Movies That Outdo Their Origins gets a little dubious at the point where it mentions the Phantom, but if you substituted Rocketeer for Phantom, it would be pretty much dead on.

Film

• According to Five Doomsday Movies Ranked by Likelihood, Skynet is never going to become a reality, but that doesn’t keep me from administering a Turing Test to my fancy toaster every time burns my toast out of spite.
• Jeff Bridges talks Tron.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Jelly Ink Press is offering the anthology “Magic for Beginners” by Kelly Link for free through its website.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Fable of the Octopus” by Peter Beagle at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Mound” by H.P. Lovecraft all through October at Space Westerns.
• Free Fiction: Tales of the Zombie War is a new website devoted to zombie fiction.

Television

• The Associated Press takes a look behind the scenes of the new series, Sanctuary.

Video Games

• Screenshots of the upcoming Stargate: Worlds MMO.

Writing

• Who are The World’s Best Paid Authors? Here’s a hint: J.K. Rowling could buy and sell your book-pirating ass in a New York minute. Surprisingly, Stephen King doesn’t make the cut, which makes me think that he needs to fire his manager.

1806
Ralph Wedgewood patents carbon paper, which he describes as an “apparatus for producing duplicates of writings” in London, England.

1849
Edgar Allan Poe dies at 5:00am four days after being found in a Baltimore, Maryland gutter.

1868
Cornell University opens in Ithaca, New York. Four hundred twelve students enroll for its first term, a record among American universities.

1913
Once again, Henry Ford overcomes the resistance of many of his own stockholders with a revolutionary method of building automobiles. Ford, who for ten years has advocated manufacturing the greatest number of cars to sell at the lowest price, can now assemble one of his Model Ts at its Highland Park plant within three hours. Ford himself can build an entire car with his hands, but in his factory, automobiles are manufactured on an assembly line. One worker attached doors, another fenders, another the engine. Ford projects that his assembly line will turn out more than 250,000 Model T’s in the first year alone.

1931
Short-exposure infrared photography is first demonstrated by researchers at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York. The first short-exposure infrared photo taken is of a group of fifty Kodak engineers in a totally dark room flooded with invisible infrared light for the purpose.
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Do we have it, or does God dictate and script everything we do and say and want? Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we’re born?

- Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, 2002.

1857
The first major chess tournament, the First American Chess Congress, is held in New York. The event was organized by the American Chess Association and won by Paul Morphy.

1876
A group of public and university librarians establish the American Library Association to promote the enjoyment of reading. Visit the organization’s official website.

1889
William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, the inventor of the motion picture camera and an employee of Thomas Edison, makes the first motion picture, in which he films himself saying “Good morning, Mr Edison. How do you like this?” The motion picture is the first “sound film.” The image of the film is only about one inch wide and three-quarters of an inch high.

1908
The Ohio Art company, later manufacturer of the Etch-A-Sketch, is founded by Henry Simon Winzeler. Visit the game’s official website.

1914
Edwin H. Armstrong is granted a patent for a “Wireless Receiving System,” in which he describes his regenerative circuit, otherwise known as a feed-back circuit. (US No. 1,113,149)
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…mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is – sometimes – turns out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called ‘physical universe’. That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess.

- The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein, 1980.

1923
Edwin Hubble identified the first Cepheid variable star.

1934
The premiere of Hollywood Hotel on CBS becomes the first US radio network program to originate from Hollywood.

1936
The first intercity telecast in the US using coaxial cable is transmitted between New York City and Philadelphia over an AT&T coaxial cable landline.

1962
United Artists releases the first installment in the James Bond film franchise, the spy film Dr. No, directed by Terence Young and starring Sean Connery, Joseph Wiseman, Ursula Andress, Jack Lord, and John Kitzmiller to UK theaters. In it, an agent of the British Secret Service, James Bond (007), is sent out to the West Indies in order to find out why another of his number was killed. His arrival is not welcomed by everyone, but it is not long before he is on the trail of the killer. The trail leads to a secretive scientist, Dr. No, but the discovery has wider implications… Produced on a budget of US$1 million, the film will gross US$109.6 million worldwide. IMDB listing MPAA Rating: PG Running Time: 1 hr 50 mins
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…mathematics is order and beauty at its purest,
order that transcends the physical worlds.

- The Man Who Loves Only Numbers by Paul Hauffman, 1987.
Originally published in The Atlantic Magazine, Vol. 260, No. 5.

1535
The first complete English edition of the Bible, printed in Antwerp as translated by Miles Coverdale, is first published.

1675
Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens patents a pocket watch.

1830
The first power printing press capable of detailed book work is patented by Isaac Adams of Boston, Massachusetts.

1931
The Dick Tracy comic strip, created by cartoonist Chester Gould, debuts in The Detroit Mirror. The next week, The New York Daily News and hundreds of others newspapers will pick up the syndicated series.

1934
Enrico Fermi measures the speed of a neutron.
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