The Great Geek Manual

Film

• As if you needed more reasons, Fantasy Magazine shares Five Reasons to be Psyched for the Watchmen Movie.
• The Dark Knight is on its way to becoming the most pirated movie of 2008. Personally, I think that deserves an award.
• David Denby of the New Yorker presents a lecture at Princeton in which he asks Do Movies have a Future? [ASX Streaming Video]
• Ladies and Gentlemen, I present the ironic link of the day: The Sci-Fi Channel suggests 10 Ways To Update Earth Stood Still. Yes, the people would brought you what, like five films about a gigantic python, think they can improve other people’s films.
• Sci-Fi counts down the 6 Scariest Environmental Doomsday Movies, reminding us that, despite the increasing visibility of environmental issues, Hollywood still isn’t as worried about global warming as it is about zombies.

Literature

• Interview: Chasing Ray interviews Ellen Datlow, Editor of Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.
• Media Shift examines the issue of Pulp Magazines Struggling to Survive in a Wired World.
• Over at Auxiliary Memory, James Harris considers who his literary relatives are as a child of science fiction and the 1960s in his article, The Children of Science Fiction.
• The Top Ten Reasons Books Are Better Than Sex.
• The Written Weird’s Jay Garmon lays out a plan for Building the Perfect Web 2.0 Sci-fi short Fiction Magazine.

Television

• The BBC Archive Project has posted some amazing memos and reports revealing the thought processes that led to the creation of Doctor Who.
• Just when you thought you were out, they pull you back in. Who is the Final Cylon?

Video Games

• An Italian boy has been diagnosed with PlayStation Addiction.
• Researchers in Birmingham have been developing new technology to add smells to the virtual world of video games.

1906
A US patent is issued to inventor Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, an electrical engineer, for the crystal detector, one of the first devices widely used for receiving radio broadcasts, until the later development of the later triode vacuum tube. His patent described it as “a means for receiving intelligence communicated by electric waves.”

1920
KDKA becomes the first radio station credited with broadcasting regularly scheduled professional programming.

1931
The first commercial teletype service was introduced by American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

1950
The NTSC color television system comes into effect as a standard in the US.

1951
William A. Higinbotham and Boyce B. McDaniel are issued a US patent for a Counter Chronograph, one of the earliest digital timing systems. (US No. 2,575,759) The invention was first built in Los Alamos in 1945.

Production of color television receivers for sale to the public is banned in the US under Order M-90 issued by the National Production Authority.
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At the end of the day, no matter how confident we are in our observations, our experiments, our data, or our theories, we must go home knowing that 85 percent of all the gravity in the cosmos comes from an unknown, mysterious source that remains completely undetected by all means we have ever devised to observe the universe. As far as we can tell, it’s not made of ordinary stuff such as electrons, protons, and neutrons, or any form of matter or energy that interacts with them. We call this ghostly, offending substance ‘dark matter,’ and it remains among the greatest of all quandaries.

- Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries by Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2007.

Source: Fuss 11

Edit: I just found out that this is a t-shirt available from Threadless. Sweet.

…SF is creative and it inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by and large does not do. We who read SF (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain reaction of ideas being set off in our mind by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create — and enjoy doing it: Joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.

- “My Definition of Science Fiction” by Philip K. Dick, 1981.

1850
The first US patent for magic lantern slides made of glass plate is issued to their inventor Frederick Langenheim of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as an “improvement in photographic pictures on glass.” (US No. 7,784)

1872
The first U.S. patent for an adding machine capable of printing totals and subtotals, called a “calculating machine,” is issued to E.D. Barbour of Boston, Massachusetts. (US No. 133,188)

1969
Apollo 12 astronauts Alan Bean and Charles Conrad land at the Oceanus Procellarum (”Ocean of Storms”) and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.

1970
The IBM 1620 scientific computer is withdrawn from the market. It was released on October 21, 1959.

1971
UNIVAC announces an agreement to acquire RCA’s computer customer base of five hundred companies and government bureaus (more than 1,000 computers) for US$70.5 million plus fifteen percent of revenues generated by existing business. One third of RCA’s 7,500 computer work force are retained by UNIVAC after the acquisition.
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10 Futuristic Concept Laptop Designs – Listphobia has compiled a list of the most futuristic concept laptop designs, some of which have won awards.

100 Awesome Ivy League Video Lectures – OnlineUniversities.com presents a directory of intellectually-stimulating college lectures on a wide range of topics ranging from astrophysics to women’s studies.

An Introduction to Sine-Wave Speech – Sine-wave speech is a form of artificially degraded speech that demonstrates how perceptual insight impacts communication. Play the first recording and you’ll hear noise. Play the second recording, and suddenly the first one is understandable.

Meh – It’s official your favorite expression of indifference is now an actual word according to the Collins English Dictionary.

The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet – Ever wonder who that girl who pops up every time you mistype a domain name is? Turns out her name’s Hannah. Just a strange FYI proving yet again that anonymity is dead.

Top 10 Ways to Speed Up Your Web Browsing – LifeHacker runs down ten tips for making the most of the bandwidth you’ve got by using software intelligently. It’s well complimented by this article on speeding up your hardware.

Ultra-Modern Underground Data Center – HotHardware tours an amazing facility that looks like the evil lair of a James Bond villain, complete with rough-hewn rock walls and fog.

Comics

• Den of Geek lists 75 comics being made into Films.
• I agree with Heckler Spray’s choice of Jessica Alba as number one on the list of the Top 26 Comicbook Movie Babes, but I’m questioning the choice of Jessica Biel as number two.
• io9 looks at 5 Ways That Sandman Changed The World.
• USA Today takes a look at the Batman 681, out November 26. According to the article, the issue will wrap up Grant Morrison’s Batman R.I.P. story line and kill off Bruce Wayne.

Film

• Bloody Disgusting has posted a first look at the upcoming sci-fi film Moon, which looks to be another “isolation thriller” like Sunshine or 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The latest Star Trek trailer is up all around the web.
• Slash Film looks at the Art and Development of Wall-E, cute robots and all.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “The Curse of the Monolith” by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter at Unexplored Worlds.
• Free Fiction: Read “Knight of Sorrows: Frozen Shadows” by Jonathan Moeller at Mindflights.
• Free Fiction: Read “Never on a Birthday” by Patty Jansen and “Puppet Strings” by Terry Ollila at Byzarium.
• New Scientist asks six leading writers for their thoughts on the future of science fiction, including Margaret Atwood, William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Their answers are surprisingly shorts for genre authors.
• This holiday season, sci-fi author John Scalzi is offering to sign books you order through the mail from his local bookstore.
• A documentary on science fiction author John Wyndham, author of Day of the Triffids, has been posted to YouTube: The Invisible Man of Science Fiction.