The Great Geek Manual

Is this the most creep-ily sexual exchange you’re ever heard in a kids game or is it just me? It’s a clip from the PlayStation 2 game Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. Rated T for Teen, in case you’re wondering.

AXXo You Are a God – Slate magazine profiles AXXo, the world’s top bittorrent movie pirate.

How to Tell if you Cat is Plotting to Kill You – Matthew Inman of 9 Reasons not to date a T-Rex and 10 Reasons to Date a Unicorn reveals the truth behind your pet’s sinister nature.

How to Think Like Leonardo Da Vinci – WikiHow throws out a few tips on becoming a renaissance man in five steps: Curiosità, Dimostrazione, Sensazione, Sfumato, and Arte/scienza.

Napster Judge Calls for Major Copyright Reform – The Judge in trial that killed the original Napster is calling for an independent body to oversee copyright licensing and enforcement.

OLPC’s XO Laptop Released – Beginning November 17, Amazon.com will begin selling the much talked-about XO laptop for US$400. For each laptop bought, one will be donated.

The Origins of ‘Net shorthand – Computerworld examines just how old the most common Leetspeak terminology is.

The Top 10 Forecasts for 2009 and Beyond – Futurist magazine has selected the most thought-provoking predictions concerning science and technology for the coming year, beginning with the chilling but plausible projection that everything you say and do will be recorded by 2030.

The Top 10 Most Annoying Phrases – Wired shares Oxford Researchers’ picks, and surprisingly, neither “Lindsey Lohan” nor “Paris Hilton” made the list, even though both trigger my gag reflex.

Film

• Guillermo del Toro wants to direct Swamp Thing, and fans rejoice.
• Movie Moron lists the Top 10 Bond One Liners.

Internet

• Slash Film has a side-by-side comparison of the various designs of the USS Enterprise, including Abrams’ version.

Literature

• Alternative Reel runs down the Top 10 Most Outrageous Opening Lines in Literature, most of which are genre titles.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “The Girl With the Sun In Her Head” by Jeremiah Tolbert at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Read “A Better Mousetrap” by Mike Resnick at Concatenation.
• I’ve always fantasized about owning a small bookshop, but George Orwell’s cynical essay, Bookshop Memories, has certainly burst that bubble. Make sure to check out the notes at the bottom of the page. Sadly, the shop where Orwell work is now a pizza joint.
• TomFolio is an enormous directory of autographs from writers of all genres. I thought that Poe’s signature was particularly attractive for a man who died in a gutter.

Television

• Author Ray Bradbury will join TCM host Robert Osborne November 20 as this month’s guest programmer movie showcase. His selections will be the 1925 version of “The Phantom of the Opera,” “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” “Rebecca,” and “Citizen Kane.”
• HBO has ordered a pilot episode of a series based on the fantasy novel Game of Thrones, though if they adapt it the same way they adapted Wizard’s First Rule, it won’t be anything to get excited about.
• Fandoman selects The Definitive Stories of 45 Years of Doctor Who.

Video Games

• Take a walk down memory lane with videos of the Top old-school video games.
• Top 10 Greatest Phrases To Ever Come Out Of A Video Game Character’s Mouth.

1907
French inventor Paul Cornu flies the first helicopter. The “flight” carries the vehicle roughly one foot off the ground and only lasts twenty seconds but it is the first flight of the first helicopter.

1928
Vladimir Zworykin is granted a patent for a color television imaging tube that employs cathode ray tubes and a screen composed of a mosaic of squares in the three primary colors. Several later biographers will call him the “true inventor of television.”

1955
The first live US television program originating from outside the continental United States comes from Havana, Cuba.

1957
Gordon Gould, a doctoral research student at Columbia University and a former member of the Manhattan Project, completes the design of a light-emitting version of the microwave emitting maser, which he names Light Amplication by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation (LASER).

1971
The American space probe, Mariner 9, becomes the first space probe to orbit another planet, when it enters the orbit of Mars. The probe’s mission is to return photographs that will map seventy percent of the surface and to conduct a study of the planet’s atmosphere.
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The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius.

- The New Industrial State by J.K. Galbraith, economist, 1967.

For those of you out there who don’t get it, that’s the speed of light.

1799
American astronomer Andrew Ellicott Douglass makes the first written record of a meteor shower in the US, the Leonids meteor shower, from a ship off the Florida Keys. He writes, “In every instant the meteors were as numerous as the stars,” and that the “whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after day break.”

1901
The first Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded to Wilhelm Röentgen for the discovery of X-rays.

1915
Theodore William Richards of Harvard University becomes the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

1937
Alan Turing publishes a paper entitled “On Computable Numbers with an Application to the Entscheidungs-problem.” In it, Turing provides an abstraction that will form the basic theory of computability for several decades. Later renamed the Turing Machine, this abstract engine described in this paper will provide the fundamental concepts of computers that other inventors will later conceive independently.
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