The Great Geek Manual

Comics

• I’m not wholly certain how accurate this list is, but it makes for interesting contemplation. Your 3D Source names The Top 10 Most Valuable Comic Books In The World.
• Two phrases you never thought you’d see in the same sentence: Comics and Christian Science Monitor.

Film

• Den of Geek looks back at the Top 24 worst special effects of all time.
• Just what you wanted to hear: Terminator Ending “Might Piss Off A Lot Of People”

Literature

• Good news. After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed.

Television

• Entertainment Weekly recaps what you need to remember for the upcoming season of Lost to make sense.
• Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs released a poll of the best anime series. A list of The Top 50 Anime Series was posted a while back. Many of the series can be viewed online for free at AnimeBoy.org.
• NY Magazine interviews Michael Emerson (Ben Linus) of Lost.

1878
W.H. Preece demonstrates Alexander Graham Bell’s new telephone invention to Queen Victoria at her Osborne House estate on the Isle of Wight. Bell patented the telephone in 1876, and in 1877, Bell had come to England on his honeymoon, demonstrating his device to telegraph engineers and giving lectures as he went. At the conclusion of the demonstration, the Queen, very impressed with the device, orders a phone line installed between Osbourne House and Buckingham Palace.

1914
Henry Ford introduces the assembly line for Model T Ford cars. The method of continuous motion method reduces the time spent assembling a car from twelve and a half hours to ninety-three minutes.

1949
The US Attorney General files a lawsuit against AT&T and Western Electric, alleging violations of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The suit will results in a January 24, 1956 consent decree separating Western Electric from the AT&T’s Bell system.

1969
The Soviet Union launches the fourth and fifth Soyuz space probes.

1970
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) releases the IBM DATA/360, a new program product that simulates the functions of the IBM 29 keypunch and IBM 59 verifier to enter data from an IBM 2260 display station to an IBM 2311 or 2314 storage device, bypassing punch cards.
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The sad thing about artificial intelligence is that is that it lacks artifice and therefore intelligence.

- “Cool Memories” by Jean Baudrillard, 1987.

1404
The English Parliament passes the Act of Multipliers, forbidding alchemists from using transmutation to create or multiply precious metals, specifically gold and silver. The Act comes in response to widespread fear that alchemists would succeed in their projects and ruin the nation or install a despot. In 1689, Robert Boyle lobbied for repeal of the Act.

1610
Galileo Galilei discovers what will later be named Callisto, the fourth satellite of Jupiter. Galileo names the Moon along with the three he discovered earlier the “Medicean planets,” after the Medici family, and numerically as I, II, III and IV. Galileo’s naming system will be used until the mid-1800′s, when they will come to be referred to as Galilean moons, Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, and Io.

1874
C.G. Spalding receives a patent for the Spalding Adding Machine. (US No. 29.3,809) The machine is the precursor of later calculators and computers.

1906
This date is sometimes noted for the first release of an advertisement for a radio receiver in the US. However, the very earliest one-inch advertisement for the Telimco appeared in the November 25, 1905 issue of the Scientific American. Both of these ads, and several similar weekly advertisements run between the two dates, were placed by Hugo Gernsback of The Electro Importing Company of New York. Gernsback will later forget the exact date on which the first Telimco advertisements first appeared and mis-cite it in a later interview for a special issue of Radio Craft published in March 1938.
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Art

• Deviant Art user RETROnoob has posted a gallery of Nintedo art, game sprites from classic NES games in real world scenes.

Film

• AMOG reviews 101 Movie One-Liners Everyone Should Know. Try guessing the top five before you check the list. I’ll bet they’re lines so common, you won’t even think of them.
• IconoCritic Movies runs down the The Top 9 Unknown Sci-fi Films to look out for in 2009, leaving me some hope this year isn’t going to be a complete flop.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read the flash fiction “The Fallen Angel” by Mike Resnick.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Man Who Would Be Kzin” by Greg Bear and S. M. Stirling.
• A board of authors and literary critics created a list for Random House of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th Century. It’s about what you would expect – mostly the sort of thing you would read in an english course.
• The List Universe examines some Gruesome Fairy Tale Origins.
• The World in the Satin Bag tries to delude itself with 5 Reasons Science Fiction Is Better Than Fantasy, even though everyone knows better.

Television

• I’m not a Stargate: Atlantis fan, but the interview in which writer Joseph Mallozzi discusses The 4 Best Stargate: Atlantis Episodes He Never Got to Write is actually fairly interest. Personally, if I were him, a Star Trek: The Next Generation cross-over would have been my number one, because, once they stopped trying, why not?
• Yet another BSG theory: Boomer is the Final Cylon.

Video Games

• Fidgit looks at 10 Videogames that redefine Science Fiction, climaxing with BioShock.
• Game Informer takes a look at the legendary game code Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A.

Writing

• Author Cory Doctorow discusses Writing in the Age of Distraction.

  http://www.locusmag.com/Features/2009/01/cory-doctorow-writing-in-age-of.html

1881
The first commercially successful long distance line, running forty-five miles between Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, opens for business.

1958
United States President Dwight D. Eisenhower calls upon the Soviet Union to dedicate outer space “to the peaceful uses of mankind.”

1965
At 10:58am PST, scientists conduct what they term a “controlled excursion,” launching a nuclear rocket in Jackass Flats, Nevada and burning off a portion of its radioactive core. The resultant radioactive close drifted over Los Angeles before It produced a radioactive cloud over Los Angeles. Documents released in 1994 will reveal that the cloud was an “intentional accident” designed to test the possible effects of a malfunction aboard a rocket. While the population’s exposure to radiation was negligible, far less than the 25 millirad danger level, the incident will spark controversy when it comes to light in 1994. Read more about the incident.

1966
The television series Batman debuts on the ABC network with the episode “Hi Diddle Riddle“. The series will run two half-hour episodes a week for two and a half seasons, for a total of 120 episodes. The series is a lighthearted comedy based on the DC comic book character Batman, created by Bob Kane. IMDB listing

1984
Engineers stop using mortar and begin using the original method of interlocking blocks that was used by the ancient Eygptians to restore the pyramids. The international panel charged with overseeing the restoration of the Great Pyramids in Egypt abandoned modern construction techniques, which turned out to be destructive when water in modern cement split adjacent limestone. The restoration effort had been frustrated by the problem, but after returning to the ancient methods, the project continued without complications.
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Everyone’s a hero in their own way, in their own not-that-heroic way.

- Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog by Joss Whedon, 2008.
Character: Captain Hammer

1902
Popular Mechanics magazine is published for the first time. The magazine has five paying subscribers and will be purchased by a few hundred newsstand customers at a nickel a copy. In September 1903, the magazine will have become sufficiently popular to begin publishing monthly issues.

1935
Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo between Hawaii and California. Three years earlier, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

1960
The ACM/GAMM committee is convened with the mission of developing the first block-structured programming language, Algol 60 (ALGOrithmic Language), which will be the predecessor of the Pascal programming language. Algol and Algol 60 were designed as portable languages for scientific computation, and Algol will later be described by Alan Perlis as “the lingua franca of computer science.”

1973
The United Kingdom’s Open University grants its first degrees to students who curriculum consisted, in part, of courses transmitted over radio and television. Founded in 1969, Open University was established to make education available to students globally. Visit Open University’s official website.

1976
The science fiction television series The Bionic Woman premieres on the ABC network with the episode “Welcome Home, Jaime: Part 1.” The series will run for three seasons and a total of fifty-eight episodes. The series is a spin-off of The Six Million Dollar Man. TV.com entry
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