The Great Geek Manual

Last Week’s Best-Selling Genre Books

1. Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs
2. The Host by Stephenie Meyer
3. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
4. Coraline (Movie Tie-in Edition) by Neil Gaiman
5. Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich
6. From Dead to Worse by Charlaine Harris
7. Men of the Otherworld by Kelley Armstrong
8. Daemon by Daniel Suarez

New Releases

The following books will be released this week:

Escape From Hell by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle
Tor Books. (ISBN: 9780765316325) Hardcover. Length: 336pp
The long-awaited follow-up to Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s classic science-fiction reimagining of Dante’s Inferno. February 17

Steal Across the Sky by Nancy Kress
Tor Books. (ISBN: 978-0756405380) Hardcover. Length: 320pp
The aliens appeared one day, built a base on the moon, and put an ad on the internet: “We are an alien race you may call the Atoners. Ten thousand years ago we wronged humanity profoundly. We cannot undo what has been done, but we wish humanity to understand it. Therefore we request twenty-one volunteers to visit seven planets to Witness for us. We will convey each volunteer there and back in complete safety. Volunteers must speak English. Send requests for electronic applications to witness@Atoners.com.”February 17

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1908
Thomas Alva Edison is issued a patent for an improvement to the “Alkaline Storage Battery.” (No. 879,612) Its purpose is to reduce foaming of the electrolytes in alkaline batteries, an effect which Edison attributes to the presence of microscopic quantities of organic matter. To correct the problem, the alkaline solution is filtered through bone black that has been purified in a hot potash solution.

1913
English Chemist Frederick Soddy introduces the term “isotope.” He suggests that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations can occupy the same position in the Periodic Table, and dubs such forms of an element “isotopes” from the Greek word for “same place.”

1929
The first Academy Awards are announced. Nominees for outstanding picture are the films 7th Heaven, The Racket, and Wings.

1930
Clyde Tombaugh discovers the planet Pluto, becoming the only American astronomer to find a planet inside the solar system. The discovery is the culmination of three decades of work at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, which involved taking millions of photographs of the night sky one tiny sections at a time in search of the one moving point.
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“You know, the average Chinese factory worker must think Americans are insane. Picture this: you work at a plant that makes Halloween stuff—you know, like, rubber severed heads. And you’re all like: Americans decorate their homes with severed heads? These fuckers are savages, man.”

Daemon by Daniel Suarez, 2006.
Chapter 45: Respawning, Character: Laney Price
The Great Geek Manual
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Art

• Twenty strange statues from around the world for you to gawk at.
• Worth1000 has posted a gallery of Cybernetic animals as seen through Photoshop.

Film

• I disagree with the Terminator and Godfather ratings, but The Trilogy Meter is a really great method of rating film trilogies.

Internet

• Gizmotron has posted The Definitive Guide To Steampunk Gadgets.
• The Top 11 Things You Won’t Find at the Microsoft Store.
• Topless Robot present’s Science Fiction’s 6 Excuses for Everything

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Dragon Hunt” by Sarah Prineas at PodCastle.
• Free Fiction: Mike Brotherton has announced the release of the Diamonds in the Sky anthology, featuring “Planet Killer” by Kevin Grazier, “The Point” by Mike Brotherton, and “Squish” by Dan Hoyt.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Adventures of Petal, the Paperdoll Pirate” by Paul Jessup at Fantasy Magazine.
• Free Fiction: Read the vintage science fiction story “The Next Logical Step” by Ben Bova at FeedBooks.

Television

• Five Brain-Manipulating Technologies That Prove Dollhouse Exists Right Now.
• One episode into Dollhouse, Joss Whedon is already talking about abandoning broadcast television for the Internet – permanently.

Video Games

• Crispy Gamer looks at ten video-game bugs that actually made the games better.

From Around the Web

55 Firefox Add-Ons To Increase Your Security And Privacy – Firefox add-ons that protect the user from various threats on the Internet. They have been divided into the categories Browsing, Cache, Cookies, Identity & Privacy, Passwords and Misc.

Ask Doctor Math – This site is an advice column for people seeking answers to the math problems that plague them. The doc discusses issues such as whether it’s possible to randomly generate a book, how colleges can profess a high teacher to student ratio, and why you should never play the lotto.

Christopher Poole – The Washington Post profiles the founder of the seminal internet forum 4chan, “moot”. He’s in debt, out of work, and trying to figure out how to make that matter.

Computer Repair Utility Kit You Can Run From a Thumb Drive – Technibble, the Australian site for aspiring computer techies, recently released the second version of its popular Computer Repair Utility Kit, a collection of 57 hand picked tools to help you diagnose and repair your Windows machine.

The Definitive Primer to the Pirate Bay Trial – New TeeVee walks you through the intricacies of the potentially historic Pirate Bay trial that started only today. Will filesharing even exist five years from now?

How to Properly Erase Your Physical Media – A full 40% of the used hard drives on eBay contain easily recoverable personal data. Use the following guide to ensure your personal data never makes it out into the wild.

Make your computer Blazingly Fast – Help Desk Geek runs down all of the ways to whittle down the time it takes your computer to perform vital processes, like booting and transferring files.

NASA’s 10 Greatest Achievements – Howstuffworks.com chooses from among the incredible feats on NASA’s résumé some of its greatest successes, beginning with the launch of the first U.S. spacecraft.

NetCat Crash Course – CatonMat runs down what you need to know about the utility people call the “Swiss Army knife” of Unix systems. Some of its features include port scanning, transferring files, port listening and it can be used a backdoor.

TinyChat – TinyChat is a service for creating simple, disposable chatrooms. There are no-frills, a deliberately limited feature set, and no accounts to sign up for. When you open a new room, TinyChat will simply create a new URL for you.

Tech News

8 Ways To Enhance Your Instant Messenger

A tutorial on how to test if your ISP is limiting your beloved bandwidth.

Five Things Twitter Should Do with $35M

Google Buying Twitter? Not a Bad Idea

Magnolia Founder Discusses Site Outage and Data Loss

Tech Layoffs Surge to 300,000

Film

• Friday the 13th set a new record for the largest horror film opening in history. That in itself is frightening enough.
• Video Hound names The Ten Biggest Acting Oscar Snubs of the ’00s.

Internet

• Auxiliary Memory examines the likelihood of a number of amazing sci-fi scenarios occurring in our lifetime.
• Get your own Free, Printable Star Trek Paper Models over at Associate Content.
• Listen to an the great NPR interview with Joss Whedon. He discusses Dollhouse and Dr. Horrible.

Literature

• It may be late, but here are Five SF Books For Valentine’s Day
• Shaun Duke discusses the Ten Things that make him Stop Reading a Novel.

Television

• CHUD contemplates Five Ways Lost can keep from Quantum Leaping the Shark, including my favorite, “Don’t do with Desmond what I think you’re going to do with Desmond.” I’m personally keeping my fingers crossed that they don’t use Des to wrap this entire series up with the cliche time travel paradox it looks like they’re barreling toward.

Video Games

• Blend Games thinks that most Video Game Reviewers miss the point.
• This free online retro-style Watchmen videogame is a part of the film’s viral campaign.

“The promise of eternal life is a threat unless you get to start over. The mythmakers knew that. They weren’t dummies, man. … They were the ones who invented rhyme and meter—the programming language for human memory in preliterary civilizations. It was a cultural checksum—a mnemonic device. You couldn’t fuck with the code or the rhymes didn’t work; and if the rhymes didn’t work, people noticed. And so the knowledge of a people was passed down intact. It was a shamanic code. If you fucked with the code, then society lost its collective mind. Smell me?”

Daemon by Daniel Suarez, 2006.
Chapter 45: Respawning, Character: Laney Price