The Great Geek Manual

Comics

• Thomas the Innkeeper names the Hottest Women in Comics and Anime in a surprisingly long list.
• What if… Wolverine Battled Conan the Barbarian. Get it before they take it down.

Film

• Ask Men has posted a gallery of photos of the Top 10 Crazy Movie Stunts.
• Star Trek is way cool. How’d that happen? Because the geeks have inherited the earth, and the White House.

Internet

• Twitter is great from watching uninformed panics live.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “Children of the Fire” by Melissa Mead at Aberrant Dreams.
• Interview: SciFiDimensions interview Robert J. Sawyer, author of WWWWake.
• The Harry Potter series get the retro cover treatment.
• L.E. Modesitt, Jr. discusses The Impact of Technology on Reader Civility and what he calls “the enshrining of the validity of each individual’s opinion.”
• In London, the Espresso Book Machine has been launched. The device, which looks like a large photocopier, can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait. It may fundamentally change the way bookstores everywhere work.
• Joss Whedon delivered an awesome acceptance speech when he was awarded the Bradbury Award for excellence in screenwriting from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. [Video]
• Who Killed the Bookstore? The Reader, at Home, With the Computer.

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1946
The first commercial ship to be equipped with a radar system, the SS African Star, goes into service.

1953
Professional wrestler Freddie Blassie first coins the term “Pencil neck geek.”

1961
NASA launches the Explorer 11 spacecraft into Earth orbit equipped with the first gamma ray telescope aboard a Juno II rocket. Its mission marks the beginning of gamma-ray astronomy. Visit the official NASA website for the Explorer 11.

1970
At an American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., the discovery of element 105, Hahnium. The discovery was achieved primarily through the work of Albert Ghiorso of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. The element has an atomic mass of 260, and it was named for the German physicist Otto Hahn.

1981
Xerox introduces the Xerox 8010 Star Information System, featuring a bitmapped screen, Ethernet, the first computer mouse, a laser printer, the Smalltalk language, a WYSIWYG word processor, and software for combining text and graphics in the same document.
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The unreal is more powerful than the real. Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because its only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on. If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. You can change the way people live their lives. That’s the only lasting thing you can create.

- Choke by Chuck Palahniuk, 2001.

My mind has an endless capacity for useless information.

- Playing By Heart
Character: Keenan, played by Ryan Phillippe

1882
Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter demonstrate the photophone, a device in which a mirrored silver disc is made to vibrate by speech from a speaking tube. Light reflected off the disc is captured in a parabolic dish and focused onto a selenium cell, where variations in the reflected light are converted into the electrical signals that are carried to headphones. The laser disc and CD of the seventies will work on a remarkably similar principle.

1900
Guglielmo Marconi is granted a patent for a system of tuned coupled circuits that allow simultaneous radio transmissions on different frequencies, allowing adjacent stations to operate without interfering with one another. (UK patent 7777)
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Some people celebrate DNA Day today to commemorates the anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick’s 1953 article on the structure of DNA.

1935
The first round-the-world telephone call is made when Walter S. Gifford, president of the AT&T Company, talks with T.G. Miller, vice president in charge of the Long Lines Department, in another room in the same building (32 Sixth Avenue) over a 23,000 mile circuit of wire and radio channels. The phone used in the call will later be preserved at the Smithsonian Institute.

1939
DC Comics debuts what will become its second major superhero, Batman, in issue 27 of Detective Comics (the May issue).

1953
The journal Nature publishes the one page article Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid written by Francis Crick and James D. Watson. In it, Crick and Watson reveal the double helix structure of DNA and explains how DNA transmits hereditary information between cells and generations. Their work will earn them a Nobel Prize in 1962.
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You know what the trouble about real life is?
There’s no danger music.

- The Cable Guy
Character: Chip Douglas, played by Jim Carrey

Comics

• Hero Complex examines Wolverine, by the Numbers.
• If you were the one writing this list of the 25 Greatest Superhero Romances, who would you rank number one, Batman, Peter Parker, or Superman? Because I’m guessing most people would not arrange the list in the order it’s in now.

Film

• As Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen comes into view, Brian Raghoobur proves that hell hath no fury like a fanboy scorned as he points out 10 reasons why Michael Bay got Transformers all wrong.
• IGN picks the mutants they’d like to see get their own spin-off films in Top X-Men Origins We’d Like to See. Meanwhile VideoHound get in on the act with Ten Other Movie Origins We’d Like to See.
• Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice
• DroppEdit has compiled a freakishly long list of Scenes in Movies and TV featuring People Wearing One Shoe. At first, I thought, “WTF?” Then, I started thinking about it, and I realized that a woman loosing a shoe is a frequently used affectation. Then, I started wondering why anyone would compile this list, and I was all “WTF?” again.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read “More Than Once Upon A Time” by S.C. Butler at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
• Free Fiction: Read “Long Way From Home” by Alice Folkart at Big Pulp.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Ascendant” by Ted Kosmatka at Subterranean Online.
• Free Fiction: Read the flash fiction piece “Lucy’s Toy” by Sarah Ellender.
• Free Fiction: Read “The Calm Man” by Frank Belknap Long at ManyBooks.
• io9 explains why The Future Of Science Fiction Publishing Is In Cyberspace.

Television

• SciFi Wire takes a look at upcoming Sci-Fi TV pilots and which of them will lead to new series.

Writing

• Jeremiah Tolbert explains How to Build a Good Critique Group.