The Great Geek Manual

We have come to look at our planet as a resource for our species, which is funny when you think that the planet has been around for about five billion years, and Homo sapiens for perhaps one hundred thousand. We have acquired an arrogance about ourselves that I find frightening. We have come to feel that we are so far apart from the rest of nature that we have but to command.

- Marston Bates, Horace M. Albright Conservation Lectureship at Berkeley, April 23, 1962.

Art

• Awesome! Altered Books are old books made into new poetry!
• Sometime, people completely miss the point of art for quibbling over the details.

Film

• Over at Wired, Star Trek’s Beast Master Reveals How to Create a Monster.

Internet

• Authors on Twitter: Who’s getting it right?
• BookSwim is being touted as the Netflix of books, but who would spend twenty dollars a month for books they don’t get to keep? That’s what library cards are for.
• Etsy has it’s own YouTube channel, chocked full of useful tutorials and demonstrations for the do-it-yourself crowd. Don’t miss the New Books with Old Materials video from a woman who makes her own journals.
• Resistance2018 is a game played with Twitter that’s being used to promote the upcoming Terminator film. It looks intriguing, but the jury’s still out.

Literature

• I was already to dismiss Time’s list of the All-Time 100 Best Novels as literary snobbery when I noticed that it includes The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe and The Lord of the Rings. Now I’m little bit pissed because I haven’t read about three-quarters of the others on the list.
• Of the entire cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who would have thought it would be Amber Benson who end up a fantasy author? I need to go back and re-watch the seasons featuring Tara and look closer for the classic geek symptoms.

Television

• As if there were any doubt that Abrams is a hardcore geek, UGO rounds up 19 Lost Nerd Winks, cultural reference only a true Geek would catch.
• TrekMovie examines the fighting technique of Captain Kirk in its Guide to Kirk Fu.

I honestly don’t know if this is Photoshoped or an actual scan from a comic I haven’t read yet, but if you’ve seen the photo of that stupid kid’s counting book that’s floating around the net, this is sure to put a smile on your face. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Today is Earth Day!
1946
CBS successfully transmits color television signals over a coaxial landline from New York City to Washington, D.C. and back for the first time.

The first installment of the popular Japanese comic strip, Sazae-san, one of the earliest examples of manga, is published in the Fukunichi Shimbun, the local newspaper of Hasegawa, Japan. The four panel strip centers around a fictional wife, Sazae-san, as she struggle with the daily tribulations of managing an average three-generation Japanese household.

1953
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp. releases the science fiction film Invaders from Mars, directed by William Cameron Menzies and starring Jimmy Hunt, Helena Carter, Arthur Franz, Morris Ankrum, Leif Erickson, and Hillary Brooke, to US theaters. In it, a boy discovers that space aliens are taking over the minds of Earthlings. IMDB listing Running Time: 1 hr 18 mins

1968
The United States Supreme Court rules in the case of Ginsburg versus New York that materials that are not obscene for adults can still be obscene for children and, in Interstate Circuit versus Dallas, that film classification schemes are constitutional if they are clearly defined.
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Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.

Storm Front, book one of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2000.

1913
Bioscope Chronicle (Warwick Trading Co.) first uses an aeroplane for filming of a news event. The plane captures footage of George V leaving on the Royal Yacht for a visit to Paris. The film is rushed back to Hendon for processing and is shown at the Coliseum at 5:20pm the same day.

1951
Whirlwind, the first computer to operate in real-time is first activated. Whirlwind was built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a team lead by Jay Forrester for the US Air Defense System. It’s the first computer to allow interactive computing and to feature a keyboard and a cathode-ray tube visual display. The Whirlwind design will later be developed into SAGE, a comprehensive system of real-time computers used to provide early warnings of air attacks.

1962
The Bell Telephone Company introduces radio paging in the United States. Radio paging was first invented in 1956 at St Thomas’ Hospital in London to alert doctors attending emergencies.

The Seattle World’s Fair (Century 21 Exposition) opens on a seventy-four acre site. It is the first World’s Fair held in the US since World War II. Nearly ten million people attend the fair. Highlights include the unveiling of the Alweg monorail and the Space Needle. Take a cybertour of the exposition at HistoryLink.
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Don’t mess with a wizard when he’s wizarding!

- Fool Moon, book two of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2001.

From Around the Web

10 Youtube URL Tricks You Should Know About – You know that site with videos and all? It turns out that its quite popular and you happen to visit and use it quite often. Instead of just searching and playing here are some top Youtube URL tricks that you should know about.

The 5 Best Screen Capture Tools – Capturing your computer screen is a terribly handy trick in all sorts of situations, ranging from creating tutorials to capturing web moments for posterity. Lifehacker helps with a rundown of the five most popular screen capture applications.

15 iPhone Apps Created by College Students – Apple’s iPhone application platform has made it easier than ever for hopeful software developers of all types to create a product and bring it to market. Here are just a few examples.

Best Source Code Comments – Stack Overflow has an awesome thread on stupid and funny code comments, including such chestnuts as //When I wrote this, only God and I understood what I was doing, //Now, God only knows, and (”drunk, fix later”).

Cold Fusion is Hot Again – When first presented in 1989 cold fusion was quickly dismissed as junk science. But, as Sixty Minutes reports, there’s renewed buzz among scientists that cold fusion could lead to monumental breakthroughs in energy production. [Video]

Operating System Interface Design Between 1981-2009 – Over the years a range of GUI’s have been developed for different operating systems such as OS/2, Macintosh, Windows, Amiga, Linux, Symbian OS, and more. In the following article, we’ll be taking a look at the evolution of the interface designs of the major operating systems since the 80’s.

Particles Have Free Will – A new paper co-authored by mathematician John Conway, inventor of a cellular automata demonstration known as the Game of Life, argues that you can’t explain the spin or decay of particles by randomness, nor are they determined, so free will is the only option left. Read the rest of this entry » » »