The Great Geek Manual

Comics

• Is it just me or is Cracked’s list of 6 Superheroes Who Completely Lost Their Shit a little short on DC characters? I’d definitely say Batman and Superman have had their moments.
• You can read free vintage Golden Age Comics online, including the comic in which Shazam! made his first appearance.

Film

• This list of 13 upcoming Remakes of Hollywood Sci-fi Classics has me excited
• Manolith has posted a gallery of 18 Vintage Sci Fi Posters: Robots, Aliens, Monsters and Hot Women.
• Mary Robinette Kowal counts down The Ten Most Epic Fantasy Battles.
• Unreality looks back at The 10 Most Visually Stunning Movies of the Last 10 Years, starting with Danny Boyle’s Sunshine.
• What is being characterized as The Final Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price trailer has made its way online.

Internet

• Following the sweet Star Wars / Dallas intro Mashup, a new, even more awesome mashup has been posted, the Star Wars/MacGyver Mashup.
• SEOMOZ names The 500 Most Important Domains on the Internet, ranked by the number of linking root domains.

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The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there.

- Turn Coat, book eleven of The Dresden Files, by Jim Butcher, 2009.

1944
Harvard University President James Conant writes to IBM founder Thomas Watson Sr. to report that the Harvard Mark I was up and running smoothly. He also notes that the Mark I is “being used for special problems in connection with the war effort.”

1957
Bell Laboratories announces the development of magnetic tape machine capable of transmitting one thousand words per minute, sixteen times faster than a conventional teletypewriter machines.

1967
The spacecraft Surveyor 3 is launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. It will become the second US spacecraft to make a soft landing on the moon, where it will study the lunar surface and send more than 6,300 pictures back to Earth. In all, seven Surveyors will be sent to the moon. The photo to the right shows Surveyor 3 on the moon, as photographed by Alan Bean over two years after its landing.

1968
AT&T unveils an experimental telephone at its annual meeting in Boston. The phone is smaller, lighter, and largely electronic. It’s unveiling marks the beginning of the end of the rotary telephone.
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1178 BC
Some link this day’s solar eclipse to the the legendary return of Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, to his kingdom after the Trojan War.

1947
The first zoom lens for a television camera is demonstrated by the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) in New York City. Prior to its invention, the entire camera had to be moved toward away from the subject of a shot in order to change the composition of the picture. The same effect can be accomplished using the Zoomar lens, revolutionizing live events like sports. The device was patented as a “varifocal lens for cameras” on November 23, 1948 by Dr. Frank Gerard Back of New York City. His company, Zoomar, will continue to develop lens technology well into the seventies.

1956
The first radio made to run off either batteries or a solar-cells is first sold in the US. The Sun Power Pak is manufactured by the Admiral Corporation, in Chicago, Illinois. By transistors instead of vacuum tubes, the radio requires so little electricity that six ordinary batteries power it for between 700 to 1,000 hours. The US$60 radio is small and weighs only five and a quarter pounds.

1959
Lisp, the programming language that provides the basis for most significant work in the field of artificial intelligence, is first unveiled. Created by John McCarthy, Lisp is the second high-level programming language to pass into mainstream use, after the FORTRAN programming language. It was designed to provide a practical mathematical notation for computer programming. It’s name is derived from “LISt Processing language”. Read more about the History of Lisp at Standford University.
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If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

- Falsely attributed to Albert Einstein in the New Statesman, April 16, 1965.

Today’s quote isn’t. That is to say, it’s a quote that never happened. This sentiment, in which Einstein apparently expresses remorse for his role in the development of the atomic bomb, was never actually spoken by Einstein. The quote is “debunked” by Ralph Keyes in The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When (2006).

Art

• This He-Man Poster was just about my favorite thing in the world to look at until I was like 15. I mean 12, of course. Now it’s my new desktop!

Comics

• Battling Boy is the next comic to be adapted for the big screen, and by none other than Alex Tse or Watchmen fame.
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? will be hitting comic stands soon, and it looks like they’ve decided to stick with the Blade Runner’s visual style.

Film

• Mental Floss has posted a great article entitled 15 Film Production Credits Explained.
• Reports show that interest in the upcoming Wolverine film is still high despite the earlier internet leak. Evidently, the folks polled didn’t actually see the thing. Blech.
• TCM’s list of Most Influential Classic Movies includes a few sci-fi flicks but not nearly as many as I would have suspected. Where’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari?
• Turns out UGO isn’t only interested in video games; they also seem to have a thing for hot chicks. Check out why at their lists of the Top 50 Hottest Sci-Fi Girls and Top 50 Hotties of Horror.
• Yahoo! Movies has posted a gallery of the Top 10 Inaccurate Movies about the Future. To which I would respond, just wait for it.

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Alice laughed. “There is no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”
“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, 1871.

Am I the only one who thought last Friday night’s finale was five minutes of cool in a sixty minute bag? I mean, all they had to do was let Summer Glau rampage through the streets for thirty or forty minutes to satisfy every sci-fi, hottie, and action film out their.

So what did they give us? Thirty minutes of suspense, an awkward bedroom scene, and two measly special effects. Pppp…
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