The Great Geek Manual

Add a footstool, and I’m sold!

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

- Is Google Making Us Stupid? by Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic, July 2008.

This is old clip of Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin punching out dumb-ass conspiracy theorist Bart Sibrel went viral yesterday. That’s one small swing for man, one giant victory for mankind.

God bless Buzz Aldrin.

Comics

• ComicBook.com has posted a gallery of The Charles Atlas Hall of Fame: 10 Memorable Comic Book Ads.

Film

• Gunaxin has a damn good list of the Top 40 Badass Movies of the Last Ten Years.
• GeekDad names the Top 10 Evil Geeks in the Movies and number one may surprise you.
• Watch The First Four Minutes Of ‘Green Lantern: First Flight’ at MTV’s Splashpage.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Read Moon Moon Moon by Kim Newman at Subterranean Press.
• Free Fiction: Read Placa Del Fuego by Tobias S. Buckell at ClarkesWorld Magazine.
• Free Fiction: Read Thieves of Silence by Holly Phillips at Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

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This is it! My two thousandth post here on The Great Geek Manual! I’ve been posting steadily to this blog for nearly three years years now, since November 2006, and I’m happy to say, traffic is better than ever.

Just Thursday, I hit an all-time record of seven thousand visits in a single day, and while I don’t maintain that kind of traffic every day, it has been gratifying to see my Google Analytics charts angling ever upward from the two hits a day I used to get from bullying my fellow guild members to nearly two thousand daily hits today.

I want to thank all of you who’ve visited for giving my rambling collection of trivia a purpose. I watch my stats closely enough to know there’s a small core of you who’ve been stopping with regularity, and I really do appreciate your time and traffic!

Sincerely,
Pipedreamergrey

Book: The Historian
ISBN-13: 978-1437647891

Author: Elizabeth Kostova
Publisher: Little, Brown & Co.
Genre: Suspense / Gothic Horror
Release: June 2005
Length: 656 pages (Hardcover)

Rating: B+ (90 / 100)

Verdict

The Historian is an excellent historical fantasy that beautifully expands upon the legend of Vlad the Impaler using a rich tapestry of real world history written in a style that closely imitates the original Dracula novel. If you’re looking for a fantasy novel with literary aspiration, don’t miss this amazing read.

Be warned, though, that if your main interest is in vampires, you are going to want to look elsewhere. While this weighty novel is big on suspense, it includes very little action, few vampires, and no scares.

Pros: Excellent writing, exotic locales, intellectually stimulating, very suspenseful
Cons: Pace drags a bit, slightly anti-climatic end, ultra cerebral, very little action

Synopsis

In Brief: When a teenage girl discovers a cache of yellowing letters in her father’s library, she learns of her father’s long obsession with the legend of Dracula and the mystery of her own missing mother’s fate, and soon, she sets out to discover the truth behind the story.
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1904
In a letter published in the journal Nature, Canadian nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks records her observations of a peculiar type of volatility demonstrated by an active deposit of radium immediately after its removal from the emanation. According to the letter, Harriet Brooks is the first person to observe the recoil of the atomic nucleus as nuclear particles are emitted during radioactive decay.

The Trans-Siberian Railway, one of the most ambitious engineering projects in history, is officially completed, linking European Russia through Siberia to the Far East with 4,607 miles through seven time zones. Its completion took thirteen years of work by thousand of workers, and its construction cost approximately 350 million rubles, all told.

1925
A Tennessee jury finds high school teacher John Scopes guilty of teaching evolution in violation of Tennessee’s Butler Act, and he is fined US$100. The judgment will later be overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court on the technicality that the judge had set the fine rather than the jury.

1931
The CBS New York City station launches the first regular seven day a week television schedule in the United States.

1946
In the first US test of the adaptability of jet aircraft to shipboard operations, an FD-1 Phantom, piloted by Lieutenant Commander James Davidson makes a successful landing and take-off from the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Roosevelt had been launched the previous year, and is the largest ship in the world. Read a brief history of aircraft carriers.
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