The Great Geek Manual

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

- Encyclopédie by Dennis Diderot, 1755.

Art

• Morbid Outlook ezine discusses The Fantastical Escapades of the Steampunk Aesthetic.

Film

• Christian reviews of the new Harry Potter movie are surprisingly positive.
• The Film Review counts down The Ten Most Expensive Movies Ever Made.
• GeekDad names 10 Comic Book Movies They’re Looking Forward To And 5 That They Might Catch On DVD.
• I seriously hope that it’s just hyperbole when GeekDad says that Everything I Know About Parenting I Learned from Harry Potter, cuz otherwise Kevin Makice is raising some super-emo kids.
• To commemorate the anniversary of the Moon Landing, Sci Fi Wire has a list of the 12 Best Movie Moon Landings ever Made.
• Rotten Tomatoes weighs the merits of magic in its list of the Best Movie Wizards.
• The Torch Online names 25 Highbrow Actors Who Did Fantasy Films.

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1872
The US Patent Office awards the first patent for wireless telegraphy to Mahlon Loomis.

1903
The Ford Motor Company ships its first car.

1960
A pair of Polaris missiles are successfully launched for the first time from a submerged submarine, the USS George Washington off the coast of Cape Canaveral, Florida. The missile’s target was more than 1,100 miles away. The Polaris has a designed range of 1,500 nautical miles and is capable of being launched when the submarine is hidden far below the surface. The George Washington was the first Fleet Balistic Missile submarine. Fitted with sixteen tubes for Polaris A1 missiles, the submarine was commissioned on December 30th 1959 and will be decommissioned on January 24th 1985.

Sirimavo Bandaranaike is elected the Prime Minister of Ceylon, becoming the world’s first elected female head of state.

The USSR recovers two dogs, the first living organisms to successfully return from space alive.
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Information is the currency of democracy.

- Thomas Jefferson

Movie: “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”
Director: David Yates

Rating: Rated PG for scary images, some violence, language and mild sensuality.
Release: July 15, 2009
Running Time: 2 hrs 33 mins
Starring: Daniel Radcliffe, Michael Gambon, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Bonnie Wright… IMDB listing

Verdict:

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is an amazing cinematic experience worth every penny of the price of seeing it on the big screen. It’s far and away the most fast-paced and visually stunning entry yet released in the Harry Potter series, which is, in itself, a monumental feat.

However, judged strictly as an adaptation of a novel, this movie is a monumental failure. The movie’s storyline doesn’t simply abridge the novel, it mutilates it nearly past the point of recognition. Most of the book’s best scenes, including Dumbledore’s visit to Privet Drive and the book’s climactic battle between the Deatheaters and the Order of the Phoenix inside Hogwarts, have been completely cut. Worse, the movie actually includes new scenes (which won’t be spoiled here) that not only grossly diverge from the flow of the series but also violate the spirit of the novel.

Sadly, with the movie’s mise en scène and script both likely to illicit strong but opposing opinions from fans of the Harry Potter novels, it’s difficult to say whether this is going down in history as the best or worst movie the series. Hardcore Potter loyalists are likely to love to hate this movie for the liberties it takes with story, but moviegoers simply looking for some big screen thrills and those fans who have followed Harry’s adventure only on the big screen are going to emerge from theaters with a smile.
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Don’t you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn’t developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don’t expect to see.

- Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams, 1987.

1843
The first iron hulled, propeller driven steamship, the SS Great Britain, is launched

1912
A meteorite with an estimated mass of 190kg explodes over the town of Holbrook in Navajo County, Arizona causing approximately sixteen thousand pieces of debris to rain down on the town.

1950
NASA attempts the first rocket launch from Cape Canaveral. The rocket is a German V-2 with a 320kg Army-JPL Wac Corporal sounding rocket. Launch is scrubbed first due to the emergency landing of an aircraft in the range. The second attempt is scrubbed when the rocket’s main chamber doesn’t ignite.

1961
Trans World Airlines (TWA) begins regularly showing in-flight movies in the first-class section of its New York-Los Angeles flights. Read more about the history of TWA.
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To think that Harry had the greatest evil ever to plague American cinema at his mercy, only to let him escape…