The Great Geek Manual

Resources

18 Cool Things Windows 7 Does That Vista Doesn’t – There aren’t many changes to the overall look of Windows 7. Microsoft seems to have spent its time on the feedback it received from Vista, but there are 18 features that are impressive.

Midomi – a musical search engine powered by your voice. All you have to do is sing or hum the song that’s stuck in your head.

Olark.com – This service inserts a tiny window on top of your website that allows users to chat live. It’s quick, simple, and it looks a lot better than a shoutbox.

PDFPirate – An online tool that strips .PDF files of all copy restrictions, so that it can freely be duplicated and manipulated.

Wikispeedia – Yet another Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon type game where users are present with two articles to travel between as quickly as possible.
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Yep, there’s an app for that!

Art

• The cover art for the next Dresden Files novel is out! Not only does is it appropriately bad-ass, but after eleven entries in the series, we finally get a cover that includes Harry’s face.

Film

• Before They Were Basterds: “Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds is perhaps his most deft handling of reference and homage yet. The video store nerds at Scarecrow Video would like to present to you an unofficial and in progress footnotes companion to Basterds. Some of these films are directly referenced in the film, others are only evoked, while others still are films we simply felt should go on the list.”
• Film Junk ruminates on 5 Lessons Hollywood Can Learn from District 9.
• Screenhead names Top 10 Sci-fi movies that should never be remade because they were made right the first time.

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Singularity is the term created to define the point at which machine intelligence surpasses that of human beings. Nasa and Google are funding a new institution, Singularity University, to explore this future. Salim Ismail, one of its leaders, says that we should re-engineer the human brain with computer-style upgrades. “The current system is flawed,” he says. “We need computer chips monitoring our neural networks. Evolution isn’t going to do this for us, so technology must do it.”

- Warning: brain overload by John Naish, published by the TimesOnline, June 2, 2009.

1831
Charles Darwin visits his uncle, Josiah Wedgwood II, to discuss his father’s opposition to his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin is enthusiastic about the opportunity, but his father considers it a waste of time that would only delay his son’s anticipated career in the clergy. Darwins uncle will write a letter to Robert Darwin, reassuring him of the value of such a trip, and ultimately changing his mind.

1842
The US Naval Observatory, one of the oldest scientific agencies in the US, is authorized by an act of Congress. Its primary task is to act as a depot for the Navy’s charts, navigational instruments, and chronometers, which are calibrated by timing the transit of stars across the meridian. Visit the agency’s official website.

1880
Thomas Edison is granted a patent for an “Electro-Chemical Receiving-Telephone.” (US No. 231,704)

1895
Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents the rigid airship, known as the Zeppelin.
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We may be reaching the point, suggested by the cultural critics Arthur and Marilouise Kroker in their 1997 book Digital Delirium, where we crash into the “the law of reversal” because our brain’s self-protective reaction to information overload is to shut down: “The faster the tech, the slower the speed of thought . . . the more accelerated the culture, the slower the rate of social change . . . the quicker the digital composition, the slower the political reflection: accelerating digital effects are neutralised by decelerating special human effects.”

- Warning: brain overload by John Naish, published by the TimesOnline, June 2, 2009.

1831
Charles Darwin replies to the letter from Reverend Henslow, telling him of the offer to sail on the HMS Beagle. Darwin had learned natural history from Henslow, who had recommended him for the unpaid position as a naturalist. Darwin told Henslow that his father would not permit him to leave on such a the voyage. Meanwhile, his father had written to his brother-in-law, Josiah Wedgwood II, about his concerns regarding the proposed two-year voyage.

Michael Faraday demonstrates the first electrical transformer.

1963
A new telephone hotline connecting the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and the Kremlin in Moscow is first activated and tested. It will provide a direct two-way communications channel between the American and Soviet governments in the event of an international crisis. The hotline is installed in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, one year earlier. During the incident, messages sent between President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev required five or six hours each way for transcription, transmission, translation, and delivery. This new hotline could cut down the delays in sending messages from hours to minutes, but it will only be used for emergencies. It is modeled after an emergency command system used to connect seventy US Air Force bases around the world. It consists of one full-time duplex wire telegraph circuit, routed through Washington, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Moscow, for the transmission of messages and one full-time duplex radiotelegraph circuit routed through Washington, Tangier, and Moscow used for service communications and for coordination of operations between the two terminal points. Teletype machines are used at each end of the ten thousand mile circuit, not telephones. A tape encryption system is used to keep messages secure. The hotline will be active twenty-four hours a day.
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After all, we’re a brain embedded in this larger set of structures. You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It’s the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It’s the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what’s actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What’s triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large. As someone on the fringes of the field, part of the excitement to me is the fact that at this point there still are these different levels of description, and no one quite knows how they all fit together.

- Chimeras of Experience, an interview with Jonah Lehrer published by Edge.org, May 21, 2009.