The Great Geek Manual

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.

1831
Charles Darwin returns home from a geology field trip in North Wales to find letters from Reverend John Henslow and George Peacock informing him that he will soon be invited on a scientific voyage of HMS Beagle. He is just twenty-two years old and has just graduated from Cambridge University. The offer is to be a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle for a two year survey of South America, leaving on September 25th. Although he immediately accepts the offer, his father and sisters are opposed to the trip. They regard the trip as an idle pursuit that will delay his expected career in the clergy. His father is prepared to change his mind, but only if Darwin can find a qualified man who views the exploit as worthwhile. Darwin will spend the next two days doing just that.

English chemist Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, the production of an electric current by a change in magnetic intensity, which will become the fundamental principle behind later electric generators.

1842
The design patent, a new form of patent, is authorized by an act of Congress. The first US design patent will be issued for typefaces and borders to George Bruce of New York City on November 9, 1842.

1893
A patent is issues to Whitcomb L. Judson for a “Zipper Clasp Locker or Unlocker for Shoes.” (US No. 504,038)
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Resources

12 Words You Can Never Say in the Office – Business has put together a list of outdated tech terms, phrases that you shouldn’t be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old. This is especially true if you’re looking for a new job.

Find a Flickr page from the .jpg’s URL – Tekzilla has finally found a way to find out who a Flickr photo belongs to based on its location! About time. Now you have no excuse not to give proper credit.

The Geek’s Guide to Seattle – A virtual tour of some of the region’s most interesting and notable technology locations, including Bill Gates’ House.

A Geek’s Tour of Silicon Valley – A gallery of photos of the Valley’s most historical and notable technology centers, beginning with the Hewlett-Packard garage.

LicenseCrawler – a free, portable tool to retrieve license keys and serial numbers from the depths of your registry. Sure, you could crawl your registry manually to extract all the info yourself, but why bother when LicenseCrawler is there to do it for you?

Your Guide To Music On The Web – Music plays a large role in our lives. Since the web now plays an even bigger part, combining the two together has become unavoidable. The greatest thing about this powerful duo is that you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching for music you like — just use this nifty guide list and you’ll find just about everything you need to enjoy hours of good music.
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Art

• Let’s map out all those pesky mythical creatures on a vin diagram!

Comics

• 92 years ago today, Jack Kirby was born, and io9 takes the opportunity to remind us Why Kirby Will Always Be The King
• BoingBoing points the way to a Google map that tracks all the events from issue 1 to 64 of the Walking Dead comic.

Film

• MovieFill has an infographic comparing the gross receipts of geek vs jock films.
• SciFi Squad pick the The Top Ten Sci-Fi Deaths. Wish they’d have gone for the top 100! I’d love to see them all ranked.
• Tarantino’s review There Will Be Blood is not only entertaining but insightful.

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I love this song, but of all the videos featuring it, this is by far my favorite. The sketch just really compliments the tone of the song somehow. In case you’re wondering, the group that originally performed this song is The Mountain Goats. The rap undercurrents are provided by the group Aesop Rock for this remix.

If you like this song, don’t miss No Children. It’s very nearly as good, even if there isn’t a music video for it yet.

Source: sk3tchth3atr3

Book: Off Armageddon Reef
ISBN-10: 0-7653-1500-9

Author: David Weber
Series: Safehold Series
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Genre: Space Opera
Release: January 9, 2007
Length: 608 pages (Hardcover)

Rating: B

Verdict

For fans of the Dragonriders of Pern and Guardians of the Flame series, picking up Off Armageddon Reef is going to be like meeting an old friend all over again. The book embraces the best traditions of the fantasy, military fiction, and science fiction genres, then recombines them into a single story in which a character with contemporary sensibilities satisfies all of a reader’s impulses to reach into the story and single-handedly rebuild a fantasy society into an idealized modern civilization.

With this, his first entry in the Safehold series, Weber clearly establishes himself as the next master of the space opera. However, readers jonesing for an action fix should look elsewhere. The thrill of this series are strictly cerebral in nature.

Pick it up, but stick to the audiobook, otherwise you may have difficulty getting all the way through it.

Pros: Weber’s wars unfold like a game of Starcraft, with a lot of the emphasis focused on the build-up of military forces rather than the war itself, which lends itself to a distinctly nerdy read. His greatest strength is telling a story on a global scale, following multiple elements of his story concurrently. Highly engrossing.

Cons: Weber’s books are beginning to strongly resemble each other. His characters within this series are very poorly differentiated, often speaking and reasoning alike. Also, most of the story is told through monologs and info dumps, which get very tiresome.

Synopsis

In Brief: Simply put, this series is The Dragonriders of Pern with a navy rather than dragons and an android (PICA) rather than a computer (AIVAS). An starship officer from the war that extinguished humanity wakes up in an android body on a world that has reverted to medieval technology. Equipped with technology that seems magical to the world’s inhabitants, she must find a way to guide the world’s inhabitants through a Napoleonic navel war to help them achieve their own Protestant reformation. Author David Weber has explained that he set out to create a series in which high technology fused with “the feel of a ‘last defender of elfland,’ but without the urban fantasy matrix.”
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When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn’t get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven’t read yet. That’s how I view that I’m rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.

- Sherman Alexie

1789
Sir William Herschel discovers Saturn’s moon Enceladus.

1830
The “Tom Thumb,” the first locomotive built in America, goes into service, running between Baltimore and Ellicotts Mill. It is the first railway service in the United States.

1844
The Count of Monte Cristo is first published in the Journal des Débats in eighteen parts. Publication runs through January, 1846. Complete versions of the novel in the original French will be published throughout the nineteenth century. The most popular English translation will be published in 1846 by Chapman and Hall.

1845
The first issue of Scientific American is published by Rufus Porter, a schoolmaster, inventor, and editor. While the paper is still just a small weekly journal with a circulation less than three hundred, he will sell it for US$800 in July 1846 to twenty year old Alfred Ely Beach and Orson Desaix Munn. Together, they will build its circulation to ten thousand by 1848, twenty thousand by 1852, and thirty thousand by 1853. Visit the journal’s current website.
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