The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Noumisphere has posted a gallery of 20 Amazing Works of Light Graffiti.

Film

• 93 Studios has posted a clip gallery of The 20 Weirdest Zombie Movies Ever Made.
• BoxWish chooses the Top Ten Science Fiction Movie Uniforms.
• Critic Robert Ebert rather strenuously Objects to Movie Trivia.
• Den of Geek counts down the Top 25 Fictional Ads in Sci-Fi Movies.
• The Den of Geek works themselves up into a full-blown rant over their love of the ubiquitous Sci-Fi Corridors that fill out the futuristic movie sets we all know and love.

Internet

• Douglas Coupland invites you to design your own cover for his new book, Generation A.
• Hardcore Nerdity has posted videos of the SPACE Sci-Fi in the Mainstream Panel.
• URLesque is calling for A Day Without Cats. September 9th, take a stand!

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Here is an adaptation of the classic science fiction short story “The Machine Stops” by E.M. Forster, which was first published in 1909 and has since served as an inspiration for some of the best stories the genre has offered. You can read the story online at the personal website of Paul Rajlich.

Source: Reel 13 via SFSignal

1833
The first issue of the first daily newspaper in the US, The New York Sun, is published by Benjamin H. Day. By 1836, the penny paper will have a circulation of thirty thousand papers, the largest in the nation.

1860
The Mercury arc lamp is demonstrated for the first time on the Hungerford suspension bridge in London, England by Professor J.T. Way.

1941
NBC station KYW in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania becomes the first television station outside of New York to come on air.

1972
The first joint computer conference between the US and Japan is held in Tokyo, Japan.

1976
The unmanned spacecraft Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars. Its mission is to analyze the soil and climate and return the first close-up photographs of the planet. The lander houses instruments to examine the physical and magnetic properties of the soil, analyze the atmosphere and weather patterns of Mars, and to seek out evidence of the presence of life, be it past or present. The site will later be used as the fictitious setting of the Federation’s ship yard in the science fiction series Star Trek: The Next Generation.
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Comics

• Stan Lee comments on Marvel becoming Disney’s bitch.

Film

• Entertainment Weekly offers A Geek’s Guide to 20 Fall Movies, starting with Carriers.

Internet

• SciFi Wire has posted a Map of 68 Must-See Sci-Fi Sights found around the U.S.
• At Wired.com, Clive Thompson discusses the New Literacy of the Internet, observing that “young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text.”

Literature

• Interview: The Agony Column interviews Peter S. Beagle, Karen Joy Fowler, Michael Swanwick, and M. Rickert all in one podcast to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine.

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Art

• Check out the Steampunk Cellphone at GearFuse.
• The Toy Zone has posted a gallery of Sci-Fi and Fantasy Origami.
• In a warehouse converted into artist studios in West Oakland, 60 plus volunteers are building a 40 foot tall Raygun Gothic Rocketship to go to the Burning Man Project.

Comics

• The Marvel Database Project is a Wikia wiki devoted to the Marvel universe. I’m not a big enough Marvel fan to gauge it complete-ness, but it’s a lot of fun surf.
• GeekDad points to Seven Comics Off the Beaten Path.

Film

• Interview: Ain’titCool talks with about Terry GilliamThe Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.

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1837
Professor Daubeny, Professor Torrey, and Alfred Vail attend a demonstration of Samuel F. B. Morse’s telegraph at New York University. Vail becomes interested. Vail and Morse will be the first two telegraph operators on Morse’s experimental line between Washington, DC, and Baltimore

1890
Guglielmo Marconi demonstrates radio transmission at Three Mile Hill in Salisbury Plain, England for officials from the General Post Office, the Navy, and the Army present.

1930
The first non-stop airplane flight from Europe to the US is completed by Captain Dieudonne Coste and Maurice Bellonte of France when they arrive in Valley Stream, New York, aboard the Question Mark after a thirty-seven hour flight.

1963
The CBS Evening News becomes US network television’s first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from fifteen to thirty minutes.
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1486
The first copyright in history is granted in Venice, Italy.

1804
One of the largest asteroid belts in the solar system, Juno, is discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding.

1858
The first transatlantic cable fails after less than one month of service.

1859
A solar flare is observed for the first time by astronomer Richard C. Carrington, who will write about his discover in Description of a Singular Appearance seen in the Sun in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1960. “While engaged in the … observation of … solar spots … two patches of intensely bright and white light broke out. … I therefore noted down the time, … and seeing the outburst to be very rapidly on the increase … I hastily ran to call some one to witness … and on returning within 60 seconds, was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled. Very shortly afterwards the last trace was gone. In this lapse of 5 minutes, the two patches of light traversed a space of about 35,000 miles.”

1865
Joseph Lister performs the first antiseptic surgery in history.
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