The Great Geek Manual

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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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

- Carl Sagan