The Great Geek Manual

Art

• These shots of Sydney in the middle of a dust storm make me itch to grab a camera and shoot a post-apocalyptic sci-fi film. Just incorporating this fun house would ensure it beats the hell out of every Sci-Fi Channel Original Movie ever.
• The Telegraph shares Movie poster mash-ups: Star Wars and Harry Potter meet James Bond and Indiana Jones.
• The Stephen King Shop has posted an enormous Stephen King Cover Gallery with over two thousand shots of practically every edition of every King book.
• io9 has posted a gallery of old but excellent Space Battles and Alien Lairs In Star Wars Concept Art.

Film

• Interview: Ian McKellen talks Gandalf the Grey in The Hobbit.
• 28 Days Later, in One Minute, in One Take is accurate, if funny recap.
• I didn’t realize it when I saw the movie, but 9 features a rather prominent tribute to the 1939 MGM Cartoon Peace On Earth. See if you can spot the image that has so recently appeared on the silver screen.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Got Milk?” by John Alfred Taylor at Pseudopod.
• Listen to “I’ll Give In” by Meghan McCarron at PodCastle.
• Listen to “The Kindness of Strangers” by Nancy Kress at Escape Pod.
• Listen to “Melancholy Elephants” by Spider Robinson at StarShipSofa.
• Listen to “Salt” by Nicholas Royle at Transmissions From Beyond.

Flash and Micro Fiction

• Read the flash fiction story Billions of Stars by KJ Kabza at Flash Fiction.
• Read the flash fiction story Gustav’s Mars by Emily Lavin Leverett at Flash Fiction.
• Read the microfiction story The Coin-Operated Boy by William Tracy.

More Links

• Free Speculative Fiction Online has posted a new batch of fiction links.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

1690
“Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick,” the first newspaper to appear in the Americas, is published for the first and only time before being suppressed by the government.

1818
The first blood transfusion involving human blood, rather than animal blood, takes place at Guy’s Hospital in London, England.

1820
Francois Arago announces that a copper wire between the poles of a voltaic cell, could laterally attract iron filings to itself. The discovery comes just months after Hans Christian Ørsted discovered that a wire charged with an electric current could deflect a neighboring compass needle from magnetic north. In the same publication, Arago describes how he caused permanent magnetism in steel needles by laying them at a right angle to a charged copper wire.

1928
The Galvin Manufacturing Corporation is founded and will later be known as Motorola.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

Whether or not it draws on new scientific research. Technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science.

- New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative by Paul Goodman, January 25, 1973.

A while back, Microsoft released this video encouraging folks to hold their own Windows 7 Launch Party, evidently having learned that spending millions to roll out their latest clunker is pointless. Unfortunately, the video was incredibly dull. It was like a late night infomercial, only more patronizing. When Cabel Sasser, founder of Mac software maker Panic Inc., got ahold of it, though, it became much, much more interesting. Check it out!

Source: Mashable

Comics

• Topless Robot names 5 Genuinely Worthwhile Female Versions of Male Superheroes.

Film

• Just a heads up. If you’re in a horror movie, expect to have terrible cell phone service. It’s just one of those rules.
• The Los Angeles Times wonders Can Bruce Willis regain star power with ‘Surrogates’? I say the ship sailed on that dream back at Live Free or Die Hard.

Internet

• If the ad is to be believed, you too can Be a Jetpack Test Pilot! Only, you have to pay for the privileged.
• io9 has assembled a gallery of The Best And Worst Of Virtual Music Video Worlds.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

1852
The first airship, a semi-rigid dirigible balloon powered by a steam engine is demonstrated with a seventeen mile flight from Paris to Trappes, France. Henri Giffard built the 147-foot long spindle-shaped coal-gas balloon and fitted it with an engine of his own design. The engine rotates an eleven foot propeller to propel the ship to speeds of up to five miles per hour against the wind. The demonstration is the first powered or controlled flight in history.

1923
The first movie released on celluloid film, Das Leben auf dem Dorfe, premieres.

1947
Majestic 12, a secret committee of scientists, military leaders, and government officials, is allegedly established by a secret executive order issued by President Harry Truman to investigate UFO activity in the aftermath of the Roswell incident.

1948
The Honda Motor Company is founded.

1960
The first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the USS Enterprise (CVAN-65), is launched in Newport, Virginia. It is the longest, tallest, and fastest warship in the world and will remain so for years to come. Powered by eight nuclear reactors, it does not need to carry its own fuel oil and so has more room for aviation fuel and weapons. In 1963, Enterprise and two similarly powered cruisers make a non-stop voyage around the world to demonstrate the viability of nuclear power. It is the eighth US ship to bear the name Enterprise. Visit the vessel’s official website.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

The evolution of asynchronous network time has meant that for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, humans are able to create and experience timescapes that are not synchronized to, or sublimated by, the logic of the clock. This process is set to become yet more profound through developments in advanced computing. Humans, as active agents in an amorphous and emergent network ecology, will potentially be able to create their own timescapes. These will not be based upon or dominated by the abstract logic of the mechanical clock, but will be an asynchronous temporality that is predicated upon the interaction of innate human timescapes coupled (literally, as the active research into Negropontean cyborg theory shows) with molecular level computing.

- “Timescapes of the Network Society” by Robert Hassan at Fast Capitalism, 2005.