The Great Geek Manual

Arrrrrrr! September 19th be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, matey! It’s also Software Freedom Day.

1848
Hyperion, a moon of Saturn, is discovered by William Cranch Bond, George Phillips Bond, and William Lassell.

1928
The first talking cartoon film, Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie, premieres at the Colony Theatre in New York, introducing Mickey Mouse.

1957
The United States conducted its first underground nuclear test, in the Nevada desert, at Area 12. The Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) first fully contained underground nuclear detonation, known as the Rainier event, detonates in a horizontal tunnel, about 47 meters (1600 feet) into the mesa and 274 meters (900 feet) beneath the surface.

1982
Research Professor Scott E. Fahlman proposes the use of an emoticon to express humor for the first time anywhere, in a message posted to the Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science department’s general bulletin board. While the use of emoticons will spread like wildfire, their origin will be lost for nearly two decades, until September 10, 2002, when the original post made by Scott Fahlman will be retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 backup tape of the spice vax (cmu-750x) server. Here is Scott’s original post:
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The vitality of thought is in adventure. Ideas won’t keep. Something must be done about them.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Film

• News: X-Men: First Class Could Shoot In Early 2010 According To Cyclops.
• Gunaxin looks back at Ten Memorable Movie Sword Fights.
• The SciFi Squad asks Is Luke Skywalker Cinema’s Most White Trash Hero? I answer yes.

Internet

• The Innsmouth Free Press has posted a gallery of the Top 10 Female Vampires in honor of the premiere of Vampire Diaries.
• Psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia revealed that exposure to the surrealism in, say, Kafka’s “The Country Doctor” or Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.

Literature

• Interview: BldgBlog talks Science Fiction and the City with Jeff VanderMeer.
• Interview: Fictional Frontiers offers a slew of interviews.
• Interview: Kristine Kathryn Rusch discusses her latest book, Duplicate Effort.
• Interview: Rescued By Nerds interviews Jeff Somers of the Avery Cates series.
• AMC’s Mary Robinette Kowal argues that Precogs and Ray Guns Have No Place In True SciFi.

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Resources

Cell Phones by the Numbers – Cellphones.org has posted an infographic on cellphone use that may be of interest to tech nerds. Turns out their are 271 million cells in the U.S. alone. Wow.

Five Free Tools for Multi-Monitor Computer Set-Ups – Several freeware and open source tools available for download to help you harness the power of multi-display set ups and get you up and running quickly.

How to Draw the Voronoi Diagram – Voronoi diagrams are fascinating geometric models because they can be used to describe almost literally everything from cell phone networks to radiolaria, at every scale, quantum foam to cosmic foam. Check out the short version at Flickr.

If You Printed The Internet – Creative Cloud has posted a great set of infographics on how much ink and paper it would take to print off a copy of the internet. The numbers turn out to be quite dizzying.

Perfect Full Page Background Image – CSS Tricks explains how to create a scalable background image without any whitespace on your website.

TWIP – An awesome comic series drawn by Greg Williams that illustrates some of the funniest comments made on Twitter.
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The world needs uninhibited thinkers, not afraid of far out speculations; it also needs conservative hard-headed engineers who can make their dreams come true.

- Arthur C. Clarke

1927
Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) goes on the air, with forty-seven radio stations. The radio network will lose a substantial amount of money in its first year, and on January 18, 1929, Columbia Records will sell the network to a group of private investors headed by William S. Paley, a Philadelphia cigar manufacturer, for four hundred thousand dollars.

1947
National Security Act goes into effect. The act, in part, creates the Central Intelligence Agency, the country’s first peacetime intelligence agency.

1948
BBC Television transmits the first documentary film made especially for television, Robert Barr’s Germany Under Control.

Columbia Records publishes the first catalog of Long Playing (LP) record releases.

1959
The Department of the Navy launches Vanguard 3 into Earth orbit.
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Art

• Cracked.com ponders what it might look like If Video Games Were Realistic.
• Steamfashion has posted a gallery of Steampunk Star Wars Costumes!

Film

• News: Spider-Man 4: Kirsten Dunst Confirmed & Same-Day IMAX Release.
• According to The Los Angeles Times, the next Starfleet goes Guantanamo? ‘Star Trek’ team hints that the next film will reflect contemporary war issues“>Star Trek will reflect contemporary war issues.
• IGN names the Most Wanted DC Movies, starting with Gotham Central. Meanwhile, Den of Geek fires back with the Top 10 unmade Marvel films.
• No, Cracked doesn’t name JarJar as one of the 6 Star Wars Character Too Retarded for Film… but they should.
• Topless Robot has compiled a really excellent list of The 10 Greatest Time Travel Movies Ever.

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Book: Walking Dead
ISBN-13: 978-0373803019

Author: C. E. Murphy
Series: Book 4, The Walker Papers
Publisher: Luna
Genre: Urban Fantasy /
Paranormal Romance
Release: September 1, 2009
Length: 384 pages (Hardcover)

Rating: C+ (75 / 100)

Verdict

Author C. E. Murphy’s lively narration and fresh style save this book from a sub-par plotline, but most readers are still going to come away from this novel wondering what she was thinking. Murphy consistently skimps over the romantic aspects of her story, despite Harlequin’s involvement in the book’s publication, which is almost certain to leave readers looking for a paranormal romance fix disappointed. And yet, halfway through the story, Murphy’s protagonist walks away from a graveyard of zombies on Halloween night, leaving those jonesing for the apocalyptic show downs that have become one of the signatures of the urban fantasy genre cold as well. Nonetheless, Walking Dead remains worth the read for its excellent Buffy-esque lead, Joanne Walker, who, with her love of muscle cars and her penchant for solving her own problem, is a refreshing change from the damsels in distress that have become such a fixture in urban fantasy.

Pros: Fast-paced. Funny, upbeat writing style. Romance angle is very minimal.

Cons: Endings in this series are all a bit too pat. The magic system is overly convenient for the protagonists. Zombies get downplayed in favor of more emotional issues.

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