The Great Geek Manual

Zod wants you to know that besides being an excellent military general, he has been design kitchens for over thirty years. Kneel before Zod!

Source: Newstopia via Newsrama

Art

• Fandomania has posted a gallery of H.P. Lovecraft fan art.
• If you’ve got a spare twenty-five hundred dollars, you to can get your own gigantic replica of the Serenity.
• SciFi Wire has posted a gallery of Gruesome Horror Movie Posters.

Comics

• Cracked.com takes a look at 5 Superheroes Rendered Ridiculous by Gritty Reboots.
• io9 names 7 Supervillains We Wouldn’t Mind Taking Over The World (And Why).
• Spike picks the The Top 10 Sexiest Superpowers from comics, and surprisingly, Wonder Woman’s ability not to pop out of her top isn’t one of the selections.

Film

• Interview: Author Tim Powers discusses adapting his book On Stranger Tides into the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
• Interview: Director Roland Emmerich discusses his upcoming movie, an Adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy.
• Super Tremendous chooses The 10 Greatest Books Adapted Into Movies.

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Today is national Freethought Day, an observation of the end of the Salem Witch Trials celebrating secular freethinkers everywhere.

1923
Axel Petersen and Arnold Poulsen demonstrate their patented sound-film system using two interlocked machines, one for picture, one for optical sound, at the Palads Teatret, in Copenhagen. The system is subsequently used by Gaumont in France, Tonfilm in Germany, and Gaumont-British in the UK.

1958
Texas Instruments (TI) demonstrates working Integrated Circuits (IC) to Thomas J. Watson, Jr., president of International Business Machines (IBM).

1964
The Soviet Union (USSR) launches the Voskhod 1 spacecraft. It’s the first spacecraft to carry multiple crew members and the first to carry either a scientist or a physician into space. In the rush to launch the mission before the NASA Gemini flights, the crew are launched without ejection seats, an escape tower, or even spacesuits (which in itself was a first). The mission will return television footage of the crew from space. The US will be left incensed that the Gemini flights had been upstaged, and the US-Soviet “Space Race” escalates. The three-man crew will return to Earth after sixteen orbits of the Earth, one day and seventeen minutes after its launched, using retro rockets just prior to impact in order to cushion the parachute landing. NASA Project Gemini site
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Everybody has a secret world inside of them. All of the people of the world, I mean everybody. No matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands maybe.

- The Sandman Vol. 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman, 1993.

1881
David H. Houston, a Scottish immigrant, is granted the first patent for roll film for cameras.

1887
Dorr E. Felt, of Chicago, Illinois, is granted a patent for the Comptometer, which is the first practical key-driven calculator. He experimented with an adding device that he built in a “macaroni box.” (US No. 371,496) The comptometer, an adder, displays a single register of results. Subtraction is carried out by nines-complement arithmetic, and multiplication by repeated addition. The comptometer will become commercially successful and be widely used in business. Read the patent.

1939
United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt receives the Einstein-Szilárd letter, in which notable physicists warn Roosevelt of the possibility of Nazi Germany conducting research on nuclear fission in an attempt to create an atomic bomb. They urge Roosevelt to launch a similar research program before it’s too late. The letter was written by Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, but it will receive considerable national attention because it was also signed by renowned scientist and media icon Albert Einstein. The letter is arguably the genesis of the Manhattan Project, and it will later become legendary when it’s revealed by scientist Linus Pauling that, by the end of his life, signing this letter had become one of Einstein’s greatest regrets. Read the letter at HyperTextbook.com.

1950
The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issues the first license to broadcast television in color to CBS after an ad hoc National Television System Committee (NTSC) is formed, the initials of which are applied to the system. However, RCA will successfully dispute the license and block CBS from putting it into effect.
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Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.

- The Sandman Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections by Neil Gaiman, 1993.

There are only two worlds – your world, which is the real world, and other worlds, the fantasy. Worlds like this are worlds of the human imagination: their reality, or lack of reality, is not important. What is important is that they are there. these worlds provide an alternative. Provide an escape. Provide a threat. Provide a dream, and power; provide refuge, and pain. They give your world meaning. They do not exist; and thus they are all that matters.

- The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman, 1990.

Ironically, today is both Tom Cruise Day in Japan, according to the Japan Memorial Day Association, as well as World Mental Health Day.

1796
The metric system is born. The date (10/10) was chosen as an allusion to the base ten system of measurements.

1846
Neptune’s moon, Triton, is discovered by William Lassell while he is observing the newly discovered planet Neptune. He was attempting to confirm his own observation that Neptune had a ring, which he made the previous week. Instead, he discovers the satellite. Soon after, Lassell will discover that the ring he thought he had seen is only a product of his new telescope’s distortion.

1886
The first tuxedo is worn at a dinner club in New York.

1941
In New York City, the Radio Club of Columbia University, under the direction of inventor Edwin Armstrong, launches the world’s first FM radio station with regularly scheduled programming, WKCR. The first words broadcast are “Good morning, hepsters, jitterbugs, and other lovers of culture.” WKCR will mostly broadcast academic programming, including classroom events, classical music, and the proceedings of the United Nations for the next two decades. After the student uprising of 1968, its format will change to Jazz and alternative music. Visit the official WKCR website.
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