The Great Geek Manual

Film

• News: J.J. Abrams will be Producing Samurai Jack: The Movie. Is Aku the smoke beast?
• News: Steven Spielberg Teams with Stephen King for an Under the Dome miniseries.
• Cinematical names the Top Seven Movies that Start Fights, including The Matrix Reloaded.
• Paste Magazine compiled a great list of The 25 Best Movie Performances of the Decade.
• SciFi Squad picks the The Top Ten Most Memorable Astronaut Movies in honor of the upcoming Planet 51.

Internet

• CollegeHumor has come up with the perfect Internet Application for Adults. I say, let’s make it mandatory!
• Check out what AdSense pairs with this Robert Pattinson website.
• Get the scoop on Flarf, the poetry of Googled search terms.

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Tinkering is what happens when you try something you don’t quite know how to do, guided by whim, imagination, and curiosity. When you tinker, there are no instructions, but there are also no failures, no right or wrong way of doing things. It’s about figuring out how things work and reworking them.

- Massimo Banzi, one the developers of the Arduino project

1477
William Caxton issues his first dated printed book in England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (“Sayings of the Philosophers). Caxton will produce approximately one hundred copies of the work.

1879
Eugen Skladanowsky presents the first public projection of photographs at the Floria Theatre in Berlin.

1894
The “New York World” publishes the first regular Sunday comic section.

1929
Vladimir Kozmich Zworykin demonstrates a television receiving system called the Kinescope to the Institute of Radio Engineers in the US.

1951
See It Now hosted by Edward R. Murrow becomes the first live coast-to-coast commercial television broadcast in the US. The program will become well know for its high journalistic standards.
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Evolution is not finished; reason is not the last word nor the reasoning animal the supreme figure of Nature. As man emerged out of the animal, so out of man the superman emerges.

- Thoughts and Aphorisms by Sri Aurobindo, 1913.

1947
The first transistor, a solid-state amplifier made of germanium, plastic, and gold, is invented by Walter Brattain and John Bardeen in a series of experiments conducted between November 17 and December 23.

1960
Customer trials of the world’s first electronic Telephone Central Office in Morris, Illinois begin.

1967
Surveyor 6 becomes first man-made object to lift off the Moon.

1970
Douglas Engelbart receives a patent for the first computer mouse. (US No. 3541541) The patent, titled “X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System,” is a simple hollowed-out wooden block, with a single push button on top.
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We learn something every day, and lots of times it’s that what we learned the day before was wrong.

- William E. Vaughan

Book: The Gathering Storm
ISBN-13: 978-0765302304

Author: Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan
Series: Book 12 of The Wheel of Time
Publisher: Tor Books
Genre: Epic Fantasy
Release: October 27, 2009
Length: 784 pages (Hardcover)

Rating: A+ (110 / 100)

Verdict

After years of waiting and worrying, fans will be relieved to discover that they will not be cheated out of a fitting end to the greatest fantasy epic of our generation. Sanderson has risen to the challenge of filling Robert Jordan’s shoes and produced one of the best books yet released in the Wheel of Times series.

Pros: Quicker pacing. Serious progress towards an ultimate conclusion. Manages to give most major characters face time. Some satisfying justice is finally doled out.

Cons: The mindf*** of wondering whether or not what you’re reading is as good as it would have been if Jordan had finished it himself. The almost painful desire to read the next book once you’ve finished this one.

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1904
John Ambrose Fleming invents the vacuum tube, otherwise known as the thermionic valve. The valve consists of a carbon or tungsten filament lamp with a metal plate insulated from the filament and a wire through the glass wall of the bulb to a third terminal outside. When battery current is applied to the filament, the space between the filament and the insulated plate will conduct electrons in just one direction. Vacuum tubes are used to amplify, switch, or otherwise modify, a signal by controlling the movement of electrons in an evacuated space, and they will remain the basis of electronic technology for decades to come.

1942
Construction of an experimental atomic pile begins. The pile will be used to investigate the world’s first artificial nuclear chain reaction under Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. The later research will be an important contribution to the Manhattan Project, a project to develop nuclear weapons.

1962
The International Business Machines (IBM) Data Processing Division (DPD) announces the IBM 1062 teller terminal and the IBM 7710 data communication unit.

1965
The Soviet Union launches the Venera 3 space probe on a mission to land on the surface of Venus, though the pressure of the planet’s atmosphere will crush the probe before it relays any data.
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