The Great Geek Manual

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+

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.

Read the rest of this entry » » »

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.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

- Aristotle

1744
Gowan Knight presents his research on permanently magnetizing steels to the Royal Society. The use of steel instead of soft iron represents a significant improvement in the compass needles used by England’s Royal Navy, but Knight won’t apply for a patent on his compass until 1766.

1883
Thomas Edison receives a patent for his two-element vacuum tube, the forerunner of the vacuum tube rectifier.

1887
German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner, is issued a patent for the first “dry” cell battery. (US No. 373,064)

1912
Gaumont Chronochrome, the first practical three-color film process, is demonstrated to the French Photographic Society in Paris. A three-lens camera with different color filters is used, compared with the two-color approach of Kinemacolor.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

There is no practical obstacle whatever now to the creation of an efficient index to all human knowledge, ideas and achievements, to the creation, that is, of a complete planetary memory for all mankind. And not simply an index; the direct reproduction of the thing itself can be summoned to any properly prepared spot. … duplicated from the records and sent anywhere, and thrown enlarged upon the screen so that the student may study it in every detail.

This in itself is a fact of tremendous significance. It foreshadows a real intellectual unification of our race. The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual. … this new all-human cerebrum. It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else seems to afford an insurance against danger and interruption. It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.

This is no remote dream, no fantasy. It is a plain statement of a contemporary state of affairs. It is on the level of practicable fact. It is a matter of such manifest importance and desirability for science, for the practical needs of mankind, for general education and the like, that it is difficult not to believe that in quite the near future, this Permanent World Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence, will not come into existence.

- “World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia” by H.G. Wells. Originally published in the new Encyclopédie Française, August, 1937.

1666
The English physician Samuel Pepys makes a record in his diary describing the first documented blood transfusion. “Dr. Croone told me … there was a pretty experiment of the blood of one dog let out, till he had died, into the body of another on one side, while all his own run out on the other side. The first died upon the place, and the other very well and likely to do well. This did give occasion to many pretty wishes, as of the blood of a Quaker to be let into an Archbishop and such like; but, as Dr. Croon says, may, if it takes, be of mighty use to man’s health, for the amending of bad blood by borrowing from a better body.”

1878
The first shipment of new telephones designed by L.M. Ericsson of Sweden is delivered. Based on his experience repairing American made phones, Ericsson began manufacturing a “telephone with a trumpet” of his own design. The “trumpet” is an extension of the mouthpiece where a caller blows to initiate a call.

1910
An airplane takes off from a ship for the first time, piloted by Eugene Burton Ely. The ship is the light cruiser USS Birmingham, and the event takes place off the coast of Hampton Roads, Virginia. Ely pilots the plane, a Curtiss pusher, to a nearby beach, where he lands after only just keeping the plane above sea level. Following the flight, Ely will be made a lieutenant in the California National Guard in order to qualify for a $500 prize that had been offered for the first reservist to make such a flight. On January 18, 1911, Ely will land his airplane aboard the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay, using the first ever tailhook system.
Read the rest of this entry » » »

My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

“Turing’s Cathedral” by George Dyson, published in Edge: The Third Culture, October 24, 2005.