The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Sci Fi Wire offers a gallery of 10 Great Sci-Fi Obama Poster Mash-Ups, starting with Optimus Prime.

Film

• DailyFill names 10 Unintentionally Creepy Animated Films, starting with Watership Down.
• John Scalzi picks Ten Directors Who Really Need to Make a SciFi Movie.
• Pop Eater looks back at the Best Alien Movie and Television Invasions.
• PopMatters rants that The Fourth Kind is NOT the truth. It is a piece of fiction using other pieces of fiction to verify its already fake plotline. io9 also warns that The Fourth Kind Is A Hoax.
• Sci Fi Wire explains Why the Stargate movie still holds up 15 years later.
• The Terminator franchise is doomed. Den of Geek explains why.

Internet

• CHICK is a new webseries that follows a woman who trains to become a superhero at a Los Angeles academy. When she catches her boyfriend cheating on her, she goes over the edge.
• The Internet continues to buzz about the secretive Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that would put every ISP on a three-strike system.

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1824
Stephen van Renssalaer founds the first engineering college in the United States, the Renssalaer School in Troy, New York. It will open on January 3, 1825, and the first class will graduate with ten students April 26, 1826.

1852
The first US national civil engineering society, the American Society of Civil Engineers and Architects, is founded. Twelve engineers attend the event at which the society was founded, though an invitation had been extended to all civil engineers in New York. The purpose of the society is “the advancement of the sciences of engineering and architecture in their several branches, the professional improvement of its members, the encouragement of intercourse between men of practical science, and the establishment of a central point of reference and union for its members.” The organization’s architects will later split off into their own organization, and the organization will be retitled the “American Society of Civil Engineers” (ASCE). Visit the official ASCE website.

1895
George B. Selden of Rochester, New York, receives the first US patent for a gasoline-driven automobile. (US No. 549,160) In the patent, he describes the complete automobile incorporating such a clutch, a compressed air self-starter, and a steering system. As a patent attorney, he knows to delay the contention over the patent by sending amendments and other communications every two years. Meanwhile, others develop the actual working of the automobile, increasing the value of his patents, and making him one of the earliest successful “patent trolls.”
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The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

- Edward R. Murrow, upon receiving the “Family of Man” Award, 1964.

This is easily the best Halloween costumes I’ve seen on the net this year.

Source: Casey Donahue’s Tumblr

Resources

7 Surprising Kick-Ass Things You Can Do with Google Sketchup – Sketchup is a free 3D modelling tool developed based on the philosophy that by giving people a small set of powerful, intuitive tools, you can lower the barrier of entry to 3D modeling, so that almost anyone can make quality 3D models with just a couple of sessions of practice.

100 Incredible Open Courses for the Ultimate Tech Geek – Here are 100 free resources for expanding your understanding the more advanced intricacies of computing.

101 really useful tips for Mac Beginners – No matter how long you’ve been using a Mac for there’s always more to learn and useful tips to discover.

Bookase.com – an online tool to search and compare price of new and used books among major ecommerce bookstores around the world.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave – This e-book’s complete contents are available for free online. Whet you appetite now for when it’s finally freed from beta.

How to make a district 9 Weapon – It may be a bit late, but this homemade film prop would look just as kick-ass sitting around the house as it would as part of a Halloween costume.

LisThings – This is an excellent virtual desktop corkboard that lets you create Post-It notes that you can see whenever you log into the site.

Spreeder – a free online speed-reading training tool. Paste in your desired text, tell it how many words per minute, and hit play.

Geocities Saved – ASCII has announced that its team has managed to archive quite a large portion of the websites hosted by the now-defunct Geocities.
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1869
The first issue of the scientific journal Nature, edited by astronomer Sir Norman Lockyer, is first published. The first issue includes articles on astronomy, education, moths, plants, an obituary for chemist Thomas Graham, paleontology, and several meeting notices. Visit the journal’s official website.

1922
The entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamen is discovered in the Valley of the Kings where archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. One of Carter’s laborers stumbled upon a stone step, the first step in a sunken stairway that ran down into the rock. Carter will open the tomb of the largely unknown child-king later in the month. In 1907, Lord Carnarvon, a wealthy English aristocrat with a passion for archeology, hired Carter and financed his excavations.

1939
The first air conditioned automobile, a Packard, is exhibited in Chicago, Illinois. The Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan has been known for producing luxury automobiles since 1899.

1943
The X-10 nuclear reactor at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory goes “critical” with a self-sustaining fission reaction, becoming the world’s second reactor to achieve such a reaction. The reactor took just nine urgent months to build. Over the next year, the reactor performed flawlessly, irradiating thousands of fuel slugs, which were disassembled and dissolved so the plutonium could be extracted, bit by precious bit. It is an experimental reactor far larger and more advanced than Fermi’s Chicago pile.
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…the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050. This scenario exists alongside another future in which young people reject many of the devices, networks, and digital services that today’s adults market to them so relentlessly. Being more technologically literate, they develop the capacities to resist the constant push of faster, cheaper, easier information and select among the new and the old on the basis of real value. If we are lucky, today’s young people will do what countless generations before them have done: defy authority. have done: defy authority.

- “The Dawn of the Postliterate Age” by Patrick Tucker, October 2009.

Art

• LIFE Magazine has posted a gallery of the 21 Greatest Space Photos.
• Sappymoosetree shares his Lego Max.

Comics

• AbeBooks shares 10 Facts You Didn’t Know About Marvel Comics like that Marvel was the first comic company to give a black superhero his own comic book.

Film

• News: “Ghost Rider 2″ Won’t be a Reboot.
• MovieLine remembers 10 Disaster Films Even More Crapocalyptic Than 2012, remember to include the questionable Knowing.

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