The Great Geek Manual

Hardcover Book Releases

Future Hope by David Gelber
The God Engines by John Scalzi
The Kingdom of Ohio by Matthew Flaming
The Red Tank by John Fraser

Paperback Book Releases

Evil Ways by Justin Gustainis
Hand of Isis by Jo Graham
Heaven’s Casting Room by Robert S. Dinning
Hunting Julian by Jacquelyn Frank
Keeper of Sulbreth by Susan Gourley
Peril’s Gate by Janny Wurts
Swiftly by Adam Roberts
This is Not a Game by Walter Jon Williams
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Art

• Interview: AMC interviews Dyna Moe, the freelance illustrator behind the vintage-y Mad Men illustrations on Flickr.
• Canstruction Vancouver is a spectacular competition and exhibition that showcases local teams who compete to design and build the ultimate giant sculpture out of canned food. This year’s winner was a model of Wall*E.
• Inspire76 lassos up 12 Heroic Images of Wonder Woman.

Comics

• Katee Sackhoff has announced that she’ll be writing her own comic. I get how someone who looks like her draws television audiences, but will good looks translate into readers?
• io9 has posted a gallery of Amazing Comic Covers From The Last Ten Years.
• Super Punch claims that Umbrella Academy Dallas is the best comic of the year.

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Today, we are indeed changing the communications infrastructure and are just beginning to feel the reverberations of this transformation in our economic life. Publisher Tim O’Reilly calls the infrastructure we are building the “architecture of participation,” and its existence will lead us to re-invent ourselves as a society and as individuals.

After all, organizations we have built are not pre-ordained, inevitable, or immutable creations—they are products of particular times, outgrowths of existing technological, social, and demographic forces. Or as Doug Ruskoff, writer and media expert, puts it, “Economics is not a natural science.”

The new architecture of participation will cause us to reweave the social fabric that links the individual to others and to the larger whole in entirely new ways. It will enable people to find each other, to connect and trade with each other in efficient and productive new ways that are outside of established organizational structures.

- “Think The Unthinkable” by Marina Gorbis, December 10, 2009.

Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, S. James Gates, Jr., and Freeman Dyson discusses science, human knowledge, and the unknown.

Resources

13 Things You Must Do First with Your New PC – A new computer is like a blank state–there’s a lot of potential there, but without some work on your part, it’s useless. It’s not hard to get started, but there are some essential first steps that everyone should follow when breaking in their new PC.

Browser Pong – This site let you play Pong in your browser with pop-up windows rather than paddles.

Browser Size – Google has released this tool to help webmasters to determine how much of their website layout is “above the fold.” Very useful.

Flickchart – a fun site where you can rank two movies at a time against each other to compile a personal best of list. Read the rest of this entry » » »

Art

• Andrew McDonald has posted a A Pictorial Guide to avoiding Camera Loss.

Comics

• Comic Alliance looks back at The 15 Worst Comics of the Decade as well as the Top 10 Best Comics of 2009, culminating in Asterios Polyp.
• io9 contemplates Which Superhero Should Be The New Santa?

Film

• Interview: Writer Mark Strong discusses the upcoming John Carter of Mars, Kick-Ass, and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood.

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1612
Galileo Galilei becomes the first astronomer to observe the planet Neptune, although he catalogs it as a fixed star.

1869
William Finley Semple is granted the first patent for chewing gum. (US No. 98,304)

1895
The world’s first movie theater opens in the Salon Indien at the Grand Café in Paris, France. The theater makes use of a portable film camera and a functional projector, the Cinematographe, based on Edison’s experimental Kinetograph. Thirty-three people attend the first public showing, at the admission price of one franc each. The first film, La Sortie des ouvriers de l’usine Lumière, was created especially for the occasion. It shows workers leaving the Lumières’ factory in Lyon by foot, by bicycle, and by car. The theater is owned and operated by Louis and Auguste Lumières, who will refuse all offers to purchase copies of their equipment. View the film online at the Institut Lumière.

1958
Toho Company Ltd. releases The Hidden Fortress, directed by Akira Kurosawa and starring Toshiro Mifune and Misa Uehara to theaters in Japan. As with most of Kurosawa’s work, this film will be immensely influential on future film makers, including George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. In it, two greedy peasants escort a man and woman across enemy lines. However, they do not realize that their companions are actually a princess and her general. IMDB listing Running Time: 2 hrs 19 mins
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Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

- Louis Pasteur