The Great Geek Manual

Art

• Am I the only one who thinks that this Photo Of Boeing Aircraft Wings Being Tested looks a lot like a scene from the movie Millennium?
• Browse the entrants of the 2010 Student Scholarship Competition: Student Illustration.
• CreativeFan has rounded up a gallery of 16 Amazing Easter Illustrations.
• Have you ever wondered what Dark Side of the Moon would sound like if Pink Floyd had written it for NES, instead of for a rock band? Now you can find out.
• Here’s an infographic of 50 cars from the history of movies, ranging from Herbie the Love Bug to the various iterations of the Batmobile.

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1880
Wabash, Indiana becomes the first town anywhere to be completely illuminated by electrical lighting, less than two months after connecting the world’s first electric streetlight February 2.

1903
Richard Pearse of New Zealand reputedly flies a powered, heavier-than-air machine, nine months before the Wright Brothers make their famous and well-documented flight at Kitty Hawk. Accounts vary, but his flight may have traveled as far as 350 yards through the air before striking a large hedge. If true, the aircraft is the first to use modern ailerons, rather than inferior wing warping system that the Wrights’ early designs will use. Pearse’s machine also has a modern tricycle undercarriage permitting it to takeoff without ramps. Some sources will mark this as the anniversary of his flight, others will claim the event occurred some months later.

1930
The Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association (MPPDA) institutes the Motion Pictures Production Code. Also known as the Hays Code or simply the Production Code, the code a set of censorship guidelines concerning crime, religion, sex, and violence in films.

John Logie Baird achieves the synchronization of sound with television pictures.

1939
Harvard and International Business Machines (IBM) sign an agreement for the construction of the Mark I, also known as the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC). The computer will weigh nearly five tons and contain more than 750,000 separate components. The system will read instructions from paper tape and data from punch cards.
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The starships of the future, in other words the vehicles of the future, which will explore the high frontier of the unknown will be syntactical. The engineers of the future will be poets. This is what virtual reality holds out to us—the possibility of walking in to the constructs of the imagination. In a way culture is that. I mean our cities, bridges, highways, airliners and art galleries are condensations out of the imagination, but at tremendous cost because we must make them out of matter. Once we can make them out of light, out of electrons, then we won’t build skyscrapers a hundred and twenty stories high, we’ll build them as high as we want. Roof height will no longer be a factor ruled by cost effectiveness and gravity, it will be a parameter ruled by the imagination as will all other parameters and then we will discover what man truly is—when we are able to erect, stabilize. share and explore our dreams in a kind of virtual hyperspace that, carefully analyzed, is seen to be linguistic. That’s what its connectors are made out of, that’s what its ferro-concrete and steel is, is the edifice of language. This is what the stuff of the imagination is made of and I think this is what we’re moving toward. The psychedelic shamans have always known this. Now the psychedelic underground art community points toward this goal and leads the way.

- “Ordinary Language, Visible Language & Virtual Reality” by Terence McKenna, 1997.

Hardcover Book Releases

Birthmarked by Caragh M. O’Brien
Bone and Jewel Creatures by Elizabeth Bear
Fever Crumb by Philip Reeve
Pinion by Jay Lake
Silver Borne (Mercy Thompson, Book 5) by Patricia Briggs
Vulture’s Wake by Kirsty Murray

Paperback Book Releases

Bad Moon Rising: A Dark-Hunter Novel (Dark-Hunter Novels) by Sherrilyn Kenyon
EVE: The Burning Life by Hjalti Danielsson
The Judging Eye: One (The Aspect-Emperor) by R. Scott Bakker
Secrets of the Sands (Children of the Desert) by Leona Wisoker
The Shattered Sylph by L. J. McDonald
The Stoneholding: Legacy of the Stone Harp by James G. Anderson and Mark Sebanc
Tsunami Blue by Gayle Ann Williams
War Games (Complete Christopher Anvil) by Christopher Anvil and Eric Flint
Weaver (Time’s Tapestry) by Stephen Baxter
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Art

• Being Stalked By A Velociraptor.
• Smeeon has posted a video and photos of the Steampunk Wheelchair he built. (Powered by Vodka and Cranberry juice.)
• SolarBeat demonstrates how Our Solar System would Sound as a Music Box.
• Ulises Farinas has posted a new illustration of the Caped Crusader all alone in his not-so-little cave – all alone, that is, except for the mountain of unnecessary objects he’s hoarded over the years.

Film

• News: Illegal downloading of movies and TV shows is so prevalent that studios may give up selling DVDs in Spain.
• The Hollywood Reporter explains How Avatar changed the rules of deliverables… more than 100 different delivery versions were created for release in 102 countries.
• Yahoo! Movies has posted a gallery of photos of the new Harry Potter Theme Park.

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240 BC
Chinese Astronomers record the first confirmed perihelion passage of Halley’s Comet. The account is confirmed by Babylonian, Japanese, and Mesopotamian astronomers.

1791
After a proposal in the journal Académie des sciences by Borda, Condorcet, Lagrange, Laplace, and Monge, the French National Assembly decides that a metre will be defined as ten millionth of the distance between the North Pole and the equator.

1842
Physician Dr. Crawford W. Long of Jefferson, Georgia first uses ether as an anesthetic in surgery. The patient is James Venable, and the surgery is to remove a tumor from the man’s neck.

1858
Hyman L. Lipman of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is granted the first US patent for a lead pencil with an eraser. (US No. 19,783) One-fourth of the length of the pencil contains a piece of india-rubber, so that cutting one end prepares the pencil for writing and cutting the other end prepares it for erasing.
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What forces Google to have a foreign policy is that what they’re exporting isn’t a product or a service, it’s a freedom

- Clay Shirky in “Google Searches for a Foreign Policy,” March 26, 2010.

Audio Fiction and Podcasts

• Listen to “Always” by Karen Joy Fowler at StarshipSofa
• Listen to Around The World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne at LibriVox.org.
• Listen to “Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer at Tor.com
• Listen to “Idiot Box” by Julie Hoverson at 19 Nocturne.
• Listen to “Love Among the Talus” by Elizabeth Bear at PodCastle.
• Listen to “Oded the Merciless” by Tina Starr at Pseudopod.

Comics and Graphic Novels

• Vertigo is offering Jeff Lemire’s “Sweet Tooth” #1 as a free download to promote the May release of “Sweet Tooth Vol. 1: Out of the Woods.”

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