The Great Geek Manual

“Born out of our geek love for the new (not so new) Battlestar Galactica series here is the music video for our BSG inspired parody of Cee Lo Green’s “F**k You!” Seemed like if anyone should be inspired to offer up a good ol’ “Frak You!” it’d be Anders. We had a blast making it. Please spread it around- tell everyone, share the link!!”

“This is a silly parody song about Battlestar Galactica (VERY MILD SPOILERS!). I wrote the lyrics, while the rest is taken from Katy Perry’s song “Firework”. Don’t worry about taking it too seriously, and I hope you enjoy it.”

399 BC
The Greek philosopher Socrates commits suicide at age 71 after having been indicted for allegedly corrupting youth.

1895
Otto Steiger is issued a patent for the “Millionaire calculating machine”. Four thousand seven hundred of the 120 pound machines will be built over the next forty years, by Switzerland’s Hans Egli. The calculating machine’s main selling point is its ability to easily perform multiplication calculations.

1946
In Japan, Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, which will be renamed Sony in 1958, is founded with about twenty employees. Read more at Sony’s website.
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Art

• Avengers Assemble is a parody of One Direction’s What Makes You
• Amazing Diablo 3 cosplay
• Book Spine Poetry is poetry made from the words on the spines of books.
• Buffy/Avengers art mashup on Draw2D2
• Here’s a locket in the shape of a brain for all you zombies out there.
• Mad Men / X-Men Mash-Up

Comics

• DC New 52 graphic novel television ads unveiled
• Huffington Post picks the 11 Most Awesome Comic Book Villain Superpowers

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Right now we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilisation but we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.

- E. O. Wilson in “E. O. Wilson: from altruism to a new Enlightenment” by Liz Else, April 21, 2012.
Originally published by New Scientist.

1896
The Aerodrome No. 5 makes the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft of substantial size. Its inventor, Samuel Pierpont Langley, launches the craft using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. In its first flight it travels 3,300 feet (1,005 meters), in its second flight, later the same afternoon, it travels 2,300 feet (700 meters). In both instances, it travels at a speed of about 25mph.

Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can’t resist the gravity of alternate worlds.

- The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human by Jonathan Gottschall, April 10, 2012.

1809
Mary Kies becomes the first woman to be granted a U.S. patent. The patent is granted for a technique to weave straw with silk or thread. The technology will be used to manufacture straw bonnets.

1834
William Whewell writes a letter to Michael Faraday concerning names to describe the process of electrolysis which he was investigating. Whewell suggests the names Anode and Cathode. The terms are based on the Greek prefixes “ana-” meaning “up” and “kata-” meaning “down.” The chosen prefixes refer to the idea that that electric current flowed from a battery’s positive to a negative pole, in the manner that water would flow down from a hillside to a valley. He suggests the term ion for the two together, rather than Zetodes or Stechions. Faraday would later reply that he was “delighted with the facility of expression which the new terms give me and I shall ever be your debtor for the kind assistance you have given me.”
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