Artist Kelly Turnbull makes a fair point in her newest comic. Pacific Rim's Mako Mori finally got to pilot a Jaeger, she wasn't about to let Raleigh Becket have all the fun. (via Manly Guys Doing Manly Things)

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Decades before Peter Jackson came along and forced mainstreamers to complain about long movies and rich stories, legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa was churning out masterful, lengthy epics like Seven Samurai, and he did so at a rate of nearly one movie every year throughout the '50s and '60s. He is regarded as one of the most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema. And since tomorrow is his birthday, you can celebrate by watching 24 of his Criterion films for free on Hulu. Happy Birthday, Kurosawa!

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Today is Carl Sagan's birthday, which, if there were any justice in the world, would be celebrated in the fashion we've become accustomed to for nerds of note -- with a Google Doodle commemorating the day that one of the world's best and brightest science celebrities was expelled from the womb. As there is clearly no justice in the world, though, Sagan's birthday was overlooked by Google's legions of doodlers, who were no doubt exhausted by celebrating Bram Stoker's big 165 yesterday. I don't think we need to tell you why this is clearly unacceptable.

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Nest of Vellum captured this caterpillar for a friend's insect collection, and to make up for the grisly fate to which they had resigned it, they decided to throw it a birthday party. The pictures came out so cute, though, that they had no choice but to return it to the wild.

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What's the best birthday gift for the man who has everything? How about the cold, clammy touch of death's inevitable embrace? A study on over 2 million people over the course of 40 years show that birthday deaths are strikingly more common than you might think, especially when attributed to heart attack, stroke, suicide, or falls. Poisoned cakes, though not mentioned in the study, are surely a culprit as well.

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Little Alana chose to don an Iron Man costume for her 5th birthday party. We adore you, Alana. 

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Yesterday was the birthday of Commander Shepard, hero of the Alliance Navy. Sunday, we can give Uncle Jesse many happy returns, two days later the same will do for Sydney Barstow, and good old April 1st is the birthday of Fred and George Weasley (they'd be thirty-three this year, and incidentally they're exactly the same age, to the day, as Bart Simpson). Hit the jump for one or more fictional character birthdays for every day in the month!

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Besides his feud with nerd icon (nerdicon?) Nikola Tesla and having a middle name of  "Alva," what do you really know about Thomas Edison? Probably not much, and since it's his birthday it's only appropriate that you let Jeremiah Warren teach you a little something. Go on, learning is good for you.

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MS-DOS, the good ol' grey and black, turns 30-years-old today. Way back on July 27th, 1981, Microsoft purchased the rights to QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Company and Microsoft Dirty Operating System was born. How much did it cost back then? Well, the rights were $25,ooo or, considering the prices of the day, the cost of about 31 mb. From these beginnings, MS-DOS went on to be Big Man on the Microsoft campus until Windows 3.0 came around and changed the computing world. MS-DOS has continued to hang around, however, but development stopped in 2000. In celebration of its birthday, I'm going to download some abandon-ware, boot up DOSBox and regress to childhood. C:>_ forever.

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In 2002, Bram Cohen posted the first functional version of BitTorrent to a message board, laying the ground work for the workhorse of file transfers that we know and love today. According to an interview with TorrentFreak, that post received one response. Hardly an auspicious start. But the world quickly recognized the potential of a system that could easily move large files over the Internet and take advantage of users' mostly unused up-stream traffic. Cast your mind back, if you will, to a time before BitTorrent. A time when it actually made sense to burn large files to CD and mail them across the country. A time where high-quality audio or video files were simply not practical since no one could download them in a reasonable amount of time.  Those were dark days. So today, raise a glass to BitTorrent! The system that let you download a movie before it was in theaters, brought you the entire discography of an artist, let you update WoW with breathtaking speed, and helped you build a collection of lossless recordings of Phish concerts. Happy Birthday! (Torrent Freak via Hacker News, image via Phaedra)

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A year ago today, we launched Geekosystem with the goal of "unit[ing] all of the tribes of geekdom under one common banner." And I think we've been pretty successful to that end. Despite cold-launching with zero marketing budget and an editorial staff of exactly two people, myself and Susana Polo, we've built a great community of readers, and the site reaches an audience of comfortably more than one million people each month. So we'd like to thank you, Geekosystem reader, for your excellent and discerning taste in websites, and for helping make the site what it is today. OK: We'll take a little credit too.

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Happy birthday, Giorgio Moroder! The father of modern dance music and both three-time Grammy and Oscar winner turns 70 today. Yes, the man who wrote the soundtrack to Scarface and thought Donna Summer’s vocal “exercises” in “Love to Love You, Baby” were a good idea at a time when people were still getting arrested for filming porn movies is now your grandfather’s age. Time flies!

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Today is Chuck Norris' 70th birthday. Seventy years ago to this day -- you may note that this was before America won World War II -- Norris was born in Ryan, Oklahoma, three months premature. The rest is history.

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