Gibbons, Dave
Born April 14, 1949, Gibbons broke into the British comics industry by working on horror and action titles for both DC Thomson and IPC (International Publishing Corporation, also known as IPC Magazines Ltd). When the 2000 AD comic line was set up, Gibbons was brought in as an Art Director. He also drew one of the original strips in “Prog1,” Harlem Heroes, as well as the occasional Future Shock. After the first year, he began illustrating Dan Dare, a cherished project for Gibbons who had been a fan of the original series.
He was also known, by sight but not by name, to readers of the short-lived IPC title Tornado. Much as 2000 AD was “edited” by the alien Tharg, Tornado was “edited” by a superhero, Big E, who also worked on the magazine in his alter-ego, Percy Pilbeam. These characters appeared in photos within the comic, and both Big E and Pilbeam were portrayed by Gibbons for the entire 22-issue run of Tornado before it was subsumed into 2000 AD. After leaving 2000 AD, Gibbons became the lead artist on Doctor Who Weekly/Monthly, drawing the main comic strip for most of the issues from #1 until #69. Gibbons was one of the British Comic talents identified by Len Wein in 1982, and was hired to draw Green Lantern for DC Comics.
He is perhaps best known in the U.S. for collaborating with Alan Moore on the 12-issue limited series Watchmen, now one of the best-selling graphic novels of all time. Moore’s meditation on superheroes in an antiheroic age was perfectly completed by Gibbon’s precise and detailed art, usually drawn in a regular nine-grid pattern. He is a winner of the prestigious Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for 1988 (Best Writer/Artist: Watchmen [DC] – with Alan Moore), 1995 (Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team) and 1998 (Best Penciller/Inker or Penciller/Inker Team).
Gibbons’ most recent complete work is a 2005 black-and-white graphic novel, The Originals, which he scripted, as well as drew. Published by Vertigo, the work is set in the near future, but draws heavily on the imagery of the Mods and Rockers of the 1960s. His current projects include the DC Comics six-issue limited series The Rann/Thanagar War (which ties into the recently released seven-issue Infinite Crisis limited series) and Green Lantern Corps: Recharge. Gibbons also provides the cover artwork for Albion, the Wildstorm six-issue limited series plotted by Alan Moore and written by his daughter Leah and her husband.
Gigabit
A measure of storage capacity and data transfer, equal to 1 billion bits.
Girls of Old Town, The
In Old Town, the ladies are the law. Among the sleazy bars in the part of Frank Miller’s Sin City that no cop ventures into – to do his job, anyway! – a truce was made between the cops and the prostitutes: The cops back off, and the ladies take care of their own brand of justice. They can be a man’s greatest fantasy, or his darkest nightmare. It all depends on how you treat them. The Girls of Old Town were portrayed on the big screen by Rosario Dawson and Alexis Bledel, among others. They appeared in Sin City (2005) and its sequel Sin City: A Dame To Kill For (2014).
Given
In mathematics, and in particular geometry, used as a noun for a known element to a problem.
Gladwell, Malcolm
A New Yorker staff writer since 1996, Gladwell’s research and work attack popular understanding of bias, crime, food, marketing, race, consumers, and intelligence. He is a popular lecturer and bestselling author with topics like cookies, pasta sauce, serial killers, steroids, and jobs-you-never-knew-existed. Referred to as a “freelance cool-hunter” and “a sort of pop-R&D gumshoe,” Gladwell has a reputation for investigating fads and emerging subcultures. He has published four books: The Tipping Point, which began as a New Yorker piece, applies the principles of epidemiology to crime (and sneaker sales); Blink examines the unconscious processes that allow the mind to “thin slice” reality, and make decisions in the blink of an eye; Outliers questions the inevitabilities of success and identifies the relation of success to nature versus nurture. His latest work, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, is an anthology of his New Yorker contributions.
Glass, Stephen
The now-notorious purveyor of journalistic falsehoods was exposed by Adam L. Penenberg in Forbes magazine in May 1998. Penenberg had discovered a completely fabricated story in the May 18, 1998 issue of The New Republic, credited to associate editor Glass. According to Charles Lane, the then-current editor of The New Republic, the story “Hack Heaven,” about teenage hackers extorting money from corporations, “contained fabricated characters and situations.” Glass was fired, and further New Republic investigation revealed that Glass was behind fictional articles which appeared not only in its own pages, but also in Harper’s, George, Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones. The New Republic would ultimately acknowledge questionable information and bold fabrications in 27 of the 41 bylined pieces that Glass had submitted between December 1995 and May 1998.
Disgraced and shunned in the journalism arena, Glass published a 2003 novel, The Fabulist, which told the tale of a journalist who fabricates his stories. Meanwhile that year, his downfall inspired the film Shattered Glass, starring Hayden Christensen and Peter Sarsgaard. Glass would go on to earn a law degree from Georgetown University, though the California Supreme Court turned him down for a state law license in January 2014 in a decision that accused him of continuing his deceptions up to and including the licensing application process.
Global Positioning System (GPS)
The Global Positioning System (GPS) is a satellite navigation network that provides continuous, real-time, three-dimensional worldwide positioning, navigation and timing. The network of satellites now used for GPS was originally placed into orbit by the U.S. Department of Defense, with the first GPS satellite being launched in 1978. Originally intended for military applications, the government made the system available for civilian use in the 1980s. A full constellation of 24 satellites was achieved in 1994. GPS satellites circle the earth at speeds of roughly 7,000 miles per hour and transmit their signal information to the Earth, where GPS receivers take this information and use triangulation to calculate the user’s exact location. A GPS receiver calculates its position by a technique called satellite ranging, which involves measuring the distance between the GPS receiver and the GPS satellites it is tracking. Essentially, the GPS receiver compares the time a signal was transmitted by a satellite with the time it was received. The time difference tells the GPS receiver how far away the satellite is. Gathering distance measurements from a few more satellites, the receiver can determine the user’s position and display it on the unit’s electronic map. Once the user’s position has been determined, the GPS unit can calculate other information, such as speed, bearing, trip distance, distance to destination, and more. While certain atmospheric factors and other sources of error can affect the accuracy of GPS receivers, overall the data is extremely accurate, thanks to the GPS system’s parallel multi-channel design.
Outside of travel navigation, GPS’s other applications in natural resource management include inventory and mapping of soils, vegetation types, threatened and endangered species, lake and stream boundaries, and wildlife habitat. GPS has been used to aid in damage assessment after fires, floods and earthquakes, to map archaeological sites, and for infrastructure (streets, highways and utilities) mapping, management, and planning for future growth. Engineers use GPS for surveying when building roads, bridges and other structures.
Go.com
See Infoseek.
God mode
In video games, a version of play where a player’s character is rendered invulnerable to damage. Such a mode is typically activated by entering a cheat code.
Goldberg, Rube
Cartoonist, engineer, inventor, sculptor, and writer Rube Goldberg was born Reuben Garret Lucius Goldberg in San Francisco, California on July 4, 1883. While attending the School of Mining Engineering in the University of California at Berkeley for his engineering studies, Rube did not forget his passion for the arts. He submitted cartoons to The Pelican, a student publication. In 1904, Rube Goldberg earned his Bachelor’s degree in engineering. In the following years, he was a vaudeville comedian, cartoonist, fortune-teller, stand-up comedian, and a playwright. He even wrote the screenplay for the Three Stooges’ 1930 screen debut Soup to Nuts. He was credited for having written many essays, plays and poetry, and for a time, he also dabbled in vaudeville, combining stand-up comedy and fortune telling. However, his claim to fame was his satirical cartoons, which illustrated human idiosyncrasies, ranging from the powerful to the mundane. In particular, his cartoons poked fun at the way human beings tend to utilize modern machines and technology to complicate, rather than simplify, life.
A recurring theme of Rube Goldberg’s inventions was the use of simple objects and processes to create complicated multi-step machines in order to accomplish a very simple task, such as collecting mail, opening a window, washing one’s back, or scratching an itch. Collectively, these creative contraptions became known as “Rube Goldberg machines” or “Rube Goldberg devices.” One familiar inspiration was the board game Mouse Trap (originally Mouse Trap Game), first produced in 1963 by the Ideal Toy Company (later re-released by Milton-Bradley), in which the object is to build and use a multi-step machine to simply drop a cage over a mouse.
On July 22, 1947, while working as an editorial cartoonist at the New York Sun, he had a political cartoon published that would garner him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1955, he won the Gold T-Square Award for his artistic contributions, and In 1959, he won the Banshees’ Silver Lady Award, given yearly to honor the outstanding writer or artist in the newspaper field.
Rube Goldberg died in Hawthorne, New York on December 7, 1970. He was 87 years old.
Golden Age of Comics, The (pre-1950s)
Name given to pre-1950s comics and comic books. Comics were invented to be escapist media for such troubled times as The Great Depression and WWII. The Golden Age established comics as mainstream media, trailblazing a new art form with new ways of telling stories. The Golden Age superhero archetype was squeaky clean and shiny. The good guys always won, and the world was always saved from the brink of peril, typically at the last minute.Most comics of the Golden Age weren’t in comic book form, but in serial strips, seen most often in newspaper inserts or leaflets. Superman, Batman, Captain Marvel (Shazam), Wonder Woman and Green Lantern were all created during the Golden Age, but in forms very different from what we know now. Captain America fought against the Red Skull and Adolf Hitler, while Superman saved the world from a meteor in one panel and deflected gunfire from a gangster in the next.
Golden Axe
First produced by Sega in 1989, Golden Axe was a common horizontal-action “beat ‘em up” game in arcades. Playing by yourself or with a partner, your chosen character (an Amazonian warrior, a Barbarian hero, or a Viking dwarf) would hack, chop and kick his way through various fantasy world enemies, on the way to overthrow the evil rule of Death Adder himself, who, along with his forces of darkness, kidnapped and imprisoned the king and his daughter, and stole the legendary Golden Axe. Along the way, you could hitch rides on the backs of dragon/chicken type creatures, and lay waste to all who opposed you. The heroes were not only armed with their individual weapons, but powerful magic. Each character also had its own special attack move.
In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey Brin met at Stanford when Page, a 22-year-old University of Michigan grad, is shown around campus by Brin, a 21-year-old student, because he is considering attending the school; By 1996, the friends began collaborating on a search engine called BackRub, which eventually operates on Stanford servers for more than a year. The next year, Google.com was registered as a domain. The name—a play on the word “googol,” which is a mathematical term for the number represented by the number 1 followed by 100 zeros—reflected Page and Brin’s mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web. In 1998, an investor wrote out a check for $100,000 to an entity that did not exist yet: a company called Google Inc. Google subsequently filed for incorporation in California, and Page and Brin opened a bank account in the newly-established company’s name. The newly formed Google then set up workspace in Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California, and the co-founders hired their first employee: Craig Silverstein, a fellow Computer Science grad student at Stanford. During that same year, PC Magazine reported that Google “has an uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results,” and recognized the site as the search engine of choice in the Top 100 Web Sites for 1998.
By 1999, Google had outgrown their garage office, and moved into new office space in Palo Alto, California, with just eight employees. The offices moved again in the same year to Mountain View, just a few miles south of Stanford. In 2000, Google won its first Webby Awards: Technical Achievement (voted by judges) and Peoples’ Voice (voted by users). Also in 2000, the first 10 non-English versions of Google.com are released in French, German, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Norwegian and Danish. Today, search is available in over 150 languages. Google New York opened in a Starbuck’s on 86th Street, complete with a one-person sales “team.” Today, after quite a bit of expansion and a new location, more than 4,000 Googlers work in the current New York office. In 2001, Eric Schmidt became CEO, while Page and Brin were named presidents of products and technology, respectively.
In 2004, Google’s email service Gmail was launched on April Fools’ Day. At first invite-only, today it boasts more than 425 million users. Google’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of 19,605,052 shares of Class A common stock takes place on Wall Street, with an opening price of $85 per share. Their European headquarters opened in Dublin, Ireland, with 150 multilingual Googlers. 2005 saw Google Maps go live, and just two months later, the addition of satellite views and directions. Google acquired YouTube in 2006, and in 2007, was named #1 on Fortune’s annual “Best Companies to Work For” list for the first time, hitting the top of the list three other years afterward. In 2008, Google Chrome became available for download. Five years later, Chrome boasts more than 750 million users.
A plan was announced in 2010 to build and test ultra-high-speed broadband networks, delivering internet speeds up to 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today. Also that year, Google announced the development of technology for self-driving cars, claiming that such vehicles could help prevent traffic accidents, free up people’s time, and reduce carbon emissions. Their automated prototypes have since logged more than 500,000 miles on the road. Speech recognition searches became a reality for Chrome users in 2011. By clicking a microphone icon in the Google search box, users could now speak their search parameters. Also that year, Google acquired Zagat restaurant and night club guides, and opened a new office in Paris. In 2012, Google Chrome for Android launched, and was followed three months later by Chrome on iOS. Android Market became Google Play, a digital content store offering apps, games, books, movies, music and more. The world saw the Olympics live on YouTube for the first time, viewing a total of 230 million video streams, and through Google’s partnership with NBC, it became the most live-streamed Olympics to date.
Goonies, The
Written by Chris Columbus and directed by Richard Donner, the 1985 film follows two brothers and their friends as they follow a treasure map and elude a gang of villains in order to claim the treasure and prevent losing their home. The group of Goonies was portrayed by child actors, many of whom would go on to bigger roles and acting careers, including Sean Astin, Josh Brolin and Corey Feldman.
Gorn
In the Star Trek universe, a species of intelligent reptilian bipeds. In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Arena,” Capt. James T. Kirk was forced to fight with the captain of a Gorn ship by a third alien race, in order to settle a dispute.
Gotham City
Popularly believed to represent New York City, but stated by one artist to be a composite of New York City and Chicago, Gotham City is home and base of operations for DC Comics’ character Batman. Its actual location has never been fully explained, and various comic book references indicate that it is somewhere in New Jersey or New York, but when The Atlas of the DC Universe was published in 1990, it portrayed Gotham City as south of New Jersey and Metropolis. Regardless of the source, Gotham’s architecture acts as a major literary device, used to set the atmosphere and tone. One writer described Gotham, figuratively, as “Manhattan below Fourteenth Street at eleven minutes past midnight on the coldest night in November.” The city has an element of urban decay, which plagues the city even after its renovations.
Gotham City is famed as the city where the crime fighter Batman (acting alone or with his partner Robin) operates, but Batman was not actually the first DC hero to reside in Gotham. During the Golden Age of Comics, Alan Scott (Green Lantern) and the Black Canary lived there. Eventually the Batman Family would grow and include Tim Drake, Damian Wayne, Barbara Gordon, Huntress, Batgirl, and Batwoman. Other DC characters known to be living in Gotham City include Plastic Man, Zatanna, Zatara, The Question, The Creeper, and Simon Dark. The Justice Society of America has also been shown to operate in Gotham City. On the other side of the law, many notorious DC criminals reside in Gotham, such as The Joker, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, the Riddler, Two-Face, and the Penguin.
GPS
See Global positioning system (GPS).
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