The Great Geek Manual

1879
Thomas Alva Edison privately demonstrates his incandescent light at Menlo Park, New Jersey. He invented the lamp on October 21, 1879 after thirteen months of experimentation to discover a suitable material for the filament and discovery that carbonized cotton filaments could operate for forty hours in the vacuum of a glass bulb. The first public demonstration of the incandescent light bulb will be given at Menlo Park on December 31 1879.

1907
Physicist Albert Michelson becomes the first US scientist to receive the Nobel Prize. He is awarded the prize “for his optical precision instruments and the spectroscopic and metrological investigations.” Specifically, he designed the highly accurate Michelson interferometer and used it to accurately measure the speed of light, establishing the Michelson Effect, which states that the speed of light is a constant.

1909
Volta Picture Theatre, Ireland’s first cinema, opens in a disused warehouse on Mary Street, in Dublin, under the management of James Joyce.

1910
AT&T acquires control of thirty percent of the Western Union Telegraph Company.

1938
Vladimir Zworykin receives a patent for the iconoscope, an early television camera tube, fifteen years after filing his application.
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Once human beings realize something can be done,
they’re not satisfied until they’ve done it.

- Cease Fire by Frank Herbert, 1958.

1871
Samuel Clemens, better known as the author Mark Twain, receives a patent for “An Improvement in Adjustable and Detachable Garment Straps,” later known as suspenders. (US No.121,992)

1914
The Cel overlay animation process is patented by Earl Hurd of Kansas City, Missouri as “Process of and Apparatus for Producing Moving Pictures.” (US No. 1,143,542)

1923
Dr. Vladimir K. Zworykin patents the first all-electronic picture tube.

1930
Amelia Earhart becomes the first autogyro pilot to carry a passenger at Pitcairn Field, in Willow Grove, Pennsylvania. Flying a PCA-2 Pitcairn Autogyro, she made trips with various passengers until dark. Just the previous day, December 18, 1930, Earhart made her first solo flight in the same autogyro, becoming the first female to make a solo flight. Two years earlier, on December 19, 1928, Harold F. Pitcairn made the first ever autogyro flight.

1958
The first known radio broadcast from outer space is transmitted from the SCORE (Signal Communications Orbit Relay Equipment) communication satellite, which was launched from Cape Canaveral the previous day. The voice of President Eisenhower issues a Christmas greeting from a pre-recorded tape on a recorder aboard the orbiting space satellite. The battery-operated 132 MHz vacuum tube transmitter had an 8W output. His full message is,

“This is the President of the United States speaking. Through the marvels of scientific advance, my voice is coming to you from a satellite circling in outer space. My message is a simple one. Through this unique means I convey to you and all mankind America’s wish for peace on earth and good will to men everywhere.”

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Comics

• Green Lantern will likely be the next Warner Bros film. I’ve been waiting for this for year, but I have nightmares of an ultra-gay pink-skinned Sinestro ruining everything.

Film

• Bob Orci explains How The New Star Trek Movie Fits With Trek Canon. [SPOILERS]
• Indiana’s Journal Gazette (Is that the stupidest name for a newspaper you’ve ever heard, or is it just me?) complains that Filmmakers recycle fan favorites instead of exploring new frontiers. And you know what? They’re right!
• io9 runs warns you off. If you haven’t seen these 10 Worst Science Fiction Remakes, avoid them at all costs.
• Popular Mechanics helps out this holiday season by compiling a list of 20 Must-Have Blu-ray HD Epics you should buy immediately when you get your new Blu-Ray player for Christmas.
• Unreality runs down a lists a gallery of the Ten of the Baddest Fictional Movie Weapons.

Internet

• What if Water World were a musical? Yes. The world would implode.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “Framing And Mounting Fairies” by Kevin Anderson at The Dunesteef Podcast.
• The Not a Planet Anymore blog recalls The Top 5 Famous Last Words in Sci-Fi and The Top 10 SF Movie Countdowns.

Television

• The TrekMovie fansite has posted a collection of video compilations of Inconsistencies in the Star Trek Continuum.
• Turns out that Lost Fans Will Get an Uninterrupted Season 5.

Fox has released a new teaser trailer for X-Men Origins: Wolverine on MySpace.com. Disappointingly, it doesn’t look like it’ll be following the Origin: The True Story of Wolverine miniseries, which is too bad, because that was one solid piece of writing. The movie, starring Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber, opens May 1, 2009.

In a sense human flesh is made of stardust. Every atom in the human body, excluding only the primordial hydrogen atoms, was fashioned in stars that formed, grew old and exploded most violently before the Sun and Earth came into being.

- The Key to the Universe: a Report on the New Physics by Nigel Calder, 1977.

1839
In New York City, John Draper makes a daguerreotype of the Moon, becoming the first person in the U.S. to photograph a celestial body, the Moon.

1926
In a letter published in the journal Nature, American chemist Gilbert Newton Lewis coins the term “photon.” In the letter, he writes that it “would seem inappropriate to speak of one of these hypothetical entities as a particle of light, a corpuscle of light, a light quantum, or a light quant, if we are to assume that it spends only a minute fraction of its existence as a carrier of radiant energy, while the rest of the time it remains as an important structural element within the atom. It would also cause confusion to call it merely a quantum, for later it will be necessary to distinguish between the number of these entities present in an atom and the so-called quantum number. I therefore [propose for this] which is not light but plays an essential part in every process of radiation, the name photon.”

1958
The world’s first communications satellite, SCORE (Signal Communications by Orbiting Relay Equipment), is launched aboard an Atlas B missile, and it will shortly thereafter record a Christmas message to the world from President Eisenhower to be transmitted the next day.

1965
Gemini VII splashes down in the western Atlantic Ocean with command pilot Frank Borman and pilot Jim Lovell Jr. on board. The mission was launched on December 4 for the purpose of physiological testing and spacecraft performance evaluations.
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Comics

• Dark Roasted Blend has compiled a directory of Steampunk Art & Gear photo galleries.

Comics

• Mental Floss shares the true stories behind 5 Comic Superheroes Who Made a Real-World Difference.

Film

• Cinematical chooses The Best Sci-Fi Remakes.
• Cracked.com has posted the script that would have been used If ‘Twilight’ Was 10 Times Shorter And 100 Times More Honest.
• Film School Rejects runs down a list of 10 Sci-Fi Films That Should Never Be Remade, and 5 That Probably Should Be.
• Santa Claus Conquers the Martians is one of the most hilariously bad films ever made. It also happens to now be in the public domain. [Found via TorrentFreak]

Internet

• Topless Robot lists The 10 Most Awesome Sci-Fi Themed Music Videos Ever.

Literature

• Free Fiction: Listen to “How to Deal With Your Daughter and Her Crabs” by Brian Salyards at Clonepod.
• Free Fiction: Listen to “True Names” by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow at The Internet Archive.
• Free Fiction: Read the classic pulp short “Gold” by Isaac Asimov
• Free Fiction: Read “Demons Without, Demon Within” by Scott M. Sandridge by Mindflights.
• AMC’s Future of Classic blog counts down the top Evil Corporate Overlords, starting with Dick Jones, the head of Omni Consumer Products.

Video Games

• Jason Hill of Australia’s Brisbane Time lists The Most Influential Games Ever, beginning with the arcade classic, Pong.
• Wired runs down The 10 Most Disappointing Games of 2008, though they might have expanded it out to twenty for all the bomb that hit the shelves this year.

Writing

• Lou Anders talks about the Author-Editor Relationship at The Swivet.