The Great Geek Manual

Art

• The Avalanche Software Art Blog has some great Twilight fan art.
• Bruton Stroube takes photos of people upside down… basically to make them look like bloated (and surprised) treasure trolls.
• DesignBoom has just unleashed The Baddest Baby Carriage ever designed.
• DJMick has posted a gallery of 24 Beggars With Funny Signs.
• StreetLevel has a tongue-in-cheek gallery of Zombified Star Wars Posters.
• Unreality explains The Hierarchy of Morgan Freeman.

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December 16th is the birthday of renowned science fiction authors Arthur C. Clarke (1917) and Philip K. Dick (1928), as well as authors Peter Dickinson (1927) and Randall Garrett (1927).

1897
The first US submarine to be equipped with an internal combustion engine, the Argonaut, is demonstrated on the Patapsco River. During the demonstration, twenty-two members of the press make descents in the vessel for up to four hours. It was built in 1897 at the Columbian Iron Works and Dry Dock Company of Baltimore, Maryland for its inventor, Simon Lake. The submarine is thirty-six feet (11m) long and nine feet (2.7m) in diameter with wheels to travel on the sea floor. Lake was issued patents for the submarine on April 7, 1896 (US No. 557,835) and on April 20, 1897 (US No. 581,213).

1907
The first radio broadcast of a singer in the US, featuring Eugenia H. Farrar, is transmitted by Lee De Forest from the Brooklyn Naval Yard in Brooklyn, New York to mark the departure of Admiral Robley Dunglison Evans (“Fighting Bob Evans”), commanded the US Navy’s “Great White Fleet,” on its world-wide cruise.

1915
Albert Einstein publishes the definitive form of his General Theory of Relativity.

1925
The silent film Wolf Blood, also known as Wolfblood: A Tale of the Forest, is released in the US. It is one of the first werewolf films. In it, a grievously injured logger must accept a blood transfusion from a wolf, and after his recovery, he and his fellow lumberjacks believe that he is transforming into a werewolf. IMDB profile Running time: 1 hr 8 mins
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Definitions of the intellectual are many and diverse. They have, however, one trait in common, which makes them also different from all other definitions: they are all self-definitions. Indeed, their authors are the members of the same rare species they attempt to define… The specifically intellectual form of the operation—self-definition—masks its universal content which is the reproduction and reinforcement of a given social configuration, and—with it—a given (or claimed) status for the group.

- Legislators and interpreters – On Modernity, Post-Modernity, Intellectuals by Zygmunt Bauman, 1987.

Hardcover Book Releases

Nautilus by Craig Weatherhill

Paperback Book Releases

Faces in Time by Lewis Aleman
Lightbearer by John Caruso
Spice and Wolf, Vol. 1 by Isuna Hasekura
Tinker’s Plague by Stephen B. Pearl
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Art

• Check out “Epic Misney” by T Campbell and John Waltrip. Best Marvel/Disney mashup yet!
• Comic Alliance has posted a gallery of Calvin & Hobbes Covered by Comic Book Artists.
• Life Magazine has posted a great gallery of Fantasy & Sci-Fi Magazine Art.
• Make Magazine is offering downloadable papercraft Elder Thing.

Comics

• TimeLostBatman is a tongue-in-cheek Twitter feed mocking Batman.

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The source of the new is the random.

- Gregory Bateson

1612
Simon Marius becomes the first person to observe the Andromeda galaxy through a telescope. He will describe his discovery in the preface to his Mundus Jovialis as, “like the flame of a candle seen through horn.”

1877
Thomas Edison files for a patent on his phonograph.

1903
The Wright Brothers make their first attempt to launch the Wright Flyer in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

1958
Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles H. Townes publish the paper “Infrared and Optical Masers” in the journal Physics Review describing what will later be known as the laser (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation) while employed at Bell Labs. Read the original document here.

1964
The first Italian satellite, San Marco 1, is launched.
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