The Great Geek Manual

1818
The classic Christmas carol, “Silent Night” is composed by Franz Joseph Gruber and Josef Mohr. It will be performed for the first time the next day.

1877
Thomas Edison applies for a patent for a Phonograph that uses tin foil cylinders to write and playback music. (US Patent No. 200,521)

1893
Henry Ford completes the construction of his first usable gas motor, and he and his wife test the small one-cylinder engine in their kitchen. Ford is the chief steam engineer at the main Detroit Edison Company plant with responsibility for maintaining electric service in the city. Because he was on call with no regular hours, he had time to experiment to his heart’s content. His wages barely paid his living expenses, but his wife was very supportive. A later two cylinder version of the engine powers Ford’s first completed automobile when on its inaugural drive on June 4, 1896.
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When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns.

- Marshall McLuhan, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland, 2011.

Art

• 3D Christmas Chalk Art
• 12 cute pics of embroidered comic heroes
• Geekiest Christmas tree ever!
• Gingerbread Companion Cube
• “How Cthulhu Ate Christmas“
• John Carter concept art transports you to the magnificent Barsoom
• Neil Gaiman’s Chilling Christmas Card Story as a creepy Pop-Up Book
• Why Get a Comic Book Tattoo? A tattoo is forever, for the most part. So why do so many people get these things?

Comics

• Infographics: Comics on the 2011 New York Times Bestseller List
• Top Ten Best Graphic Novels of 2011

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Today is the traditional date for the celebration of Festivus, a fictional holiday introduced by the sitcom Seinfeld. It is also HumanLight, the winter holiday celebrated by American secular humanists.

1672
Astronomer Giovanni Cassini discovers the fifth major satellite of Saturn, Rhea.

1750
Benjamin Franklin is severely shocked while electrocuting a turkey.

1823
The poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, otherwise known as The Night Before Christmas, is first published in the Sentinel newspaper in the Troy, New York.

1834
Charles Babbage unveils his Analytical Engine, on which he had begun work on in 1821.

1900
Reginald Aubrey Fessenden successively transmits speech over a distance of approximately 1.6 kilometers, marking the very first radio transmission of an audio signal.
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Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas —we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them — and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations. I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we’ll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.

… social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves. That’s one consequence of social learning, that it has sculpted us to be very shrewd and intelligent at copying, but perhaps less shrewd at innovation and creativity than we’d like to think. Few of us are as creative as we’d like to think we are.

- “Infinite Stupidity” by Mark Pagel, December 15, 2011.
First posted to Edge.org.

1845
The first voice synthesizer, later known as P.T. Barnum’s Euphonium, is demonstrated to the public.

1882
The first string of Christmas tree lights is created by Edward H. Johnson, an associate of Thomas Edison, to decorate his home Christmas tree. Traditionally, trees are traditionally decorated with wax candles. The first commercially produced Christmas tree lamps will be manufactured in strings of nine sockets by the Edison General Electric Co. of Harrison, New Jersey, and they will be advertised in the December 1901 issue of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Each socket will take a miniature two candlepower carbon-filament lamp operating on thirty-two volts. Electric Christmas tree lights will quickly become popular among wealthy Americans, but the average citizen won’t use them until the twenties or later. Character light bulbs will become popular in the twenties, bubble lights will become popular in the forties, twinkle bulbs will become popular in the fifties, and plastic bulbs will become popular by 1955.
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The self is not a thing but a process.

- The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger, 2009.

Art

• 10 More Nerdy Christmas Ornaments
• Amazing Morrigan Dragon Age cosplay
• Great Zombie Apocalypse Charlie Brown
• Left 4 Dead Fan Film
• Tintin meets Lovecraft. Madness ensues.
• Worst Star Wars Costumes Ever

Cross-Media

• Interview: Making It with Joss Whedon.
• 6 SFF Characters We Want to See Go Evil
• The 10 Creepiest Santa Clauses

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