The Dragonborn Comes
A female cover of the Skyrim Bard Song!
Source: malukah.com
This Day in Geek History: December 8
1903
The Boston-based National Bell Telephone Company is dissolved by court decree.
1929
The first commercial ship-to-shore mobile telephone service is launched.
1931
Lloyd Espenschied and Herman A. Affel receive the first U.S. patent for coaxial cable. (US No. 1,835,031) The patent, described as a “concentric conducting system,” is assigned to American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) of New York City.
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Geek Media Round-Up: December 7, 2011
Art
- 8-bit Holiday Cards
- Beautiful literary mystery in Edinburgh
- These Calvin and Hobbes Cut Outs may be the best Christmas decorations ever!
- Check out Ilias Kyriazis‘ top 30 favorite DC characters in one long illustration.
- Geeky Tissue Box Covers
Comics
- Interview: Rebekah Isaacs Q&A for Angel & Faith #4.
- News: Alan Moore attacks Frank Miller in comic book war of words
- If you missed the recent Comikaze Expo in Los Angeles, here is a look back. A 43-minute long look back, in fact, from iReporter Cherry Davis
- Top Ten Ways to Improve The Comic Book Retail Experience
This Day in Geek History: December 7
1877
At the offices of the Scientific American magazine, Thomas Edison demonstrates his improved phonograph, using a cylinder wrapped with tinfoil instead of wax-coated paper. Just the day prior, he made the first recording using the device to demonstrate it to John Kruesi, the machinist who built it from Edison’s sketches.
1909
Leo Baekeland of Yonkers, New York, receives a patent for the first completely synthetic (artificial) plastic thermosetting plastic. (US No. 942,699) The patent for “an improvement in methods of making insoluble condensation products of phenol-formaldehyde” covers the creation of what Baekeland dubbed Bakelite. Bakelite is the beginning of the plastics industry. It is a nonflammable material cheaper and more versatile than other known plastics. It will be used in a wide variety of application, from inexpensive jewelry to sophisticated electronics.
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Geek Quote of the Day
Here’s a thought: online, there’s no one to watch over us. We are responsible for watching one another. And we’re doing it constantly. And we have a much more fertile ground to observe because no one needs to dig: we are giving more and more information away – willingly. In the virtual world, ideas about privacy are changing at the ground level and what we do online will have a greater impact upon future privacy laws than any legislation that results from the current offline inquiry.
- - “Untangling the web: privacy” by Aleks Krotoski, November 26, 2011.
Published by The Guardian.
Geek Media Round-Up: December 5, 2011
Art
- Russian Video Game Propaganda
- In September of 2011 artist/illustrator Molly Crabapple locked herself in a hotel room in New York City, covered the walls in paper and set about covering that paper with art.
- Trailer for a Half Life Origins Live Action Film
Comics
Free Fiction Round-Up: December 6, 2011
Audio Fiction and Podcasts
- Listen to “Claude and the Henry Moores” by Casey Wolf at Beam Me Up.
- Listen to “The Best Boy, The Brightest Boy” by Megan R. Engelhard.
- Listen to “Dream Engine” by Tim Pratt (Part 2) at Journey Into…
- Listen to “Giant Episode: Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar Pirates of Sarskoe” by Garth Nix at PodCastle.
- Listen to “Honor Killing” by Ray Tabler at EscapePod.
- Listen to “People Who Live in Wax Houses” by Julie Hoverson.
- Listen to “Raft of The Titanic” by James Morrow at StarShipSofa.
- Listen to “Sirius” by Ben Peek at Clarkesworld.
- Listen to “The Sighted Watchmaker” by Vylar Kaftan at Lightspeed.
- Listen to “The Stink of Animosity” by Rob E. Boley at Pseudopod.
- Listen to “This Strange Way of Dying” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia at PodCastle.
- Listen to “The Tunnel under the Earth” by Frederick Pohl at DramaPod.
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This Day in Geek History: December 6
1631
The transit of Venus occurs as predicted by Johannes Kepler. He correctly predicted that an ascending node transit of Venus would occur in December 1631, but it passed unobserved in part because his prediction wasn’t sufficiently accurate to predict the exact time it would occur and in part because it occurred after sunset for most of Europe. Unfortunately, Kepler died a year before the event.
1768
The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Latin for “British Encyclopaedia”) is published under the title “Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A dictionary of arts and sciences, compiled upon a new plan.” The series will eventually become the oldest continuously published English-language encyclopedia. The first edition is published in one hundred installments, which will later be bound into three volumes. Each installment costs sixpence or eight pence for an edition printed on finer paper and is delivered in weekly installments. It will also be published under the pseudonym “A Society of Gentlemen in Scotland,” a title which refers to the many gentlemen who had purchased subscriptions. The three bound volumes will be sold for twelve pounds sterling apiece. The set runs 2,391 pages and includes 160 copperplate illustrations. However, one set of illustrations, a three page depiction of female pelvises and fetuses in the midwifery article will be torn from every copy by order of King George III.
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