Geeky Holidays Party excuses for the geek in everyone.

Geek events to celebrate on January 12:

1866 – The Royal Aeronautical Society is formed in London.

Geek events to celebrate on January 11:

2007 – JK Rowling completes the 7th novel in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

January 11 birthdays of geeky note:

1800 – Ányos Jedlik, Hungarian physicist (d. December 13, 1895). He is considered by Hungarians and Slovaks to be the unsung father of the dynamo and electric motor.

Geek events to celebrate on January 10:

1962 – Apollo Project: NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket booster. It became better known as the Saturn V moon rocket, which launched every Apollo moon mission.

Geek events to celebrate on January 9:

1793 – French inventor and aviation pioneer Jean-Pierre Blanchard becomes the first person to fly in a balloon in the United States. I doubt he could have predicted his invention would lead to aviation geekery such as the Balloon Federation of America or the British Balloon and Airship Club. My favorite geeky balloon-related thing right now, though, is the Hot Air Balloon simulator. I got up to 1500 feet or so before I realized that 100 feet above ground is really more ideal for tossing your markers to the ground anywhere close to the target. You have to “enlist” before you can play, which just requires a first name, last name, and nickname.

1839 – The French Academy of Sciences announces the Daguerreotype photography process.

1923 – Juan de la Cierva makes the first autogyro flight.

January 8 birthdays of geeky note:

1923 – Joseph Weizenbaum, German-American author, computer scientist and leading critic of Artificial Intelligence (d. March 5, 2008). He published a natural language processing program in 1966 called ELIZA that became the forerunner of AI technology. Author of Computer Power and Human Reason and subject of the documentary film Weizenbaum. Rebel at Work. [He is also my great uncle! – Yvette]

1942 – Stephen Hawking, a British theoretical physicist whose key scientific works to date have included theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity, and the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation (or sometimes as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation).

Geek events to celebrate on January 7:

1610 – Galileo Galilei observes the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time. He named them and in turn the four are called the Galilean moons.

January 7 birthdays of geeky note:

1502 – Pope Gregory XIII (d. 1585). The Gregorian calendar is named after him because he reformed date-keeping to more accurate astronomical standards… and that’s the standard civil calendar that we use today!

Geek Holiday: Phi Day!

The fabulously irrational number φ has two decimal representations (1.618… and -0.618…) so it can be celebrated both on January 6 and on June 18. Crazy, huh? Leave it up to those wacky mathematicians to create two viable party dates from one number. Double the φun, right? Phi is also important to artists and architects because it is the core of the basic aesthetic proportion known as the Golden Ratio or Golden Mean.Geek

Geek events to celebrate on January 6:

1838 – Samuel Morse first successfully tests the electrical telegraph.

Geek events to celebrate on January 5:

1896 – An Austrian newspaper reports that Wilhelm Roentgen has discovered a type of radiation later known as X-rays

1940 – FM radio is demonstrated to the Federal Communications Commission for the first time.

1972 – U.S. President Richard Nixon orders the development of a Space Shuttle program.

2005 – Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system, is discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory.

January 5 birthdays of geeky note:

1940 – Stephen Kleene, American mathematician who helped lay the foundations for theoretical computer science (d. January 25, 1994).

Geek events to celebrate on January 4:

1958 – Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from its orbit.

1959 – Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.

January 4 birthdays of geeky note:

1643 – Sir Isaac Newton, English mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian and natural philosopher (d. March 31, 1727) who is considered one of the most influential scientists in history.

Geek events to celebrate on January 4:

1496 – Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine.

1957 – The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.

1977 – Apple Computer is incorporated.

1999 – The Mars Polar Lander is launched.

January 3 birthdays of geeky note:

1892 – J.R.R. Tolkien, father of modern fantasy literature (d. September 2, 1973). He was not the first to publish works of fantasy, but his success with The Hobbit (1937) and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy (1954-1955) popularized the genre for generations of geeks to come.