Today is Thanksgiving and although it’s primarily a North American tradition its impact reaches across the globe. The stuffed turkey dinner, Black Friday sales and other traditions associated with Thanksgiving are starting to make an appearance in many other parts of the world.
We wanted to do something a bit different for a Thanksgiving post so we thought, who would a geek want to have over for Thanksgiving dinner?
Of course we would all want different people to join us for different reasons. And yes, we tried to stick to real people.
Who would you invite? Here is our selection.
Stan Lee
He’s the co-creator of many of our favorite comic book heroes and a hero himself to many. Stan Lee helped bring to life Spider-Man, the Hulk, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four, Iron Man, Thor, and many others. Just imagine the questions you can ask if he joins you for Thanksgiving dinner.
Galileo Galilei
There are so many famous scientists from the past that we’d like to talk to but our choice is Galilei. With him we could pick almost any topic in science and he could carry on a conversation about it, whether it be physics, astronomy, or something else.
Hans Rosling
Professor in International Health Hans Rosling has given a number of TED Talks and if you’ve watched any of them you can’t help but be smitten by his energy and devotion to making statistics understandable. Try his GapMinder tool yourself and see the numbers come alive. Just watch out, he may attack your washing machine.
Ole Kirk Christiansen
You may not know the name but you know of Lego. We’d like to talk to him about how he went from making wooden toys in 1932 to plastic ones in 1947, and if he could even imagine the impact Lego would have on millions of would-be geeks around the world.
Mayim Bialik
Oh, there is so much to talk to Mayim about. Like, what was it like working on Blossom, what about the guys in The Big Bang Theory, what does it take to get a Ph.D. in Neuroscience, and more. Most importantly though, how does she pronounce her name?
George Eastman
Eastman founded Kodak in 1892 and introduced photography to the masses. Although we may not be talking about “a Kodak moment anymore” we’d like to talk to Eastman about the early days of photography, and what it was like making cameras a mass market commodity, enabling millions to capture precious memories.
Susan Kare
We’d like to have Susan Kare at our Thanksgiving dinner partly because we’re big Apple fans in the Pingdom office, but more than that, we’d like to know more about her design work. We could see ourselves spend hours chatting to Susan about her work on many of the icons, graphics, and typefaces for the original Mac. How do you manage to get so much meaning out of so few black and white pixels?
Ernő Rubik
Who has not tried to turn a Rubik’s Cube every which way to make each side one color? It may not be as popular as it once was, but geeks everywhere would envy you, if you could say that you had Rubik over for Thanksgiving dinner.
Shigeru Miyamoto
There are so many people from the video game industry we’d like to talk to but our pick is Shigeru Miyamoto. Donkey Kong was his first big game creation, which he followed by Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and many others. ‘Nuff said.
Steve Jobs
Finally, we’d like to see Steve Jobs show up for Thanksgiving dinner. If he would even have accepted the invitation, he may just show up to insult our cooking skills, but that’s okay, as long as we can chat some about Apple, Pixar, NeXT and more.
Who would you invite?
That’s our pick of ten people we’d like to invite over for Thanksgiving dinner. Each and every one has something unique to talk to us about, related to technology in some way.
Who would you invite? Share your suggestions with us in the comments below.
Picture credits: Steve Jobs by lwpkommunikacio, Hans Rosling by Pierre Omidyar, Stan Lee by Gage Skidmore, Galileo Galilei from Wikipedia, Rubik’s Cube from Wikipedia, Shigeru Miyamoto by Sklathill, Susan Kare by R.J.Muna, Mayim Bialik by MingleMediaTV, Ole Kirk Christiansen by Miniland Online, George Eastman by Wikipedia.
