This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com.

So, 2013 is almost here. Time to break out the paper hats, the party glasses and the annoying air horns. How are you planning to spend your New Year's Eve? At home with friends and family watching TV? Partying it up (a.k.a. getting your drunk on) at an overpriced club / lounge? Or smooshed together with the rest of humanity in the bowels of Times Square? Well, wherever you are, I hope you have fun and remember that 2013 will be an amazing year!

While we're on the subject, an advisory from our friends at Uber: Surge pricing will be in effect for NYE, people. So don't be surprised tomorrow morning when ya see the bill. In Uber's own words, "NYE pricing is not for the faint of heart! The average surge multiple will likely be 2x normal prices, but during extreme spikes it could cost you $100 MINIMUM before time and mileage charges!" The most expensive times to take an Uber? Between 12:15am and 2:45am. There. You've been warned.

This Sunday is the Tesla Spirit Award Gala Benefit Reception at the New Yorker Hotel, marking the 70th anniversary of Nikola Tesla. Tesla died on January 7th, 1943 at the hotel in room #3327 on the 33rd floor, where he'd lived for the last 10 years of his life (1933-1943). Yup, he was a fan of the number three. And in case you don't know who Tesla is (god forbid), here's the Oatmeal comic celebrating the greatest geek who ever lived.

A few months ago, at the launch of the Queens Tech Meetup (complementing existing ones in Manhattan, Brooklyn and New Jersey), I wrote how cool it would be to have a Bronx Tech Meetup. Well, guess what folks--it's finally happened! The first meeting is January 16 at 901 Hunts Point Avenue. So go check it out and show your support for the community taking shape there. Any takers for a Staten Island Tech Meetup next? ;)

Want a no-strings-attached grant of $100,000 to skip college and focus on your cool projects? Of course you do. Check out Peter Thiel and his fellowship program. Applications for the 2013 class are due by 11:59 PM, December 31, 2012. That's tonight, so you'd better hurry.

The good ol' MTA finally gave us the holiday gift we'd all been craving: Subway Time!, an app providing a countdown to the next train's arrival arrives so you can slurp down one last mojito before heading home. Took them 11 years and $228 million but by golly they did it. Now, before you get all excited, remember there are a few caveats. It only works on the iPhone (for now), it does need an internet connection, the UI is bad, it only works with a third of the subway lines (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & S) and it could take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to fully roll out. But..... it's a start! And while we're on the subject, MTA, can we haz some WiFi pleez?

It's almost the end of the year, which means everyone and their uncles have predictions for 2013. Lemme save you the time and spell it out for you: Moar cloud, moar big data, moar 3d printing, moar wearable computing, moar internet of thingz, moar collaborative consumption, apple tv (duh), moar contextual stuff, moar privacy intrusions, moar k-pop, moar grumpy cat photos (hola Tardar Sauce!), moar sexting, moar oversharing, moar mobile everything. Moar moar moar! Meanwhile, here's a video you should watch.

And now let's see what's going down in the Alley this week...

Headspace: Your Brain on Music!
Showcasing the latest at the intersection of neuroscience and new media, with a focus on music. Live demonstration of a brain-controlled environment to drive spatial control of music and real-time visual effects based on the thoughts, moods and emotions of the headset-wearer.
Monday (Dec. 31), 10 a.m. @ Dolby Theater NYC, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, Main Floor Screening Room

Startup Pitch Night
Wednesday (Jan. 2), 6:30 p.m. @ Bar 13, 35 East 13th Street, 2nd Fl.

Raising Startup Capital
With Arie Abecassis (cofounder, AppStori and venture partner, DreamIt Ventures)
Thursday (Jan. 3), 6 p.m. @ General Assembly East, 902 Broadway, 4th Fl.

Explore Social Media
Thursday (Jan. 3), 6 p.m. @ Empire State Building, 350 5th Avenue, 59th Fl.

The Product Group January 2013
With Jared Raskin (manager, site and subscriber analytics, WeightWatchers)
Thursday (Jan. 3), 7 p.m. @ MTV Networks / Viacom, NYC

Village Tech Breakfast
Friday (Jan. 4), 8 a.m. @ The Smile, 26 Bond Street, #1

Foursquare Hackathon 2012: Connect all the Apps!
The best Foursquare hacks and apps will get global glory, swag and some mind-blowingly awesome prizes including ringing the NASDAQ closing bell, rocking tickets to SXSW, partying with an action figure version of yourself, or wearing the infamous Foursquare hackathon TITLE BELT!
Saturday (Jan. 5), 9 a.m. @ Foursquare HQ, 568 Broadway

Conducting User Research
With Diane Loviglio (resident mentor at 500 Startups and former Mozilla user researcher)
Saturday (Jan. 5), 11 a.m. @ General Assembly West, 10 E. 21st Street, 4th Fl.

Tesla Spirit Award Gala Benefit Reception
Marking the 70th anniversary of Nikola Tesla. Organized by the Tesla Science Foundation and endorsed by HRH Prince Philip of Serbia. Event will include a number of prominent speakers, dignitaries, artists and others who will receive this year’s Tesla Spirit Awards.
Saturday (Jan. 5), 6 p.m. @ New Yorker Hotel, Grand Ballroom, 481 8th Avenue

More events on the horizon...
A Conversation with Adaptly Founder Nikhil Sethi on Jan. 7 @ General Assembly East
#BARK Presents: New Year New You | What Can We Learn From Brands That Pivot on Jan. 8 @ Yotel
Invasion of The Hackathons: Creating Unique Opportunities for Entrepreneurs on Jan. 8 @ NYU Poly
January 2013 NY Tech Meetup on Jan. 8 @ NYU Skirball Center For The Performing Arts
NJ Tech Meetup 32 on Jan. 10 @ Stevens Institute Of Technology
Investor Feedback Forum on Jan. 10 @ Microsoft
Startup GC Panel #2 on Jan. 10 @ General Assembly
Startup Dinner on Jan. 10 @ Central Cafe (TBA)
Enterprise Technology Meetup on Jan. 15 @ Cooley
1st Bronx Tech Meetup on Jan. 16 @ Majora Carter Group
Hearst Fashion Hackathon 2013 on Feb. 9 @ Hearst

Until next week. Stay thirsty social, my friends! And Happy New Year! :)

We half expect Mr. Twain to rise from his grave to mock Mr. Blaine. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Poor Nikola Tesla. The man pioneers alternating current, dies alone and forgotten, and now his legacy is being subjected to the ultimate desecration: Becoming fodder for David Blaine's latest public work of utter ridiculousness.

The New York Times reports:

David Blaine, the magician and endurance artist, is ready for more pain. With the help of the Liberty Science Center, a chain-mail suit and an enormous array of Tesla electrical coils, he plans to stand atop a 20-foot-high pillar for 72 straight hours, without sleep or food, while being subjected to a million volts of electricity.

This is, of course, very similar to how Mr. Tesla once impressed Gilded Age crowds. However, Mr. Blaine has ramped up the wow factor by adding the endurance test elements--something in which he ludicrously specializes--and by adding the very twenty-first century feature of audience involvement. Viewers here in New York as well as London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney will be controlling the Tesla coils via ultrabooks contributed by the event's corporate sponsor, Intel.

Mr. Blaine ominously told the Times:

 “It doesn’t hurt, but it’s strange. I have no idea what 72 hours of exposure to these electromagnetic forces will do to the electrons in my cells and the neurons in my brain.”

Anyone interested in assisting in the torture of Mr. Blaine can do so starting Friday at the Hudson River Park. Anyone interested in watching can do so at www.youtube.com/electrified.

Anyone wishing to travel back in time to warn Mr. Tesla of this coming posthumous indignity is on his own.

Nikola Tesla, circa 1895. (Photo: Marc Seifer Archives)

For all the modern-day desire to emulate Steve Jobs, the heroic nerd isn't a new American trope. As long ago as the Gilded Age, scientist Nikola Tesla was a celebrity. He lived at the Waldorf Astoria and was close friends with Mark Twain.

But he was neither entertainer nor robber baron. Rather, as the inventor of an effective alternating current system of power generation, he’d helped usher in a new, electrified era. His ambitious visions of the future (and complete lack of a filter) made great copy, meaning newspaper reporters were always eager to put him in print.

In 1901, at the height of his fame, Tesla built a laboratory in the rural farmland of Shoreham, Long Island. Dubbed Wardenclyffe, the facility was designed by Stanford White and meant to be the site of his greatest achievement yet: Intercontinental transmission of wireless radio signals. But it wasn’t to be. “Wardenclyffe was a landmark as magnificent in concept and execution as America’s Golden Age of electrical engineering ever produced,” writes Margaret Cheney in her 1981 biography Tesla: Man Out of Time—“magnificent and doomed.”

Today, raccoons roam the graffiti-covered interior, which has been gradually stripped of all valuable piping and wiring. The soaring interior has been subdivided into warren-like enclosures, arched windows boarded over. The tower that formerly loomed overhead is long gone. Until very recently, it was a Superfund site, polluted with silver and cadmium.

Wardenclyffe today. (Photo: flicr.com/nikisublime)

While Marconi made it into the history books for his wireless innovations, and Edison is remembered as the great inventor of the lightbulb and popularizer of electricity, Tesla fell out of favor. By 1916, he was bankrupt. (That made the papers, too.) He died at the New Yorker Hotel in January 1943, reportedly with only a snow-white pigeon as a companion. For ages, he was remembered largely as a Doctor Strange-like figure, lurking in the shadows of scientific respectability.

For 17 years, a retired teacher named Jane Alcorn has been trying to turn this moldering near-ruin into a science museum. She even organized a nonprofit and extracted the promise of an $850,000 matching grant from the state of New York, but couldn’t quite scrape together the $1.6 million required to buy the property. But now the internet, that hive of fandoms, has spawned a new generation of enthusiasts ready to right the wrong of Tesla’s neglect. A fund-raising campaign on Indiegogo, spearheaded by Matthew Inman, creator of the popular web comic The Oatmeal, drew more than 30,000 donations, and the Tesla Science Center now has $1.25 million and counting in cash to go toward the effort.

Born in 1856, an ethnic Serb in what’s now Croatia, Tesla cobbled together an advanced education in engineering despite limited financial resources and struck out for America in 1884. Upon arrival, he proceeded, letter of introduction in hand, to the early R&D shop run by Thomas Edison.

The understaffed Edison hired Tesla on the spot, but the relationship soon soured: the American supposedly promised his hardworking employee a substantial bonus to redesign the company’s energy-generating dynamos, but when Tesla went to collect his prize, Edison reneged.

The tale is a nice setup for the “War of Currents” that followed. As America embraced electricity, two technologies wrestled for dominance: Edison’s direct current system, which was first to market, and Tesla’s more efficient alternating current system, commercialized by competitor Westinghouse Electric. The latter would emerge victorious, despite downright slanderous attempts by Edison to brand it as dangerous, including using AC to electrocute the Luna Park Zoo’s troublesome elephant Topsy, on Coney Island.

To free up capital for the battle, Tesla released Westinghouse from a lucrative contract for the use of his patents—a step that would contribute greatly to his later poverty.

Wardenclyffe in its heyday. (Photo: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

But by 1901, he’d had already moved on to bigger, wilder ideas. At Wardenclyffe, he hoped to establish a facility for wireless communications on a transcontinental scale—hence the enormous tower that loomed over the building. (In the end, Marconi would get much of the glory, though by building on Tesla’s patents.) Perhaps even more ambitious were his ideas for the wireless transmission of power, a technology that’s only just now, a century later, creeping into the marketplace.

However, it was something more mundane that brought down Wardenclyffe: cash flow problems. Even if the science had worked—and the Gilded Age had seen enough marvels that it might have seemed doable—Tesla’s primary investor, J.P. Morgan, didn’t become one of the wealthiest men in America by giving things away. The money dried up, and the project failed. The property was repossessed; the tower was knocked down (though the concrete and granite foundation remains). The building and land were sold to film manufacturer Peerless Photo, later acquired by the Belgian multinational Agfa Graphics, which owns the property today.

But Tesla wasn't completely forgotten. Many a curious autodidact would stumble onto the man’s legacy. Marc Seifer, author of the Tesla biography Wizard: The Life and Times of Nikola Tesla, described discovering Tesla in the 1970s, while researching another man: “I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous. If someone had invented all this stuff, I would’ve heard his name before,’” he remembered to The Observer.

Jane Alcorn, however, didn’t set out to rescue Tesla from obscurity. Rather, she simply wanted to find a new home for the small science museum housed in the local high school.

“I had been aware of a Tesla’s laboratory in a very peripheral way,” she explained. She knew Wardenclyffe, which was already empty, had originally been home to a scientist, but she didn’t know much about him. “Maybe that would be nice—to have a science museum in a scientist’s laboratory,” she thought.

In the meantime, more enthusiasts were emerging. The scientist appeared as a minor but pivotal character in the 2006 fantasy movie The Prestige, portrayed by a grave-faced David Bowie. A fictionalized version of his Houston Street lab (which burned down sometime in the late 1800s) appeared in the 2010 Nicholas Cage movie The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

So as Ms. Alcorn worked toward securing the site, visitors from Japan, Istanbul, Europe and elsewhere would call her up and ask to have someone meet them outside Wardenclyffe, in hopes of learning new details. “This has been in the past—and will continue to be—almost a site of pilgrimage,” said Ms. Alcorn.

That’s where Matthew Inman came in, alerting his hundreds of thousands of fans to the cause. Suddenly it was less a dry matter of historical preservation than a mission to do right by an unjustly forgotten underdog.

Mr. Inman first became aware of Nikola Tesla from a site called Badass of the Week and was struck by that typical disbelief that he didn’t already know about the man. “As I was reading the article I was kind of thinking, ‘Oh wow, that’s really impressive. Oh wow, he did—oh my God, holy shit, he did all of those things?’”

Impressed, Mr. Inman wrote a comic that was included in his first book, 5 Very Good Reasons to Punch a Dolphin in the Mouth (And Other Useful Guides). But it wasn’t until he began selling T-shirts that read “Tesla >Edison” that he realized the depth of devotion to this supposedly forgotten hero. “These things just started selling like crazy,” he explained. That’s when he decided to completely rewrite the original comic and turn it into a paean.

Mr. Inman knew he didn’t have the technical background to do justice to Mr. Tesla’s feats of engineering. Instead, he decided to focus on “the spirit of what he did, in terms of—the guy was a huge nerd,” he said.

The final product: “Why Nikola Tesla Is the Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived.” Within a week, the comic had over 500,000 Facebook likes, and Mr. Inman found himself the unofficial king of internet Tesla fandom. When he heard about the fundraising attempts, he stepped forward, offering up his hordes of eager Oatmeal readers. It took just days for the campaign to blow past its goal of $850,000. The project will require millions more in donations before the museum opens its doors, but such a day suddenly looks possible.

For years Mr. Inman has referred to him as an unsung hero, but between the funds raised and the press attention, “I almost feel like the dude is pretty well sung at this point,” he admitted.

The question is, why now? One plank of Ms. Alcorn’s plan for the site hints at the currents propelling this renaissance: Besides classrooms and interactive exhibits, she’d like to include a hacker space. “If you had an invention in mind but you didn’t have a place to create your prototype, and you didn’t have the equipment, machinery or space to work on it, we could have a space with equipment you might not have at home that you could use to create your prototype.”

Between his world-altering ambitions and his loner image, Nikola Tesla engages our infatuation with innovators and entrepreneurs. We’re in a cultural moment when shirtless photos of Mark Zuckerberg pop up on TMZ, even as he extols the “hacker way” in SEC filings, and Google cofounder Sergey Brin appears at Fashion Week wearing Google Glasses. Everyone has his own idea for an earth-shattering tech startup.

And Tesla is the perfect embodiment of the ever-optimistic idealist, holding fast to his disruptive convictions. “Even when everything was against him and he was broke, even when he was a little old man in his 80s, he was always working on something,” explained playwright Jeffrey Stanley, author of the semi-autobiographical Tesla’s Letters, which premiered Off Broadway in 1999.

Tesla in his lab with Mark Twain. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons

That goes a long way toward explaining his popularity with the tech crowd: Google cofounder Larry Page likes to cite him as an inspiration; Paypal founder Elon Musk, in what looks like a self-aware admission of his own grand ambitions, named his electric car startup Tesla Motors.

Edison, on the other hand, represents a corporate approach that lacks the cultural cachet it once held. In fact, according to Leonard DeGraaf, an archivist at the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey, Edison’s greatest legacy may be that he made inventors seem like a solid bet. “He makes invention safe for people to invest in, as an activity that they can throw money at,” because he proved he could deliver, Mr. DeGraaf explained. A valuable contribution to the history of American business—but one that, fair or no, reeks of mass-production in an era that fetishizes the creative and the artisanal. Besides, it’s so much sexier to take a chance on Space X, Mr. Musk’s great hope for colonizing Mars, than to invest in a practical, revenue-generating snoozefest like Paypal.

That said, the bigger bets are a lot more likely to leave you alone in the end, with just pigeons for company.

Good morning, sunshine! (Photo: flickr.com/globochem)

Gen Y just loves working for tech companies. This study cites "flexibility," which we're just going to read as "free food." [CNN Money]

AT&T towers are reportedly screwing with a pricey new police radio system in Oakland, California. [Ars Technica]

Quora assesses Y Combinator's latest batch of graduates. [Quora]

Speaking of YC: Revenue was all the rage at yesterday's Demo Day. [Bloomberg]

Shoreham, Long Island is one step closer to having its very own Nikola Tesla Science Center: The Oatmeal-instigated Indiegogo fundraiser to buy the inventor's last remaining lab surpassed its funding goal late yesterday afternoon. [Indiegogo]

Six percent of the American population lives out of reach of broadband. [Wall Street Journal]

Hey girl. (Photo: Tumblr)

Google Maps updated its transit layer and now has scheduling info for more than a million public transportation stops, but that still won't make the F train come any faster. [Google]

Speaking of Google, its Mountain View campus has a 3D pasta printer for its employees. We're not jealous or anything... [TechPP]

What's the deal with Obvious Corporation's new publishing platform, Medium? Nieman Lab breaks it down for you. [Nieman Journalism Lab]

Fresh off the heels of his amusing lawsuit debacle with Charles Carreon, The Oatmeal is putting his efforts into building a museum for Nikola Tesla. [The Oatmeal]

People pirate because it takes three years for Avatar to come out on 3D Blu-ray, apparently. [Gizmodo]