Nerd Nite is an evening of empirical entertainment, back from the dead. Three nerds give short talks… in a bar. History. Science. Linguistics. Japanese astrodendrochronology. Unlike that time at your thesis defense, drinking and good-natured outbursts are encouraged!
Saturday, Oct. 27, 2018
Half Sour (755 S Clark St)
Doors at 7pm, Presentations begin at 7:30
Tickets (only $5) are limited by the awesome, intimate space. Grab yours early!
In honor of Halloween, three veteran nerd nite speakers take the stage this proto-Halloween to set the tone for the coming year of Nerd Nite drinking, friends, and good, old-fashioned weirdness. Geekiest costume (as judged by audience applause) wins a free drink on us.
Pirates: Scurvy! (Lost & Found & Found (& Found Again)) – Laura Lanford
Do you think pirate talk was all “Avast, ye miserable scallywags!” and “Shiver me timbers!”? Likely you’d also hear mutters along the lines of “Ow, me teeth hurt!” and “Argh, me aching bones!” Life on the sea was more scurvy than it was swagger, in no small part because we kept losing the ubiquitous yet elusive cure for this dreaded vitamin deficiency. From the Cape of Good Hope to Cape Horn, from Greenland to Antarctica, come and hear tell of the convoluted tale of the Scourge of the Seas!
Laura is a veteran Nerd Nite presenter and the co-Boss of Nerd Nite Chicago. She talks a lot about a lot of things, including medical esoterica.
Aliens: Astronomy with Gamma Rays & Gravitational Waves – Michael Kirby
Did you hear the one where a pair of multi-Solar-mass black holes do-si-do’ed into a single, giant object? Well you would have if you had Laser-Interferometry Gravitational-Wave Observatories for ears. When alien life gives us a call, there are at three ways their text messages can now be seen (with telescopes), heard (with distortions of space-time), and even felt (with massive neutrino detectors). Grab a drink and we’ll watch the universe do something it can’t undo.
Kirby is a three four-time Nerd Nite presenter and can often be seen around Chicago smashing atoms and racing bikes. Not necessarily at the same time, but also not mutually exclusive.
Death: The End of the Universe as We Know It – Jason St. John
Starting from the destruction of the Earth (yes, this one is pretty much guaranteed), find out just what science tells us will happen to the Universe (this one that we’re in). Is it complete heat death? Nothing but clumps of iron floating around in space? Or a place you can round off a day with breakfast after doing six impossible things in the morning?
When Jason isn’t nerding out over drinks with friends and strangers, he’s probably revving up a particle accelerator at the lab or falling down a research wormhole… which will mean more excited explanations of obscurata very soon thereafter. (Can we talk about the ancient symbolism of the ouroboros and the punctuated rise in the use of this word in English?…)