Nerd Nite

When

Thursday October 10, 2024: 7:00pm to 9:00pm  Add to Calendar /   Add to Google Calendar

Where

LIVE (102 S 1st St)

For Whom

Adult

Description

Gather ‘round for an evening of informed and informal talks from a friendly neighborhood expert! We’ll have three speakers, each presenting on a different topic and sharing interesting facts that you never knew you never knew! Past Nerd Nite speakers have led deep dives into topics from the legacy of Louis Pasteur, to the origin of elements, to how a trumpet works, to a dissection of romance novel tropes. So bring a friend, grab a drink, and enjoy an evening among fellow nerds. Be there and be square!

 

We’ll start things off on a vast note with David Robinson and How It’s Made: Galaxies. The night sky is full of galaxies in a variety of shapes and sizes, including our home galaxy, the Milky Way. The story of how these galaxies formed is played out on the largest stage in the universe, full of collisions, explosions, the mysterious substance known as “dark matter,” and much more.

 

David is a physics graduate student in his last year at the University of Michigan.  Outside of physics, he enjoys reading novels, playing piano, solving crossword puzzles, and learning to cook new things.

 

Next, we’ll zoom in to the Soviet Union for Keeping Time Behind the Iron Curtain: A Visual History of Soviet Watchmaking with Jody Harnish. Join us for a storytelling tour of socialist timekeeping, slideshow style. We’ll get a crash course in horological history, then survey 70 years of the industry, designs, & fashion that defined watchmaking in former USSR. And we’re gonna look at so much cool dial patina (So. Much. Patina.) and party like it’s 1991.

 

Jody is a longtime AADL public library staffer, where he shops for, catalogs, prints, teaches, answers, makes, & occasionally breaks many different things! He once set off the Downtown Library’s fire alarms 2 hours after closing, and they were very cool about it.

 

We’ll end the night closer to home (but further back in history) with Esteban Touma and The Spanish Conquest: How the Americas were taken by Columbus, Cortez, and a Handful of Other Idiots. Much has been said about Columbus and the Spaniards that brought a genocide to the native populations of “the New World.” They were ruthless, ambitious, and relentless. But did you also know they were also f%#&ing idiots? In this talk, we will explore the ways their relentless stupidity in their words and action brought so much change and destruction and changed the course of the world forever.

 

Esteban is a teacher, content producer, and stand-up comedian who loves all things language. Besides being a Spanish teacher and media producer for Babbel, his writing and comedy has been featured on Comedy Central, NPR, Sirius XM, and The Moth. As a Babbel spokesperson he has been featured in The Guardian, the BBC, Newsweek, and many other publications. He’s also a recipient of the the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association award. When not teaching his language or telling jokes on stage you can catch him in a used bookstore, buying books he’ll never read. 

The Library will be providing a live stream of this event and we intend to make it available for future viewing. A video player will appear on this page 1 hour before the start of the event.