Join Nerd Nite East Bay at Club 21 in Oakland on Monday Oct 30th for our special Fifth Anniversary Show with the Bay Area Science Festival! Alcohol, music, a free Nerd Nite-brand multi-tool (yes, it opens beers) plus:
How the Monster Squid Lost Its Shell
Using CRISPR DNA Editing to Make Life Weird
Cthulhu, Horror Writing’s Most Terrifying Monster
Early bird tix just $8, $10 at the door:
http://bit.ly/NNEB-58
Doors, music and pre-show games at 7. Talks at 8.
CRISPR DNA Editing Gets Weird
CRISPR has revolutionized our ability to easily alter genomic DNA, and has quickly created opportunities to change life in important, strange, superfluous and weird ways. Learn how CRISPR has manipulated myostatin to emulate muscular superheroes, manufactured mesmerizing micropigs, manhandled malaria in mosquitos, and might make TB-free cows, modern mammoths and magnificent marijuana.
Megan Hochstrasser and Kevin Doxzen studied CRISPR in the Doudna lab in the PhD program at UC Berkeley and work in science communication at the Innovative Genomics Institute. Kevin spends his free time watching the Warriors and eating strawberry Pop-Tarts, while Megan adores Clue (both the board game and the movie) and everything about Fiona Apple.
The Cult of Cthulhu: A Century of Cosmic Horror Writing
H.P. Lovecraft created the weird fiction genre and revealed Cthulhu, a strange alien god that dwells on the very periphery of human perception and one of the most foreboding and unsettling monsters in all of literature. Consider Cosmicism, a philosophy based on the utter insignificance of the human race within a vast, carnivorous cosmos, and discover the cult of authors who have added to Lovecraft’s terrifying creations over the last century.
Ross E. Lockhart is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Word Horde and edited the acclaimed Lovecraftian anthologies The Book of Cthulhu I and II and Cthulhu Fhtagn!. Recent horror books from Word Horde include John Langan’s Bram Stoker Award-winning novel “The Fisherman” and the new Ouija-themed “Tales from the Talking Board”. Lockhart lives in Petaluma with his wife Jennifer, hundreds of books, and Elinor Phantom, his Shih Tzu/editorial assistant.
How the Monster Squid Lost Its Shell
Ancient cephalopods were the original sea monsters, as these gigantic and bizarre predators moved slowly through the oceans and ate everything in their path. But the evolution of fast-swimming, shell-crunching fish turned these once fearsome hunters into the hunted. Learn how cephalopods survived by changing from tentacle terrors into shell-less modern masters of speed, camouflage, and brainpower.
Danna Staaf is the author of Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods, which chronicles the 500-million-year evolutionary journey of cephalopods from masters of the primordial sea to calamari on your dinner plate. She earned her PhD in “Squid Sex and Babies” from Stanford University, works as a freelance science writer and lives in San Jose with her husband, kids, cats, and an astounding array of plush cephalopods. Book available at https://www.amazon.com/Squid-Empire-Rise-Fall-Cephalopods/dp/1611689236
Music and entertainment provided by Rubberband Girl AKA Small Wonder, with beer and cocktails from Club 21, food for sale from Grilled Cheese Guy, preshow games hosted by Ann-Marie Benz, and lots of extra info from the Oakland Public Library. See you at our Fifth Anniversary Show!
Tickets available now: bit.ly/NNEB-58
We’re teaming up with
Hoodslam, Nerd Nite San Francisco, and the Bay Area Science Festival on this madness.
Scientists are more selfish and twisted than the DNA double helix! For every heroic Rosalind Franklin using x-rays to see through life’s mysteries, there’s the base behavior of Watson and Crick scheming to steal her data and her Nobel Prize. Hoodslam and Nerd Nite team up as Franklin searches for revenge, while the air is filled with a distinct Musk of hatred as Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison face off in a match that is guaranteed to shock. Don’t deny your interest in the Science Denial Royal Rumble, where anti-vaccine advocates try to push climate change deniers off the edge of the Flat Earth.
- Tickets are $20. Our Science Festival events tend to sell out.
- Sunday, Sunday, Sunday! October 29th, 7-9PM
- Oakland Metro Opera House, 522 2nd Street, Oakland.
- Full bar
- FB event
21+, $20 cover, #dontbringyourfnkids !
We’re hosting alcohol-fueled educational talks at Chabot again on Friday August 25 . They have a pinball exhibit up with 30 machines you can play, courtesy our friends at the Pacific Pinball Museum [they’re awesome; you should also help them fund a permanent home!]
- Tickets are $15. We’ve sold out every time we’ve done this.
- Friday, August 25th
- 6PM – Doors
- 7PM – Talks in Megadome
- 8:30PM – Screening of Tommy in outdoor ampitheater
- Beer and wine!
- Food from Canasta Kitchen Food Truck
- Amazing Talks!!!
- The Science of Pinball by Michael Schiess, Pacific Pinball Museum
- Why Humans Automate the World by Camie Bontaites, Chabot Center OpenScienceLab
- History of Chabot and Neptune Beach by Dennis Evanosky and Eric J. Kos, East Bay Then & Now and OaklandHistory.com
- FB event
Poster by Rebecca Cohen.
Argentine Ants
eSports Explosion
East Bay Baseball before MLB
Start your night at 7PM playing Gigantic Jenga with Ann-Marie Benz, hear beats by DJ Citizen Zain and enjoy eats by Grilled Cheese Guy. Talks begin at 8PM.
RSVP at facebook.com/events/133142073913556
How eSports Powered Up
Get UP UP, not DOWN DOWN for Nerd Nite this month and don’t be LEFT out as we learn what’s gone so RIGHT to make eSports a billion dollar industry, and what’s LEFT to take this sport RIGHT into the mainstream. While Twitch and Blizzard have led to suddenly famous teenagers playing for millions of dollars in sold out arenas, there is also a dark side as the maturing industry struggles with stability, diversity and the ten hour practice days needed to B A success. Think you’re ready for huge money from your own pentakill on Summoner’s Rift with the eSports arena opening in Jack London Square? Come to the show to get your START!
Roland Li is the author of Good Luck Have Fun: The Rise of eSports and covers real estate for the San Francisco Business Times. He grew up in New York and moved to the Bay Area in 2015, where his life was changed with his first Mission burrito.
Argentine Ants, the Gateway Bug
A single ant colony from Argentina has now filled almost six hundred miles of California’s coastline, and brought with it an equally huge opportunity for education outreach. Learn about the surprisingly similarities in social behavior between this and other insect groups when compared to human populations, and what this can teach us about the future of humans’ own worldwide supercolony. Also discover the unseen world of insects right below your feet using ongoing citizen science projects and learn why ants are the perfect “gateway bug” to get the public interested in science.
Jenna Florio is a Research Assistant at the California Academy of Sciences where she develops projects for the public and scientists to work together on backyard insect populations. She has studied the social behavior of spiders in the jungles of Costa Rica, the migrating behavior of malaria mosquitos, and loves both insects and humans enough to inspire her current work on keeping ants out of your kitchen.
East Bay Baseball Before MLB
The Oakland A’s are now #RootedInOakland, but the roots of professional baseball in the Bay Area stretch back over 150 years. Starting with the Live Oaks Base Ball Club in 1866, Oakland became a hub for professional baseball outside of the Major Leagues. Oakland was also one of the pioneering locations for racial integration with the first African-American to play in organized white baseball a half century before Jackie Robinson, and the East Bay also featured an early integrated league. Discover the locations of long lost stadiums scattered throughout the Bay Area, get an old timey base ball demonstration by Bay Area Vintage Base Ball and learn about the significant history of baseball in the East Bay before the arrival of the A’s and Giants.
Cyrus [suh-ROOS] Farivar is the Senior Business Editor at Ars Technica, and is also an author and radio producer. A fourth-generation Californian, Cyrus grew up with the Los Angeles Dodgers but frequently can be found at the Oakland Coliseum when the tickets are only $5.
Tix: https://nerdniteeb.yapsody.com/event/book/105426/432851