Poster designed by Cindy Wang.

Poster designed by Cindy Wang.


Nerd Nite East Bay returns to the last Monday of the month in November. We’ll shake you out of your turkey-day food coma with a presentation that was voted as one of the best from Nerd Nite New York: David Shuff will recall the rise and fall of Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride. Cesar del Solar‘s treatise on competitive Scrabble will help you balance your rack. Finally, NNSF alumnerd and Inquiring Minds co-host Indre Viskontas will dismiss the myth that we have five senses.

Doors will open promptly at 7. The bar opens then and The Lumpia Company will sell their tasty bites.

Rick, Rebecca, DJ Ion the Prize, and the Oakland Public Library will keep everything on the up-and-up according to the OSPD4.

Be there and be square.

This event is 21+.

Monday 11/30/2015
Doors (+food,drink) at 7 pm, show starts at 8 pm and ends at 10:30 pm
Club 21, 2111 Franklin St, Oakland
(two blocks from the 19th St BART)

Advance tickets are $8 and are available until 3PM the day of the show or until they sell out.
Your CC statement will denote these come from Drinkified Learning, LLC.
Door tickets are $10 (cash or card).

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A Journey Through Liquid Space: The Disney 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Ride by David Shuff

In 1971, Disney unveiled the greatest theme park attraction ever: the 20K ride. For decades it inspired, delighted and scared the crap out of anyone with half an imagination. In 1994, the ride was temporarily “closed for maintenance,” but it was a lie, lie, lie. In fact it never sailed again, and after laying fallow for a decade, the decrepit ruins were unceremoniously demolished in 2004. But the story—and the dream—doesn’t end there. David Shuff has dedicated himself to keeping the memory and magic of 20K alive; in spite of riding it only once when he was 3 years old. Sharing rare photos, video and actual crew member accounts, he will helm a spine tingling adventure through the rise, fall and surprising afterlife of the 20K ride—the lost 8th wonder of the world.

David Shuff is a well-rounded human being with a healthy dislike of most things Disney. Always drawn to the mysteries of the deep, as a child his dream was to be a marine biologist and his nightmares were about giant squids; it only dawned on him recently that he had the 20k ride to thank for both. Though marine biology was not to be, he’s happy engaged otherwise as a video creative at AKQA in San Francisco. Beware the plush giant squid behind his couch.

War of the Words: A Fascinating Glimpse into Competitive Scrabble by Cesar del Solar

In 1938, an out-of-work architect named Alfred Butts created the game we now know as Scrabble. By painstakingly tabulating the letter distributions of words in the New York Times, he created a great game that has withstood the test of time and gone on to sell hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. The first National Scrabble Championship was played in New York City in 1978 and won by David Prinz, who then retired from the game and went on to form Amoeba Records. This talk will focus on those among us who have decided to take up this game competitively. When we’re not furiously memorizing word lists or obsessively analyzing prior losses, competitive Scrabble players can be a pretty personable bunch! At the highest levels, Scrabble becomes more of a game of math, probabilities, and spatial reasoning. While this is not what some casual players may have in mind when talking about Scrabble, I hope to expose the beauty in this game and the many lifelong friendships that have resulted from it.

César Del Solar is a software engineer residing in the East Bay since 2014. He received a degree in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 2004; while there he became obsessed with online Scrabble. In 2005 he played his first tournament in West LA and became hooked, and since then he has played more than 100 tournaments around North America (and won more than 20 of them). In April of 2015 he was (very) briefly ranked number 1 in the state of California and is trying to regain that status. César currently works as an engineer and CTO of a data visualization startup named Leftronic.

Everything You Learned in Kindergarten Was Wrong: You Don’t Have Five Senses by Indre Viskontas

The idea that we experience the world through five senses is so ingrained in our culture that entire preschool educational methods are built upon it. The magic number five has a lovely order to it- corresponding to our eyes, ears, nose, mouth and skin. And when we talk about some sensation other than what can be captured by these body parts, we call it a ‘sixth sense’. But the truth is that we have way more than five and even those senses don’t work alone: what you see is what you smell, hear, taste and touch.

Dr. Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist and opera singer. She holds faculty positions at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the University of San Francisco. Her course 12 Essential Scientific Concepts was released by The Great Courses in 2014 and her second course, Brain Myths Exploded: Lessons from Neuroscience will be released in 2016. She edits Neurocase, co-hosts Inquiring Minds, and makes one heck of a Dr. Krieger.