Nerd Nite Boston

Author Archive

Join us for another exciting installment of Nerd Nite at Oberon. It’s two events in one — you can join us for Nerdnite at 8, or come early for our first-ever…

NERD NITE SPEED DATING — 6:30pm. Our first order of business for the evening finds hosts Jeremy and Mary playing the part of cupid for 20 single ladies and 20 single gents. It’s like the Love Connection with nerds. Speed dating will start at 6:30pm. Get your tickets today by clicking here. Price includes admission to speed dating and main Nerdnite event.

THE MAIN EVENT – 8PM
As usual, our main event features two talks that are certain to delight and entertain. Claude Money with special guest Raleigh Fingers of Brobots! play nerd appropriate tunes for your listening pleasure. Advance tickets on sale now — click here to buy.

Talk 1 – “Dance Your PhD”
by John Bohannon

Science correspondent John Bohannon demonstrates how scientists around the world are competing to explain their PhD research projects with interpretive dance.

Website: http://gonzolabs.org/dance/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/DanceYourPhD

Talk 2 – “Bending Steel: Professional Filmmaking in the New DIY Age”
by Ryan Scafuro

Filmmaker Ryan Scafuro discusses his experience as the producer and director of photography of the feature length documentary “Bending Steel,” and how the advent of affordable high definition DSLR cameras and the popularity of crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding has opened up a new world of opportunities for independent filmmakers hoping to produce and distribute films on a micro-budget.

Website: www.bendingsteelmovie.com
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/bendingsteelmovie
Twitter: @BendingSteelMov (https://twitter.com/BendingSteelMov)

Be there and be square!
Oberon Theater
2 Arrow Street (in Harvard Square)
Cambridge, MA

Friends of Nerdnite Boston,
Our next event — and the last of the summer — will take place Monday August 27, 8pm at the Middlesex Lounge. Whether you’re an old hand at Nerdnite or just arriving in town for the new semester, we’re sure you’ll enjoy the nerd-tastic lineup that’s on tap this month. As always, DJ Claude Money will be on hand spinning the nerd-appropriate tunes.

Here is this month’s lineup:

Talk 1: “Edvard Munch: His Life and Work In Context”
by David Curcio
While widely recognized for such iconic masterpieces as The Sick Child, Madonna, and especially The Scream, Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944) has been largely misinterpreted as a tormented genius doing battle with inner demons and isolating himself from the art world and the public. While this is in part true, Munch was also a shrewd businessman, responding to cultural turn-of-the-century trends including psychoanalysis, misogyny and the anxiety produced by the Industrial Age. Also little known is the fact that the majority of his most famous work was done before he was forty, and that until he died at 80 years old, he was more prolific than any artist in history, producing a body of work staggering in its breadth, style, and contribution to modern painting.

David Curcio has been more or less preoccupied with Edvard Munch since 3rd grade when he saw a reproduction of the black and while lithographic version of The Scream. It worked its way into his nightmares which lasted for years. Today he is an artist living and working in Boston, his obsession with the great Norwegian never having left him.

Talk 2: “Sh*t [nerds] say: Just what the hell is a snowclone anyway?”
by Tim Sullivan
In this talk, Tim will discuss what a snowclone is, why he thinks they’re interesting, and how they’re not-so-slowly infiltrating every facet of your life.

Tim Sullivan has a degree in public policy. He has never studied linguistics, but thinks this sort of thing is pretty cool. He enjoys bow ties and ginger beer.

Be there and be square!
Monday August 27, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave
Cambridge, MA
$5

Friends of Nerdnite,
The next edition of Nerdnite Boston takes place Monday July 30 at Middlesex lounge, and we’re pretty fired up about this month’s lineup. Come spend a summer evening enjoying a brew with fellow nerds and learning a thing or two about your immune system… plus, an answer to the question, “Silk: is there anything it can’t do?” As always, DJ Claude Money will provide the nerd-appropriate tunes. It’s a great lineup — hope to see you all there!

Talk 1:
“Too Close For Missiles, Switching to Guns: Stories From the Front Lines of an Immune Response”
by Sarah Bettigole

Sarah is a Ph.D. student in the Immunology program at Harvard studying how stress influences inflammatory processes. Her talk will illustrate the social network dynamics of immune responses in the context of various pathological events such as infection and cancer. Having tutored and taught extensively in college and graduate school, she likes doing 3D design and animation of biological processes in an attempt to make science more engaging to a general audience. And sometimes to her advisor.

Talk 2:
“Silk: The Ancient Material of the Future”
by Max Chalkin

Silk is a natural fiber that has been cultivated and fabricated into textiles for over 5,000 years. The Tufts Silklab is hard at work reinventing it. Max is a member of the Tufts research group led by David Kaplan and Fiorenzo Omenetto. His talk will cover many aspects of silk’s awesomeness. For instance, silk has a combination of properties not found in any comparable material used today — it is programmably degradable, biocompatible and edible, and completely sustainable. Silk has wide-ranging implications for high-technology, medicine, material science, and global health. To date, the Silklab at Tufts University has created implantable, fully-biocompatible sensors and optical components, refrigeration-free drug delivery systems, tissue scaffolds and orthopedic devices, and biodegradable ‘smart’ consumer goods. With silk and silk composites, we can imagine a world free of plastic bottles and Styrofoam cups, in which drugs are transported across the desert without the need for refrigeration, food tells us if it’s stale or contaminated, and our bodies alert us before we get sick. High-tech silk implants and hardware can deliver drugs, promote bone and tissue repair, and harmlessly dissolve in the body or remain stable for years. With silk, the possibilities are limitless.

Be there and be square!
Monday July 30, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA
$5

Join us for the June edition of Nerdnite this Monday, June 25, at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge. We’ve got three fascinating talks on the docket — that’s right, an extra speaker! — so we’ll get things started early this time: 7pm. DJ Claude Money will provide the nerd-appropriate tunes.

Special thanks to the Cambridge Historical Society for partnering with us on this event! They’ve coordinated with us to provide two of the speakers, who will talk about their efforts to preserve and document our local history. Our third speaker — a special out of town guest — draws his nerdery from an entirely different realm… his talk will explore the mysterious world of metallurgy. Read on for more details!

Talk 1:
Are We Rolling?: Trial and Error in the Music in Cambridge Oral History Project
by Katrina Morse, Cambridge Historical Society
Katrina is a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Her talk will focus on an oral history project documenting the music scene in Cambridge from folk to punk. In addition to her nerdy interests in archives, oral history, and reading, she likes to do cool things like ride her bike, swim in lakes, and travel to exotic locales. She is currently editing three books to be published by Harvard University Press and is planning her next oral history project.

Talk 2:
Saving the Last Lustron Home in Boston
by Sonja Vitow
Sonja is an intern at the Boston Preservation Alliance and is also currently a third-year MFA student at Emerson College studying fiction. She’ll be talking about the Alliance’s work to preserve recent history, and to rescue an important modern house in Boston.

Talk 3
Heat It & Beat It: From Wootz to Modern Super Metals
by Rick Karnesky
Rick is the co-boss of Nerd Nite East Bay (now in vaporware!) and the host of Spectrum, the science and technology show on KALX Berkeley. He’s a metallurgist for Sandia National Labs in California and spends a majority of his time breathing in coke dust and ripping apart materials atom-by-atom.

Be there and be square
Monday June 25, 7pm
(note earlier time!)
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5

Please join us for the next Nerdnite on Monday May 28, our annual Memorial Day celebration of Boston nerdery. There’s no better way to polish off your Memorial Day weekend than with a beer, a couple of nerdy talks, and some nerd-appropriate tunes from DJ Claude Money. Plus, we’ll be giving away free copies of the brand-new issue of Nerdnite: The Magazine for everyone who comes out. So come on down to the Middlesex on Monday the 28th — we’ll get started at 8pm.

Here’s this month’s lineup:
Talk 1:
“The Walking Death, Poison Apples, and Tangled Proteins”
by Joe Mazzulli

These three seemingly-unrelated things have one thing in common — they all revolutionized our understanding of how the brain works, and in particular how our brain allows us to perform and execute movements. This talk will describe how the study of neurological disorders led to breakthroughs in the neuroscience of movement. Joe is a neuroscientist at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Med School who has been studying the biochemical basis of neurodegenerative diseases for the past 11 years.

Talk 2:
“Inhabiting the Global Anonymous (observations on the evolution of cities with a focus on Tokyo)” 
by Ishita Sharma

Ishita was a Travelling Fellow in Tokyo in 2010 (facilitated by the Dallas Center for Architecture). She has spent the better part of her life questioning and reveling in the cacophonous, serendipitous flood of life, intrigued by reflections of the universal in the particular and of the particular in the universal. She seeks that nebulous place in her and in the world where art, science, spirituality and design intersect.

Be there and be square
Monday May 28, 2012 — 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5
Find us on Facebook here or here.
Find us on Twitter here

Hello again friends of Nerdnite. Our first ever month with two Nerdnites rolls on — 8pm, Monday April 30. We’ll be back at the Middlesex for this one, and we’ve got an awesome night of urban farming and music history in store. DJ Claude Money will provide the nerd-appropriate tunes — this time with assistance from Brobot Justin.

Here is the lineup for April 30:
Talk 1 – “Urban Farming: From Backyards to Rooftops”
by Brendan Shea and Jessie Banhazl

Brendan is a LEED Accredited Professional who started his career in wastewater treatment engineering for environmentally sensitive areas. After 10 years of poop jokes from friends, he moved up the wastewater chain, founding Recover Green Roofs, shifting from wastewater to stormwater management. Working on rooftop gardens led to a natural progression toward rooftop agriculture, where Brendan and Jessie started working together on Boston’s first commercial rooftop farm.

After becoming frustrated with the lack of access to fresh produce and green space in her Brooklyn neighborhood, Jessie left a career in reality television and moved to Boston to start Green City Growers. GCG sets up and maintains urban farming plots for schools, private residences, restaurants, and corporate offices. Jessie’s interests and experiences lie in education, marketing, social entrepreneurship, and organic vegetable production. She has a dog named Stella who loyally follows her throughout most of her work day.

Talk 2 – “Glam Rock 101 – Wolves in Women’s Clothing: The Differences between GLAM-rock & glam-RAWK”
by: Vadim Akimenko (aka DJ 45, aka Vadim Hansome Akimenko, aka King Crab Handsome)

Vadim is a Florida transplant and has been a resident of Somerville for six of his 11 years in Massachusetts, spending the last four years in The Square. Some have said he is a pompous wind-bag that will ramble on for hours splitting hairs about music. His friends describe him as “a true zealot and filled with the spirit of the Lord.” Vadim claims that he owns a thousand records and that dogs like him. Neither have been confirmed.

Be there and be square!
Monday April 30, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5
Find us on our Facebook Group or Twitter or our Facebook Page.

Hello friends of Nerdnite,

The next Nerdnite Boston will take place on a special night and at a special venue: Tuesday April 17, at the Oberon, 2 Arrow Street in Harvard Square. Because of the special venue, we’ve got advance tickets for sale. In addition to our usual format of two nerdy speakers + beer + nerd-appropriate tunes by DJ Claude Money, we plan to bust out a Nerdnite first: a film premier! Before we get to the details, I just want to point out that we will have our regularly-scheduled “last-Monday-of-the-month” Nerdnite at the Middlesex on April 30. Details on that event will come soon.

Now, on to the lineup for April 17. We’re thrilled to present the premier of the short film “Pie Heaven,” written and directed by Aviv Rubinstein and starring Adrian Ward. Aviv and Adrian will also be our speakers for the evening, but as you will see from the descriptions of their talks below, their nerdy interests are not limited to the nuts and bolts of filmmaking.

Talk 1: “Who needs friends when you’ve got Google?  How Google is reshaping our minds, relationships, and ideas about the self.”
by Adrian Ward
Adrian is a doctoral candidate in the psychology department at Harvard University. He tends to get excited about everything and, as a consequence, researches almost everything. He wears his grandfather’s wristwatch, loves muffins and barbecue, and wouldn’t mind living in a treehouse.

Talk 2:
“Subatomic Screenwriting and The Psychology of the Moving Picture”
by Aviv Rubinstein
This talk will dissect the art of screenwriting to the atomic level, then build it up to the size of the universe. Then, switching gears, we will discuss the ability for the moving picture to control audience’s mind. Clever psychology or witchcraft?

After Aviv’s talk, we’ll premier “Pie Heaven.” Two best friends, Ben and Emily engage in a competition…If Emily wins, Ben has to pay her rent for six months. If Ben wins, Emily must sleep with him.
Watch the trailer here.
The film will be followed by a Q&A with both Aviv and Adrian.

Be there and be square!
Tuesday April 17, 8pm
Oberon Theater
2 Arrow Street, Cambridge
Buy advance tickets here!
Find us on our Facebook Group or Twitter or our Facebook Page.

March Nerdnite takes place a week early, on the second-to-last Monday of the month, March 19. We’ll have our usual “2 nerds and a DJ” routine — and some fine nerdery it will be, we’re really excited about our lineup this month. Plus we’ll be giving out copies of the latest issue of Nerdnite – the Magazine.

As always, DJ Claude Money will provide the nerd-appropriate tunes.

Forthwith, the lineup for March Nerdnite:
1. Pan American Music, from Buddy Bolden to Los Rakas
by Galen Moore
Galen is the web editor at Boston Business Journal, and a masters candidate at Northeastern University, studying startup accelerators. He;s also a sometime DJ on the MIT radio, where he learned to dabble in musical styles he knows little about. He grew up in Oakland, Calif., and Tokyo, Japan, and he’s a licensed sea captain. He’s lived in Boston since 1995.

2.The future of retail… Coming to a store near you
by Aaron Chio
Aaron is a retail ‘obsessionado’ and focuses his time on helping global brands understand consumers & future of retail. Aaron loves the science behind large scale retailing. He has visited hundreds of stores across multiple continents searching for ideas on how large scale retailers market and merchandise to consumers.

Be there and be square!
Monday March 19, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5
Check us out on Facebook — we have a group and a page
We’re also on Twitter

The next Nerdnite will be our second event presented in conjunction with the Awesome Foundation.  We’re very excited to have two Awesome grantees coming to Nerdnite to tell us about their exciting and nerdy work.  This will all go down Monday Feb. 27, 2012, at 8pm at Middlesex Lounge.  As always, DJ Claude Money will provide nerd-appropriate tunes.

Talk 1:
Psychology, Magic, and Meaning: Stories from a Children’s Circus in Afghanistan.
by Zach Warren

Zach has been a juggling and magic teacher at the Afghan Children’s Educational Circus since 2005.  He holds a masters in divinity from Harvard, a masters in public policy from Georgetown, and is featured in the 2008 Guinness Book of Records for doing something strange — related to his work in Afghanistan.  He’s now a PhD student in psychology at Georgetown University.

Talk 2:
Tales from the Hammock
by Hansy Better Barraza

Hansy is an architect and an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design.  In 2011, She cofounded BR-A-CE: Building Research-Architecture-Community Exchange, a 501c non-profit dedicated to creating new community spaces.  When she is not working at Studio Luz Architects, the firm she cofounded with Anthony Piermarini, Hansy is playing soccer with her soccer teammates -the Thunderbolts.

Thanks to Kara Brickman of the AF who spearheaded this exciting collaboration.  If there was ever a time to “be there and be square,” this is it!

Monday Feb. 27, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5

The first Nerdnite of 2012 is nearly here. Join us at the Middlesex on Monday January 30 to welcome a new year of nerdery — including the newest member of the Nerdnite family: “Nerdnite: The Magazine.” That’s right: In addition to our usual fabulous talks, and the nerd-appropriate tunes of DJ Claude Money, everyone who comes out for the January event will be able to pick up a complimentary copy of the inaugural Nerdnite Mag issue. We’re excited to show it off.

We’re also excited about this months talks — here are the details:

Talk 1:
Frontier Nerd: Going it Alone in Western Montana
by Mattie Booth
Mattie is a huge nerd for all things old timey. She is currently studying painting and 3D arts at MassArt but takes frequent and lengthy trips to her home state of Montana where she indulges in the wisdom of local curmudgeons in preparation for the impending apocalypse. This past summer she lived alone in a cabin in the Bob Marshall wilderness to paint, hike, learn a few survival skills, and practice being the last person on earth. She will talk about a few of the tricks and techniques she picked up out in the woods including butchering a rooster and skinning and tanning a hide. Graphic and educational photos will be abundant.

Talk 2:
CA$H FOR YOUR WARHOL: The Evolution of a Prank
by Geoff Hargadon
Geoff is a conceptual artist and photographer focused on subjects such as money, consumerism, and art as a commodity. He has created “CA$H FOR YOUR WARHOL,” “Runaway Reindeer,” and “The Somerville Gates.” He has also had a wealth management practice in Boston for 35 years. Worst case scenario for his presentation: free stickers for all.

Be there and be square!
Monday January 30, 8pm
Middlesex Lounge
315 Mass Ave, Cambridge
$5
Check out our Facebook Group, our Facebook Page, or our Twitter feed for info on upcoming events.