There has never been a better time to embrace your nerdiness and thirst for knowledge (except for maybe during The Enlightenment, but we missed the boat on that one). Nerd Nite Vancouver is kicking off Version 1.0 and is ready to rock your knee-high socks off with three fantastic presenters! So, be there and be square!
Where: Café Deux Soleils (2096 Commercial Drive)
When: Wednesday, February 19th 2014 @ 8pm (Doors @ 7:30pm)
Tickets: $5 dollars at the door
#1 The Other Side of Two Dimensions
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
With the advent of image making and seeing them on computer monitors, I believe that while we no longer get paper cuts, we have lost a sense of our three-dimensional world. What would it be like to live in only two dimensions? How can we learn to incorporate that third dimension to a screen that is photons thick?
Bio: My birth in a Buenos Aires hospital was recorded with a burst of a photographer’s magnesium flash in 1942. I knew then that I would become a photographer.
I taught algebra, and ancient and medieval history in a Mexico City high school until 1975 when I moved here with my Canadian wife Rosemary and two Mexican-born daughters.
I started as a stills photographer shooting CBC drama and variety shows. But magazines were my real love. I have shot for almost every magazine and newspaper in Canada, Time, New York Times, Vanity Fair, Stern, the Guardian, Globe & Mail and many more. I am also a gardener. I had a series of rose stamps for Canada Post.
For 13 years I taught photography for the Outreach Program of Emily Carr and for 15 years at Focal Point until it closed.
#2 Structural Colour: How Nature Makes Beautiful Colours Out of Fingernail Clippings and Sand (and uses them for, um, sexual purposes)
Joel Kelly
Colour has been described as “evolution’s most beautiful accident”. As long as there have been eyes to see it, colour has been used by organisms to hunt, distract, camouflage, and communicate. Although many are familiar with dyes and pigments that exhibit colouration through absorption of light, nature has also harnessed structural colour to produce brilliant, intense colours (such as those found in peacock feathers, opal gemstones, or butterfly wings). These colours originate from otherwise transparent materials (such as silica, cellulose or keratin), and are generated through the spontaneous organization of these materials into elegant periodic structures at the nanoscale. We will discuss the origins of structural colour throughout nature, its importance in biological interactions and how scientists inspired by this approach to colour have produced synthetic materials with controllable structural colouration.
Bio: Dr. Joel Kelly is a scientist working in chemistry at the University of British Columbia. His research is based around the development of new synthetic materials with structural colour made through self-assembly.
#3 How Comic Books Can Save a Life
Ian Boothby
“A talk about how comics from mainstream to indie can save lives”. Ian will give a unique perspective on the evolution of the comic book industry from when he first started reading them to now – when he creates them. He will tell the story of how they have affected his life personally, and how they can change our lives.
Bio: Ian Boothby is a multiple Shuster Award, Harvey Award and Eisner Award nominee and Eisner Award–winning comic book creator best known for his work as one of the main writers on THE SIMPSONS and FUTURAMA Comics, including the SIMPSONS FUTURAMA CROSSOVER CRISIS and COMIC BOOK GUY THE COMIC BOOK. Ian is also an improv, sketch and stand up comedian living in Vancouver where he writes for CBC Radio’s THE IRRELEVANT SHOW and co-hosts the SNEAKY DRAGON and COMPLEATLY BEATLES podcasts.