Nerd Nite Vancouver

Our final episode in VIFF and Nerd Nite’s summer movie series takes us into the world of genetics with Dr. Greg Bole who teaches Evolution, Ecology, and Genetics at the University of British Columbia! Tonight he’ll join Michael from Nerd Nite and special guest host Dr. Carin Bondar to discuss the sci-facts in a variety of clips from movies about genetics and evolution!. We’ll be discussing the science of classics like Gattaca and Jurassic Park, but also more recent films like Annihilation.

When: Aug 28

Where: Vancouver International Film Centre

When: 7:30 – 9:00 – This talk will be followed by a screening of Errol Morris’ “Gattaca” at 9:30 pm. Double bill price: $20

Tickets: Here

VIFF and Nerd Nite’s movie series is back! This time we’ll focus on disaster and apocalyptic themes with geophysicist, disaster researcher, and sci-fi scientist Mika McKinnon. Tonight she’ll join Kaylee and Michael from Nerd Nite to discuss the sci-facts in a variety of clips from movies that cover topics from a variety doomsday scenarios. We’ll be discussing the science of movies like Mad Max, The Day After Tomorrow, and Sharknado!? Buckle up.

When: Aug 14

Where: Vancouver International Film Centre

When: 7:30 – 9:00 – This talk will be followed by a screening of Errol Morris’ “A Brief History of Time” at 9:30 pm. Double bill price: $20

Tickets: Here

SciFact vs. SciFi: Nerd Nite Goes to the Movies. “The Universe According to Hollywood.” Presented by Dr. Douglas Scott. This evening we blast off into space with astrophysicist Dr. Douglas Scott from the University of British Columbia who specializes in cosmology. Dr Scott joins Kaylee and Michael from Nerd Nite to discuss the sci-facts in a variety of clips from movies set in outer space. We’ll be discussing the science of classics like Star Wars and Star Trek, but also modern films like Interstellar and more.

When: July 31

Where: Vancouver International Film Centre

When: 7:30 – 9:00 – This talk will be followed by a screening of Errol Morris’ “A Brief History of Time” at 9:30 pm. Double bill price: $20

Tickets: Here

 

This summer we’re trying something a little different. Our new summer series of talks – a collaboration between Nerd Nite and VIFF – examines the pseudo-science propagated by Hollywood, and seeks to sift real insights from fake facts, in a fun, playful but peer-approved format. Each show will feature clips from a variety of movies on a science theme with a featured scientist on hand all doneNerd Nite style with drinks! We begin with biology, and our first presenter is Dr Carin Bondar.

Dr Bondar has been the host of Science Channel’s Outrageous Acts of Science, and she’s the author of several books including “Wild Moms: The Science Behind Mating in the Animal Kingdom”. Tonight she’ll join Kaylee and Michael from Nerd Nite to discuss the sci-facts in a variety of clips from cinema. We’ll be discussing the science in Planet of the Apes, The Birds, Arachnophobia, Snakes on a Plane, and more!

When: July 10

Where: Vancouver International Film Centre

When: 7:30 – 8:30 – This talk will be followed by a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic The Birds (9pm). Double bill price: $20

Tickets: Here!

As the Earth nears its complete tilt towards the Sun, we are also halfway through what has quickly become Nerd Nite’s biggest year in Vancouver. We can’t thank you enough for helping us grow this community of adult learning, and we’ll be announcing our fun new summer movie series very soon, but for now we have some important nerding to do. June 19th is not only the anniversary of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, but also it’s National Cocktail day. In 1806 the very first definition read as follows “Cock-tail is a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water, and bitters—it is vulgarly called bittered sling, and is supposed to be an excellent electioneering potion, in as much as it renders the heart stout and bold, at the same time that it fuddles the head.”

Let’s fuddle the head with knowledge and potions!

Where: The Fox Cabaret

When: Wednesday June 19th; Doors @ 7, show starts @ 7:30

Tickets: Eventbrite

Hosted by: Kaylee Byers and Michael Unger

DJ Bürger – Grant Francis Minor

Poster: Armin Mortazavi

IG: @armin.scientoonist

1. Non-Animal Dissections

Dr. Elisabeth Ormandy

Bio: Dr. Elisabeth Ormandy is a former neuroscientist who has spent her career getting to know animals better, on their terms. After retraining in animal behaviour, welfare, and ethics she now uses her science savvy to advocate for the advancement of science without suffering. Elisabeth is co-founder and executive director of the Animals in Science Policy Institute (AiSPI), a Vancouver-based national charity. She is an instructor at the University of British Columbia, an Advisor to both the Canadian Centre for Alternatives to Animal Methods, and the Humane Education Coalition. She is part of the editorial team for the Alternatives to Laboratory Animals journal, and also gives national policy advice to the Canadian Council on Animal Care on a regular basis.

2. The Potential Perils of Brain Eating Fungi!

Linda Horianopulos

From leaf litter on the forest floor, to the sugars in human brains, fungi can feed on all sorts of things. The brain eating fungi have particularly intrigued researchers, leading them to speculate about the possibility of “zombie fungi”. In fact, in the insect world, it is well documented that fungi including Cordyceps infect insect hosts and control their behaviour to increase the spread of the fungal pathogens. But could they affect people in the same way? The human fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans disseminates throughout the body and grows well in the brain where it finds and feeds on one of its favourite sugars. We’ll explore the world of brain eating fungi and speculate on whether a human mind control fungus could reasonably evolve.

Bio: Linda is a PhD candidate with a fascination for fungi! Mushrooms are cool, but the underappreciated fungal pathogens are what really get her excited. She keeps a ukulele in the lab to pass the time and a soccer ball under her desk to hone her foot skills, after all it’s all about work-life balance, right?

3. Seismic Spying: You Can’t Keep Secrets from Rocks

Mika McKinnon

Seismology isn’t just for earthquakes. Geophysicists use seismic signals to spy on everything from bomb tests and traffic jams to crashing waves and lover’s lanes. A signal is just the noise you’re looking for, and our planet is humming in its eagerness to spill subsurface secrets.

Bio: Mika McKinnon is a geophysicist, disaster researcher, and scifi scientist. As your friendly neighbourhood geoscientist, when she’s not creeping on seismic signals, she offers tasting notes on rocks, tweaks party planning to enhance disaster preparedness, and obsesses over impending doom. McKinnon scrawls equations and establishes plausibility for shows including Stargate, Star Trek, and [redacted]. Her writing appears in Wired, io9, Vox, and more. She shares her press passes (and social media) with a bevy of mischievous plush creatures.

May 22nd is National Goth Day. The Goths’ reputation as barbarians is mostly fake news that got told from the perspective of the ego-torn Romans who got their ass handed to them in 410 CE. For the most part Goths were peaceful hunters and farmers who were very sophisticated when it came to trade, diplomacy, and agriculture. It’s no wonder that these outcasts would become the inspiration for your Gr.9 self, when perhaps you first heard the dulcet tones of Robert Smith tell you that it was okay for boys to cry, practiced your spastic Ian Curtis dance moves in the mirror, and wore eyeliner just like Siouxie. So pull your black leathers and lace and get in here for the 44th version of Nerd Nite, where we have three amazing nerds to talk about genetics, poetry, and artificial intelligence!

Hosted by: Kaylee Byers and Michael Unger

DJ Bürger – Grant Francis Minor

Poster: Armin Mortazavi

IG: @armin.scientoonist

Where: The Fox Cabaret

When: Wednesday May 22nd; Doors @ 7, show starts @ 7:30

Tickets: Eventbrite

1. Can Artificial Intelligence Learn Chemistry/Physics?

Rodrigo A. Vargas–Hernández

Machine learning (ML) algorithms are used extensively in daily tasks such as language translation, image recognition, and navigation systems to mention a few. In this talk, I will explore how the fields of chemistry and physics have benefited from the use of ML algorithms. ML is divided into three main fields, (i) supervised learning, (ii) unsupervised learning and (iii) reinforcement learning. During the talk, I will explain how one can reformulate some chemistry/physics problems in terms of each field of ML. The results I will present illustrate how ML can help us predict material properties, similarities between chemicals and new synthetic routes, and the synthesis of chemical compounds without human intervention using robots and computers.

2. Poetry is Fucking Fun

Dina Del Bucchia

The worst part of being a poet, and being someone who enjoys poetry, is all the jerks who say they aren’t interested in poetry, don’t read poetry, just don’t get poetry. What everyone who limits their exposure to poetry is doing to themselves is making sure they’re having a less good time. In fact, poetry is very similar to actual popular art forms. Performed on stage poetry can be as hilarious and engaging as a night at a comedy club. On the page it has the capacity to go deep on subjects normally reserved for op-eds. Or to talk about human emotions we see reflected on TV and film. The musicality of a hit song is present in poetry’s rhythm and meter. See? It’s really not so different from other pop culture. Converting people into poetry readers is the only conversion therapy I support.

Bio: Dina Del Bucchia is an otter and dress enthusiast originally from the village of Fruitvale, BC. She is the author of the short story collection, Don’t Tell Me What to Do, and four collections of poetry: Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, Rom Com, written with Daniel Zomparelli, and the newly released, It’s a Big Deal! She is a senior editor of Poetry Is Dead magazine, the Artistic Director of the Real Vancouver Writers’ Series and hosts the pretty literary podcast, Can’t Lit, with Jen Sookfong Lee. You can find out more about her at: dinadelbucchia.com.

3. Genetics

Avery Noonan

From new ideas to recounting history, language enables us to externalize our thoughts and share our ideas with the world.  With the familiar characters “ATCG” and the resemblance of a code with rules and syntax, it is easy to think of our DNA as the language of life. However, instead of being used to communicate our ideas and thoughts, the language of DNA encodes our biological past, present, and future. In an era where you can order a kit online to sequence parts of your genome and synthesize a gene for the price of a taxi home to the suburbs, reading and writing the language of life has become a common practice in medicine, agriculture, manufacturing, environmental monitoring and the study of the natural world.  However, unlike the language you speak with your friends, humanity didn’t invent DNA to represent our own thoughts, and we are still working on understanding its intricacies. Much like copying out the characters of a language you don’t speak, context is everything and meaning is often lost in translation. We are going to explore the extent to which we can read and write the genetic code, and the challenges of speaking a language we are only beginning to understand.

Bio: Avery Noonan is a Toronto-born, BC-raised graduate student at the University of British Columbia.  He is interested in biking, hipster cocktail bars, beach volleyball, hip hop and the engineering of microbial metabolisms to build, breakdown and detect material in an environmentally sustainable way, and the development of genetic tools for these purposes.

Poster by: Armin Mortazavi IG: @armin_mortazavi

Where: The Fox Cabaret

When: Wednesday April 17th; Doors @ 7, show starts @ 7:30

Tickets: Eventbrite

1. Orbital Resonance

Christa Van Laerhoven

We generally think of planets (and the smaller stuff, too) as going about their orbits, minding their own business. In actuality, our Solar System is a giant interact-a-thon, as fellow planetary bodies perturb each other via gravity. I will talk about a kind of interaction called orbital resonance and a way to diagnose that this particular kind of interaction is happening. The cast celestial characters that will help me demonstrate these concepts includes Neptune and everyone’s favourite not-a-planet Pluto.

Bio: Christa Van Laerhoven is a valley girl from Agassiz and a postdoctoral fellow at UBC, studying what she likes to call ‘orbital shenanigans’ (how the orbits of planets, asteroids, and moons can change over time). She has a PhD from the Department of Planetary Sciences, University of Arizona and a B.Sc. from UBC in Physics and Astronomy (Honours).

2. Science Through Storytelling

Kristi Charish

Ask any gamer who’s played the sci-fi video game series Mass Effect about the genophage and they will spin you a tale of a genetically engineered virus that devastates an entire species’ fertility, and then they’ll tell you of the mission they’re on to discover and distribute a cure. So if a video game can convince millions of gamers to engineer a vaccine and release it across the galaxy, why can’t we convince people on earth to vaccinate against measles and take their antibiotics? Are we speaking a different language? Living in an overlapping but parallel universe? Tonight we’ll talk about the power of the narrative and why it works so well. Video games, TV procedurals, films, and even our arch nemesis pseudoscience use the power of the narrative and we can too!

Bio: Kristi is the author of OWL AND THE JAPANESE CIRCUS, an urban fantasy series about a modern-day “Indiana Jane” who reluctantly navigates the hidden supernatural world, and THE VOODOO KILLINGS, an urban fantasy/mystery about a voodoo practitioner living in Seattle with the ghost of a deceased grunge rocker. She writes what she loves; adventure heavy stories featuring strong, savvy female protagonists, pop culture, and the occasional RPG fantasy game thrown in the mix.

Kristi is also a scientist with a BSc and MSc from Simon Fraser University in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry and a PhD in Zoology from the University of British Columbia. Her specialties are genetics, cell biology, and molecular biology, all of which she draws upon in her writing.

Twitter: @kristicharish

FB: http://www.facebook.com/KristiCharishAuthor

Website: http://www.kristicharish.com

Instagram: @charishkristi

3. How to Teach a Robot to Walk in Two Simple Steps

Glen Berseth

Moving around in our world is a very important skill. It allows us to get to the bar so we can order drinks, or get to the bathroom after too many trips to the bar. In my talk, I will first describe the hand-holding process needed to get a robot to take its first steps. After a robot can walk I will describe what comes next when a new robot parent sets his child free to explore in a simulated world.

Bio: Glen Berseth is a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia where he works in the Motion Control and Character Animation group. He received his BSc degree in Computer Science from York University in 2012 and his MSc from York University in 2014 for optimization and authoring crowd simulations. Glen is almost complete his PhD and will be starting a PostDoc at Berkeley where he will continue to force robots to do his bidding.

Does anyone remember “The Six Million Dollar Man” or the spin-off “The Bionic Woman? If not you probably have heard the catch phrase “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was. Better…stronger…faster.” The show even has a sweet premise: “After a severely injured astronaut is rebuilt with nuclear powered limbs and implants, he serves as an intelligence agent.” !!! The problem though is that even if you have nostalgic feelings of this show as a kid, in today’s world it’s practically unwatchable. Technologies dreamed in stories back then rarely translated well to a live-action show or movie mainly because the fictional technologies were too far beyond real life technological capabilites. The Scientific-technical revolution from the 1940’s to the 1970’s laid the groundwork for some amazing science fiction, but only recently have some of these technologies started to become reality which is why the tech sector in society today has become so robust and exciting.

Nerd Nite is proud to go on a special field trip to the #BCTECHSummit sponsored by Unbounce, where we’ll hear from three tech nerds to share their stories! If you’re never been to Nerd Nite before, we’re short nerdy talks with drinks. It’s a casual learning and drinking environment!

Where: Unbounce (400-401 West Georgia St)

When: Tuesday March 12th; Doors @ 7, show starts @ 7:30

Tickets: Eventbrite

 

1. The Crossroads Between Data & Baking

Claire Son

Claire Son is a born and raised Calgarian and made the move to Vancouver in 2015. She is the Data Analyst Lead here at Unbounce where she helps Unbouncers understand the impact of their work by uncovering data insights, all while spreading data best practices and knowledge company wide. Claire has been involved in a number of data projects ranging from deep dive analyses to enterprise data migrations and loves to empower people with data.

Bio: When Claire isn’t spending her time on a data problem she’s either travelling the world, playing video games or baking. Claire is an avid baker and recently joined the Pastry Team at Terra Breads.

2. Nonprofits: Why we love them, and hate them. (But mostly love them)

Najeed Kassam

The nonprofit sector is misunderstood and underappreciated. And while it’s important to ask questions and value accountability, our society has to understand how nonprofits operate to truly evaluate them. Join Nejeed Kassam, founder of Keela and the Better Canada Initiative, to discuss the nonprofit sector, its role in civil society, and the gap that exists between what most donors believe and the reality of nonprofit work.
We’ll even tackle the question: Should people who work in nonprofits be paid for their work? (Spoiler alert: absolutely.)

Bio: Najeed Kassam is the CEO and founder of Keela – an impact technology company, dedicated to empowering small non-profits with accessible software. He was educated at McGill University (B.A.) and Osgoode Hall Law School (JD). Called to the Bar in Ontario in 2015 and in British Columbia in 2017, Nejeed is also the founder of the Better Canada Initiative. He is the former Executive Director of both End Poverty Now and Conversations for Change. Nejeed is a global innovator with experience working for the United Nations and the Senate of Canada. He is the author of the book ‘High on Life’ (foreword written by former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien) and the co-producer of the documentary, ‘Conversations for Change’. Nejeed sits on a number of start-up and non-profit advisory boards, has spoken at conferences around the world, and is currently a member of the Global Shapers Community (World Economic Forum) and a fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts in the UK.

3. On Being a Female Tech CEO

Maraym Sadeghi

When you think of tough nuts to crack in the CEO business world what comes to mind? Being a first-time CEO? Being a female CEO? Being a technical CEO? I’d like to share my experience of having fun combining all of them together. Saying any one of these things is difficult would be the understatement of the decade!. If you are a first-time CEO, not many will trust you. If you are a female, there are some prejudices you’ll face whether you like it or not. Coming from a technical background means you don’t have the business eye and training- but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn it! Join me on my journey in discovering how it’s less about what you know (and more about what you don’t know) and how you plan to manage that so you can make your dreams come true!

Bio: In 2012, Maryam founded MetaOptima Technology Inc. in Vancouver, Canada, where MoleScope and DermEngine were developed for intelligent dermatology, smart skin imaging, analytics and management. The company was one of 10 that were shortlisted for the 2013 BCIC New Ventures Competition, and won a $40,000 Wavefront Wireless prize package. In 2014, Dr. Sadeghi also won the Venture Prize from Coast Capital Savings.