Nerd Nite

*** Please note this is a ticketed event and I am not the organizer! I just like going to these and want to meet new people.

Tickets can be purchased here!

Nerd Nite is a casual, bar-based event where smart, curious people give short, entertaining talks about things they’re obsessed with (science, history, pop culture, weird research, niche hobbies, etc) without academic pretension. It’s learning, but fun.

This event is for people who want to go to Nerd Nite but might not know anyone to go with.

*Presentation #1
What I Like About You: Relationship Science and Interpersonal Attraction
by Marisa Cohen

Description: Get ready to decode the science of love and attraction! This presentation dives into what really drives our romantic choices and the surprising research behind it all. You’ll also learn a clever, science-backed formula to estimate how many potential partners are actually in your dating pool (yes, math meets matchmaking!). You will (hopefully) walk away with fresh insights and practical tools to make smarter, more intentional choices in your love life and maybe even become a more discerning and confident dater.

*Presentation #2
Pre-Internet National Stereotypes Through the Lens of Nintendo’s ‘Punch-Out’
by Brian Dillon

Description: In a time before the internet was widely accessible, the most brilliant minds in the world’s most ethnically homogenous nation endeavored to create a new video game for American children. Their task: design a rogue’s gallery of international villains that prepubescent Americans would be eager to punch in the face. Instead, what their years of labor and technological genius produced was a video game that managed to offend more distinct demographics than any to exist before. Except of course… one.

*Presentation #3
How a Dictator Is Built and Broken: My Time Living With Noriega’s Right-Hand Man
by Cillian Dunne

Description: The United States has spent more than a century shaping who holds power in Latin America, beginning with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. This talk uses Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega as a case study to show how dictators are not born but carefully engineered through intelligence agencies, money, and foreign policy. Drawing on extensive research from his time in Panama, writing the book The Right Hand Man, author Cillian Dunne takes the audience behind the scenes of how the same system that builds strongmen eventually turns on them.