Profs and Pints Metro Baltimore

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Folkloric Felines,” a look at cats in folklore and fairy tales, with Brittany Warman, former instructor at Ohio State University and co-founder of The Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-folkloric-felines ]

As any cat owner (servant) will tell you, cats are special in ways that make them more than mere domesticated pets. Moreover, humans’ fascination with felines is nothing new, dating back to well before the worship of cats in ancient Egypt.

Join Brittany Warman, a folklorist who has earned a devoted following among Profs and Pints fans, as she explores how our spoiled housecats have inspired the human imagination.

She’ll discuss how cats have been associated with a huge variety of folk beliefs, folk magics, and folktales. They were feared as an agent of the Devil in early Europe and celebrated and reviled throughout the Western world as a witch’s familiar, a creature of magic and mischief. You’ll learn about the enormous Cat Sith of Celtic folklore, the Norwegian Forest Cats of the goddess Freya, and the monstrous Yule Cat of Iceland.

Of course, cats prowl through our fairy tales, too. We will quest with “Puss in Boots,” converse with “The White Cat,” observe the ascension of royalty in “The King of Cats,” and more. Sometimes fairy-tale cats are kind helpers, sometimes they are dastardly tricksters, and they are both in the exact same tale. With a cat, you can never be sure what you’re going to get!

This talk promises to be more fun than chasing the beam of a laser pointer. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: The Norse goddess Freya’s cat chariot depicted in Ypres, Belgium’s 2012 cat parade. (Photo by Zeisterre / Wikimedia Commons.)

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “How Do You Fly This Thing?” A discussion of the basics of piloting airplanes and navigating our local airspace, with Nate Young, FAA-certified commercial pilot and flight instructor at Washington International Flight Academy.

[Doors open at 3. The talk starts at 4:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-fly-this-thing ]

For many of us, riding in an airplane from point A to B is an act of faith. Lacking much understanding of how the plane flies, how anyone flies it, or what’s happening around us, we sit there experiencing varying degrees of trust and trepidation.

Profs and Pints is offering those who want a deeper understanding of airplane flight the next best thing to a seat in the cockpit: An evening with an airplane pilot and instructor at one of the region’s largest flight schools.

You’ll learn the basics of how airplanes fly, focusing on the importance of lift, weight, drag, and thrust as well as how airplanes harness the laws of physics. You’ll be introduced to the various dials, gauges, and gizmos that are standard flight instruments in airplane cockpits and enable pilots to know airspeed, direction, and basic orientation to the ground. We’ll cover the basics of how to read a navigation chart and look at the “roadmaps” that pilots of all types use in getting around the United States.

You’ll learn how to read and predict weather like a pilot, based on how they take into consideration cold or warm fronts, low- or high-pressure systems, radar, and weather information sites. You’ll gain a sense of how to view clouds through their eyes, considering cloud shape, color, and height to predict bumpiness or unstable air and whether a nasty thunderstorm is brewing.

Young, who trains private pilots, commercial pilots wanting to become flight instructors, and retiring U.S. military pilots seeking to transition to commercial airline work, also will discuss how pilots make risk assessments using FAA-approved frameworks. We’ll cover explanations for in-flight turbulence and other things you might experience as a passenger.

Finally, we’ll cover the region’s rich aviation history and heritage and what makes airspace over parts of the region especially complex and restrictive. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Photo by Nate Young.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “Our Bodies, Our Minds,” an exploration of the relationship between our biology and our thought processes, with Justin Brooks, M.D., associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at University of Maryland, Baltimore County and scholar of computational psychophysiology.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-bodies-minds .]

For millennia, humans have wondered how mind and body are connected. Are our thoughts just the electrical murmurs of nerve cells, or is there something more? Are they the result of millions of years of evolution?

Explore the mind-body problem through the lens of measurable physiology with Dr. Justin Brooks, a physician-scientist whose research focuses on using mobile and wearable technologies to understand, predict, and influence human behavior and health.

He’ll describe how millions of years of evolution shaped the way our minds and bodies speak to each other, with our nervous system being the product of countless adaptations that shape how we react, think, and survive. Reflexes hidden in our physiology, attention, and mental effort reveal a “biotype,” a stable but adaptable signature of how we process the world.

The problem is that reflexes honed by a prehistoric world of predators and scarcity now must navigate the strange demands of a modern society. Rather than mirroring who we truly are, our reflexes often are just echoes of ancient survival needs. As a result, many of us live slightly out of sync with our own biology. We think faster than we feel, ignore our body’s quiet warnings, and misread the signals from our bodies that guide balance and well-being. Breakdowns in the conversation between mind and body cause stress to accumulate, performance to falters, and health to erode.

In a talk that blends neuroscience, physiology, and philosophy, Dr. Brooks will discuss how our specific biotypes might hold clues for realigning our ancient wiring with the pace of contemporary life to avoid the pitfalls of burnout, chronic stress, and mental fatigue. He’ll explore how measuring the body can illuminate the mind and how both can be brought back into harmony for the world we live in now. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Bar doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: Part of an illustration of the brain in Traité complet de l'anatomie de l'homme, a textbook completed by anatomist Jean-Baptiste Marc Bourgery and artist Nicolas Henri Jacob in 1854.

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “The Emerging World Order,” on global shifts in power and what they portend, with John Rennie Short, geographer and professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and author of Geopolitics: Making Sense of a Changing World.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/baltimore-emerging-world .]

We are witnessing a transformation in the geopolitical world order and, with it, renewed superpower rivalry and heightened security concerns in hotspots such as the Middle East and the South China Sea.

Why is all of this occurring? Who will gain advantage and who will lose out?

Get a big-picture understanding of recent geopolitical upheaval and what may be ahead with John Rennie Short, a scholar of national security issues who has written several acclaimed books on world trends and given several excellent Profs and Pints talks focused on geopolitical affairs.

He’ll walk us through the most important changes in the geopolitical world order since the end of the Cold War, focusing especially on 21st Century trends that appear likely to usher in increased instability. Among the developments he’ll cover: The emergence of China as a competing superpower. A more assertive Russia’s flexing of muscle against former Soviet republics. The slow but strengthening emergence of a shift in Europe’s focus from economic integration to geopolitical security, with Sweden and Finland’s entering NATO in response to rising fears of Russian aggression.

We’ll examine the implications of our own nation’s withdrawal from its commitment as a global leader and adoption of a more insular foreign policy focused on immediate economic interests.

We’ll contemplate potential future scenarios like the rise of a China-Russia alliance to rival the U.S., and we’ll tackle questions such as whether a more security-minded Europe will become an independent source of power. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5 pm. The talk starts at 6:30.)

Image: A Risk board as photographed by Ben Stephenson (Creative Commons).