*Tickets are selling briskly! If you want a ticket we’d recommend purchasing in advance. Seating is first come, first serve. Doors open at 7:30.*

It’s once again time for nerds to unite in the quest for deeper, more nerdy knowledge! It’s our fourth Nerd Nite, and we have a fantastic smorgasbord of fine beers and delightfully nerdy speakers to drop some science, arts and other knowledge on your mind grapes.

When: February 21, 2013 (doors @ 7:30p, show @ 8)
Where: Haven Social Club – 15120 Stony Plain Road
$10 in advance + service charge (includes a free drink!) Tickets on sale now!
$15 at the door (includes a free drink!)

#1 – Toys
Shane Turgeon

You played with them. Cherished them. Maybe even shot them with your BB gun – all before your mom gave them to the neighbour kid without telling you. They were your childhood favourite toys and these days they’re highly collected by people around the world. But there’s more to a toy than just being a toy; each is a work of art and an engineering marvel unto itself and the prototypes and preproduction materials that went into making your favourite toys are the creme de la creme of the toy collecting world. Collector and toy historian Shane Turgeon will be taking you on a journey down memory lane and showing you all of the hard work that goes into making just one, single, solitary action figure – all the way from concept to store shelves.

Bio:Shane Turgeon is a long time collector of toys, comics and pop culture artifacts. He’s the owner of Shades of Grey: Tattoos | Toys | Comics | Gallery here in Edmonton and started the Edmonton Collectible Toy and Comic Show over a decade ago; a show which has morphed into the Edmonton Comic and Entertainment Expo, of which he is the co-founder and event coordinator. He’s written numerous articles and a couple of books on nerdy subjects including his self-published coffee table book, The Force in the Flesh: Star Wars Inspired Body Art. Shane currently has some exciting television projects on the go that will hopefully bear fruit soon!

#2 – Sewers
Don Iveson

Councillor Don Iveson – Chair of the City’s Utility Committee – was initially reluctant about being appointed to the Utility committee because he figured it would be really boring. Turns out the world of sanitary and storm sewers is fascinatingly nerdy. In terms of sheer scale, it’s quite remarkable: it would cost $13 billion to replace the infrastructure we use to keep sewage and storm water from rising in your basement. Plus, turns out Edmonton is doing all kinds of interesting things to modernize our system and reduce the ‘total load’ – yep, ‘total load’ – going into our river. We only think about it when something goes horribly, horribly wrong, but Iveson will try to give you a reason to smile and be proud every time you flush or walk by a drainage intake.

Bio: Don Iveson has represented southwest Edmonton on City Council since 2007; first elected in the former Ward 5, and since 2010 representing the new Ward 10 around the U of A South Campus, Southgate and Century Park. Don chairs the Capital Region Board Regional Transit Committee. He also represents Council on the Edmonton Public Library Board. He leads city council’s Environment Initiative, chairs the City of Learners initiative, and supports the youth and NextGen outreach files. He also chairs Council’s standing Utility Committee, or the “Poop, Garbage and Tap Water Committee” as he sometimes refers to it with younger audiences.

#3 – Ice, Ice, Baby: How and Why we Quest for Absolute Zero
John Davis

In our everyday lives we experience only a small slice of the possible temperatures that can occur – even in Edmonton.  Somewhat similar to how we only experience a small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum as visible light.  But the variations in temperature are even more interesting than the spectrum of light.  Entirely new, and sometimes bizarre, phenomena occur when we cool materials down.  Harnessing refrigeration (and I mean serious refrigeration) gives us a control knob to discover new physics.  In my lab at the U of A we have recently reached 0.0072 K (the coldest temperature to have ever been reached in Alberta) and in the near future expect to be at or below 0.0003 K (which will be the coldest place in Canada).  [Note 0 K is -273.15 C].  I’ll tell you about how we can do this, and what we are hoping to see at these temperatures – like what happens to beer at these temperatures?  And I’ll try to perform some interesting experiments during the talk to demonstrate all this, hopefully without breaking anything or hurting myself.

Bio:  John P. Davis grew up in St. Louis Missouri – a relatively warm place compared to Edmonton – where he did his undergraduate at Washington University in St. Louis.  Afterwards he moved northward to Chicago – definitely a cooler place (pun intended) – for his PhD at Northwestern University where he studied superconductors and superfluids.  Now, as far north as he ever hopes to go, at the University of Alberta he is building a lab and research team to explore new physics at the cross section of ultra-low temperatures and the nanoscale.

 

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