Nerd Nite is Going Electric!
Can you hear that buzzing in the air? It’s almost electric! For October Nerd Nite, we are going to see what’s vibrating in the air – from music to electricity to good ol’ radio waves. So tune into Nerd Nite at 6:30pm EST to hear Nathan West get nitty gritty about Telsa vs. Edison, Lavanya Ramanathan wax about how the Beatles rocked DC and we will interrupt our regularly scheduled program to geek out about radios with Tom Rondeau. Be sure to tune in to be there and be square.
Where: DC9 Nightclub at 1940 9th St NW, just south of U St.
When: October 14th, 2017. Doors at 6PM. Show starts at 6:30 and ends around 8:30.
Tickets: Get your tickets here. $10 each.
Tesla & Edison to Marconi & a Magician: Early problems of wireless communications and why they still haven’t been solved by Nathan West
Tesla revolutionized high frequency used in wireless communications. The Marconi telegraph company quickly capitalized on his discoveries to transmit wireless telegraph signals; their marketing, however, took several liberties in technical speak only to be “found out” by a magician. Telsa was further foiled by Edison persuading the US Navy to adopt his methods about the needed infrastructure for communication. These old feuds still pervade the wireless landscape we see today.
Bio: Nathan works at a small company designing wireless modems and formerly worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. He is currently slogging through a PhD applying machine learning to wireless communications and can’t get enough of the surprisingly colorful characters that shaped the communication revolution. He also thinks Edison wasn’t such a bad guy.
Beatlemania began in a hockey arena in Northeast D.C.: The strange tale of the first American Beatles concert By Lavanya Ramanathan
Two nights after their landmark “Ed Sullivan” appearance, four slightly overwhelmed young men boarded a train for Washington D.C. for their first live performance stateside; a show that would take place in, of all places, a hockey arena in Northeast Washington. Al Gore was in the audience. The concert was almost derailed by a major snowstorm. Tickets were less than $5. Hear the whole story of how Beatlemania in America kicked off with a very loud, very short concert right here in Washington.
Bio: Lavanya has been a reporter for The Washington Post for 13 years, and a music-head since birth. She’s covered everything from police stories to food and dining and now, what a reader has described to her as “the American mood.” She’s actually agnostic about the Beatles’ music, preferring the Stones. But she loves a good story.
How an actress and composer laid the foundation for the future of wireless communications by Tom Rondeau