DATE: 9/16
TIME: Doors at 6, show at 6:30
PLACE: DC9 Nightclub
TICKETS: $10 @ bit.ly/septnerd
WHAT: Three irreverent-yet-informative lectures by passionate experts separated by short breaks for drinking and socializing with your fellow nerds!
THIS MONTH’S TALKS:
“The Glomar Explorer: What we can confirm and deny about “vast government conspiracies” from Project Azorian” by Andrew Thaler
Project Azorian was the most expensive and complex covert operation in US history, yet it was, by all accounts, a complete failure. What lessons can we learn from the OG Vast Government Conspiracy about how misinformation spreads, how government works (or doesn’t), and how projects like Azorian can shape international policy half a century later.
Bio: Andrew Thaler is a deep-sea ecologist, conservation technologist, and ocean educator whose work on high seas policy and the environmental impacts of deep-sea mining often collides with some of the stranger moments in the history of deep-ocean exploration.
“Sex Ed Summer School– Who Will Be Teacher’s Pet?” by Rebecca Rose Vassey, aka Diva Darling
Did vibrators cure hysteria? What sex toy is a disability assistive device? Will a yoni egg fix your haunted vagina? Forget STI scare tactics and condoms on cucumbers, sex edutainer Diva Darling fills you in on the erotic know-how you wish you’d gotten in school– and busts some myths along the way. You’ll be begging for detention!
Bio: Diva Darling is the producer and femme-cee of the sex-themed storytelling show Smut Slam DC. She’s a sex educator, dating/relationship coach, and writer for The Pincus Center for Inclusive Treatment and Education. She’s also a burlesque performer and teacher, actor, playwright/producer, and an author whose short story “Frenzy” was just released in Best Women’s Erotica of the Year Vol. 8. Follow her at divanations.com.
“Artificial Gravity and Faster-Than-Light Travel: Spacetime in Sci-Fi” by Erin McDonald
Join Erin Macdonald (PhD, Astrophysics and Star Trek Science Advisor) as she walks us through the history and science of spacetime physics and how we can cheat (or not) these rules to make long-term space travel in sci-fi possible!
Bio: Erin Macdonald, PhD (she/her) – Erin Macdonald is a tattooed one-woman STEM career panel, with recognition as a researcher, educator, speaker, engineer, and consultant before her current career. She lives in Los Angeles working as a writer and producer and is also the science consultant for the entire Star Trek franchise. She is also the founder and CEO of Spacetime Productions, a production company dedicated to lifting marginalized voices and providing opportunity in traditionally under-represented genre stories.