Join us for an evening of complete madness and tasty drinks!
Grab your friends by the straightjackets and come get wild with us at The Last Word! From the influenza epidemic of 1918 to self deception and sports, we’ve got about as much madness as you can handle- and maybe a little more! Be there. Be MAD.
Date: Thursday, March 21st
Time: Doors at 6:30, event at 7
Location: The Last Word, 301 W Huron, Ann Arbor, MI 48104
Fees: $5 Cover
We’ll have buttons and T-shirts, and they’ll be as many drinks as you want to buy at the bar!
Questions? Send us an e-mail at nerdnitea2[at]gmail.com
Want more info? Check out this month’s presentation highlights:
Self-Deception, or: I’m Pretty Sure This is the Best Nerd Nite Talk You’ll Ever Hear, Alex D Jakle
Athletes, as a matter of practice, often tell themselves they can win a race or a game even when all the evidence suggests otherwise. But self-deception is hardly limited to athletes; we all lie to ourselves. All the time. About everything. We fit everything around us into pre-fabricated narratives\ whether true or not (and whether they fit well or not). Many – if not most – of the things we hold dear are founded at least in part on the exaggerations, half-truths, and lies we tell ourselves. But don’t despair! Because the dirty little secret? It may not be such a bad thing…
Alex is a law student and a Ph.D candidate in Political Science at UM. His research explores how the culture of amateur baseball encourages NCAA rule violations, for which he had to spend two grueling summers doing fieldwork in the Cape Cod Baseball League. He’s worried somethin’ awful that he’s lying to himself about the quality and progress of his dissertation.
Influenza Madness: The Pandemic of 1918 and the Flu Today, Joshua Stoolman
Pandemics seem to be a great topic for horror stories. 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, Contagion are a few that come to mind right off the bat. The best one I have heard just happens to be real. The 1918 flu pandemic was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic which infected 500 million people across the world and killed 50 to 100 million of them — 1 to 3 percent of the world’s population at the time — making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. This virus’ progeny are still around today and cause about 1 billion infections world wide each year. The H1N1 scare in 2009 illustrates how real of an issue this still is today.
Joshua was born and raised in Ann Arbor, went to Kalamazoo College where he majored in biology and came back to Ann Arbor do work as a technician in an immunology lab. Joshua is now a graduate student in the Program in Immunology at the University of Michigan where he study immune cell migration to the central nervous system in a mouse model of Multiple Sclerosis.
H. H. Holmes: A Devil Born in his Soul, James T Mann
Serial killer, con artist. Born Herman Webster Mudgett in 1861 in Gilmanton, New Hampshire. Sometimes referred as the Beast of Chicago, H. H. Holmes’ life of crime started out with various frauds and scams as a medical student at the University of Michigan…
James Mann is a local historian, storyteller and author. His books include “Ypsilanti: A History in Pictures,” City of Ypsilanti Fire Department 100 Years,” and “Our Heritage: Down by the Depot in Ypsilanti,” written with Tom Dodd. His most recent book is “Wicked Washtenaw County: Strange Tales of the Grisly and Unexplained.”