Nerd Nite North Bay: ’50s Computer Ads, Craft Beer History & Samurai Sake | Novato

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Cancelled – Nerd Nite North Bay | Novato

Please Note: After two full and fun years of shows, Nerd Nite North Bay have decided to stop doing monthly presentations.

Hang out with smart people and learn some stuff while drinking beer at the Nerd Nite North Bay held on the first Tuesday of the month at Hopmonk Tavern in Novato.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Cancelled – Nerd Nite North Bay | Novato

June 2, 2015 talks:

Pint-erest
Looking Before and Beyond The Golden Age of Brewing

Fill your brain cup with the history and future of craft beer and leave Nerd Nite as a highly qualified quaffer. From “magical brewing sticks” to industrial vats, the styles of beer say as much about being human as they do about taste. Learn how the current Golden Age of Brewing is in many ways a tour of countries, traditions, yeast strains and techniques resurrected after hundreds of years, and ponder how the digital era of beer ratings and analysis can protect and potentially endanger the (thankfully) still-divergent value systems of beer and wine.

Ken Weaver is an award-winning beer writer and editor based in Petaluma. He’s the author of The Northern California Craft Beer Guide and serves as beer editor on the staff of All About Beer Magazine. Once upon a time he earned his M.S. in physics from Cornell University, and he’s since forgotten all of it and drinks beer for a living.

CTRL-ART-1950s
Advertising America’s First Computers

What was the killer computer feature of 1957, and how do you sell it? While computers emerged from the familiar fields of data processing and mathematical computation, the first commercial art for computers needed to demystify something that was still new and bizarre to most people. Learn how modernist language, graphic design and concrete poetry were used to sell and explain what would once have been considering terrifying, a simple machine that could read and calculate as well as any human.

Megan Prelinger is the co-founder of the Prelinger Library in San Francisco and the Internet Archive and a cultural historian of technology and graphic design. Her forthcoming book is Inside the Machine: Art and Invention in the Age of Electronics.

For Peat’s Sake
Biotech’s Samurai, Whisky and Sake-Soaked Origins

B.C. doesn’t stand for Before Cocktails. Pieces of 10,000 year old Chinese pottery show humans deliberately (desperately?) fermented mixtures of fruit, rice, and honey to produce alcohol, and centuries of improving sake production set the stage for a lone Samurai Chemist to revolutionize the production of whisky in the 19th century. Learn about the journey hard, delicious alcohol takes to arrive in your glass, and how ancient sake and whisky practices directly led to the miracles of modern biochemistry.

Adam Rogers is the author of Proof: The Science of Booze and an editor at Wired, specializing in science and geekery. Rogers was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT and a reporter for Newsweek and has written about whisky-eating fungi, comic books, Cirque du Soleil and black holes in science fiction.

Disclaimer: Please double check event information with the event organizer as events can be canceled, details can change after they are added to our calendar, and errors do occur.