In Inkling Magazine's "Nerds Just Wanna Have Fun," Kurt Wong tells us about Nerd Nites, informal scientific symposia held in bars and clubs in Boston and New York where scientists hook up with vibrating tadpoles over lectures on synchrotron-based X-ray scattering, Z/W sex chromosomes, and worm poop.
If you don't know your fusiform gyrus from your fuel-efficient Prius, you might be out of your league at first, but put on your beer goggles (held together with single malt scotch tape) and you'll quickly become a vocal expert on every topic discussed. And if not, you can at least hope a fight breaks out when some drunk catastrophic limnogeologist pulls a Michael Richards and starts hurling untoward comments at uniformitarians in the audience. Now that's edutainment.
As you'll note, I did the illustration for the Inkling article, which gave me an excuse to draw this happy little camel spider:
I think he makes for an apt exemplifying topic illustration since, like potential Nerd Nite attendees, Solifugae are active at night, seek dark recesses, and get their nourishment from drink (Guinness and liquefied beetles, respectively... or, possibly, irrespectively).
Oh, and my finite apologies for the awkward and way, way, way too obscure (yet, oddly solvable) nerd pun in the title. There's just no excuse for that sort of thing.
