nerd nite 14: braaaaaainz
UPDATE: The prezis from the talks are available here.
As some of you may know, this Saturday (Jan 12th) is the day on which Hal turns 21! We tried to organise a screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey to commemorate this auspicious date, but the rights are incredibly locked down. Sigh. No matter, though! You can all still watch it at home with your friends and loved ones, and we encourage that most strongly 🙂
Our first nerd nite of the year looks like it’s going to be a corker, and has been set for January 21st, 6pm, at Hotel Bristol.
Yes, it’s a public holiday, but the Hotel Bristol is open (and NOT charging a surcharge, yay!).
Without further ado, our speakers:
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Electrifying Brains
Gina Grimshaw
Blurb – Humans have been zapping their brains for centuries. Gina Grimshaw will show us how, and explain why we would ever want to do such a thing.
Gina is a cognitive neuroscientist in the School of Psychology at Victoria University. She thinks brains are cool.
UPDATE: to be a test monkey for Gina, contact her.
Look Blue Go Purple
David Bimler
David Bimler is a physicist who went over to the dark side and became a perceptual psychologist. He will not use his talk about Pigments of the imagination as a way of recruiting experimental subjects from the audience.
The present story really goes back 150 million years, when colour vision in mammals turned weird. Things took another strange turn 30 or 40 million years ago: tropical plants started selectively breeding our primate ancestors to serve
as their seed-dispersal devices, and the primates used a clever biological hack to re-invent three-colour vision. Much later, colour perception was hijacked when we discovered language.
However, I will be concentrating on more recent aspects of colour research.
These include:
— the Russian Blues
— the world’s largest survey of colour language, conducted by missionaries in the 1970s
— the field-work used by Estonian linguists as an excuse to stay in Florence.
There will be colour swatches and words like ‘taupe’.
UPDATE: to be a test monkey for David, contact him.
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As always, do get in touch with with me if you or someone you know would like to give a talk 🙂
See you all there!
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