EXPAND YOUR MIND
Nerd Nite Albuquerque kicks off inaugural event by pairing education and beer
Nat Baca often enjoys some of his hobbies with beer. It’s a perfect fit for Baca as he’s one of the co-bosses of Nerd Nite Albuquerque. The event is a semiformal network of like-minded people and events that are centered around the notion that drinking beer and having fun while learning go hand-in-hand.
Baca says the organization cares about delivering high-quality, evidence-based education without any of the pretension and overt seriousness that certain other lecture events have.
“The Nerd Nite network is a registered for-profit corporation and a trademarked brand, but we are not a particularly profit-driven organization, as many individual chapters are even free to attend,” Baca says.
Baca moved to the area last September with his wife, who grew up in Albuquerque, and was looking around for local events to attend.
“I was saddened to see that there wasn’t a local Nerd Nite chapter. I had been to Nerd Nite events in San Francisco, Brooklyn and D.C., and had come to love their mix of weird and interesting, so I reached out on their site and decided to start my own,” he says.
“Local Nerd Nite Chapters are run by ‘bosses,’ who help to host, organize, promote and find speakers for events, so in so doing I became a boss and a founder of our chapter. I was joined by two others who had also reached out, Andy Torres and Aidan Manning. Andy is a local artist who runs the Mobius Theory lifestyle brand, and Aidan is a water advocate with N.M. Wild.”
The inaugural event, “Microplastics, Tobacco, and Bears — Oh My!,” will take place at 7 p.m. Thursday, March 7, at Santa Fe Brewing Company at Green Jeans.
John Fleck, who will lead the discussion on tobacco growing in New Mexico, is the writer in residence at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former Albuquerque
NERD NITE ALBUQUERQUE 7 p.m. Thursday, March 7
WHEN:
WHERE: Santa Fe Brewing Company at Green Jeans, 3600 Cutler Ave. NE
HOW MUCH: Free to attend
Journal writer who focused on the environment.
The second talk, “Cleaning up the Rio Grande Microplastics – Use your Brain!,” will be by Matthew Campen.
Campen is the director for New
Mexico Center for Metals in Biology and Medicine.
Campen will discuss microplastics — small pieces of plastic that come from a variety of sources including cosmetics, clothing, food packaging and industrial processes — are everywhere, we don’t really know what they do to us, and now they’ve found their way into blood.
The third talk, “Bear Spray and Sunscreen Won’t Save You: How Exclusion and Fear Mongering Mangled Our Relationship with Nature,” will be led by Manning.
Manning is the program associate for New Mexico Wilderness Alliance.
He will give ideas of what 10 things need to be done to prepare for a 10-mile hike, as well as having good spatial awareness.
“I wanted to bring this event to Albuquerque to give a platform for all the interesting people here to share their eccentric passions, and to put a local spin on it,” Baca says. “I also hope this serves to expand the definition of nerd, and encourage anyone interested in anything to attend — we’re all nerds about something. I say this both as a nerd myself and as an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit behind Wikipedia.”