Where: Backyard Bar and Comedy Club, 231 Cambridge Heath Road, E20EL
When: November 21st. Doors open 7pm, event starts 7.30pm
Tickets: £7.50, available here
Nerd Nite London aims to teach you details about subjects which you didn’t even know you were curious about, while you drink beer and learn things you didn’t know you didn’t know. This month we learn what to eat for marathon swimming, history of the apostrophe and how diseases get named.
Be there and be square
Nutrition in marathon swimming: Jelly babies and bonking
Nutrition in marathon sports is a multimillion pound industry. Most of it may be a con, and just the accepted norm. Remember being told not to eat before swimming? We will discuss floating whilst eating and drinking whilst swimming, as well as the pros and cons of different energy sources during endurance sport. There will be an insight of how best to hit the wall and keep going.
Nick Murch is a marathon swimmer, qualified to claim that title by having swum Windermere, the English and North channels (Northern Ireland to Scotland) and the length of Lake Geneva (42 miles, 32 hours). He helps train the Dover Channel training crew; and is well known to be built for comfort and not for speed. In his spare time Nick is a Consultant physician in a London teaching hospital with an interest in education and simulation.
Apostrophes, from Greece to greengrocers
Bitter grammarian battles have been fought over them, societies formed, books written, guerrilla punctuation carried-out… but where do apostrophes come from and where are they going? What are they and as interestingly, what aren’t they? Why are they the shape they are? And what would an apostrophe shortage do to greengrocers? Lydia Thornley has been on a voyage of typographic nerdery to find out.
Lydia Thornley was the first graphic designer to speak at Nerd Nite. She once cited nosiness as a key design skill – it’s led her to some fascinating projects for space scientists, Polar explorers, chefs, a City livery company, one of the Queen’s chaplains, urban beekeepers, countless charities and one of the 100 most influential Britons in the history of the web. Lydia never passes up an opportunity to research something in unnecessary detail.
Eponymous diseases: From Alzheimer to Ebola
A brief exploration of the naming of diseases and the often strange and eccentric people responsible. This is a tale of weird, rare or painful conditions, improbable events and tragic or barely sane doctors memorialised in the popular imagination. Have you ever asked yourself what is your favourite disease? No? Then now is the time to start.
Geoff Browell is unqualified in almost every conceivable way, but is a professional magpie, who collects stories and plays with ideas. In his spare time, 9-5, he is an archivist who curates memories by piecing together diaries, letters and photographs he finds in old attics, basements and lock-ups.