Friday Nov 20th, 2026 at The Howland Cultural Center
Buckle up, nerds! We’ve got a stellar cat-tastic catastrophe for you.
Tickets will be on sale October 20th! Follow us @nerdnitehudsonvalley on instagram for announcements or join our mailing list here.
Three fun-yet-informative visual presentations with music, prizes, refreshments and guaranteed good company.
Author and journalist Alex Davies joins us with test engineering: the weird, fascinating, occasionally dangerous work of figuring out how things fail before they kill you. It involves shooting dead chickens into jet engines, dropping safes from four stories up, strapping a guy to a rocket sled at 647 miles per hour, and — yes — letting a grizzly bear loose on your best cooler design for exactly one hour of “bear contact time.” His book Kobuk the Destroyer: And Other Tales from the Wild, Unseen World of Test Engineering will be on sale at the show!
We’ve got a self-proclaimed (and proud) crazy cat lady! Anthropologist and Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Southern Maine, Dr. Susan Rottmann brings us “A Non-Scientific and Barely Anthropological Study of Cat Humor.” Drawing on the theories of superiority, incongruity, and comic relief, the presentation shows how cats are perceived as loving, hateful, intelligent, strange, terrifying, cute, and childlike. These contradictory representations make cats humorous while reflecting broader concerns about independence, identity, gender, loneliness, consumerism, uncertainty, and the desire for affection.
And we are so excited to welcome Liz Kennick, the CEO of Teachers in Space (TiS), a nonprofit dedicated to educating teachers about space. Participating teachers build CubeSats, tiny satellites with embedded sensors that capture data, such as radiation sensors and sound levels. These CubeSats are launched on low-altitude balloons and beyond: Lauren Sanchez-Bezos took a TiS CubeSat with her on her Blue Origin flight to space (!!!). From their site: https://www.tis.org please enjoy this student’s postcard to space. “Hi,I would like there to be lots of people going to space like it’s an everyday thing in the future.”
Friday November 20th at 7:30pm at The Howland Cultural Center in Beacon, NY.
$20. Doors at 7pm. Be there and be square!