Greetings nerds~ I hope you all enjoyed the warm season while we had it. Hopefully any sadness you feel at the passing of summer is alleviated by the glorious return of random knowledge injections via Nerd Nite! Our 2025 season resumes next Thursday with three amazing topics for your nerdy fulfillment. Check it out:
Growing Carnivorous Plants
Everyone knows them, but can everyone grow them? It’s easier than you think! Learn the secrets of the flesh-eaters!
Audrey Gilbraith is a horticulturist working at Baker Garden & Gift. Her passion in life is to share knowledge about plants for anyone who will listen.
Common Gamer Strategies: League of Legends, Marvel Rivals, and American Football
Competitive eSports has raised an existential question: Are competitive video games a “sport”? A better question to answer is: in what ways can sports and video games be talked about in the same way? As someone who enjoys watching sports and playing competitive video games, I want to share how some concepts and terms from one context can be applied to another.
Idris Malik is a Physics and Discipline-Based Education Research Ph.D. student at North Dakota State University. Idris loves discovering new music and going to concerts at venues small and large. He also likes Disc golfing, DnD, playing online video games with his friends, and other various nerd things.
Plant Blindness: Are You Smarter than a 3rd Grader.
[Paula hasn’t gotten a summary to me yet but google defines plant blindness as the term for people’s chronic inability to notice or recognize plants in their environment, leading to a failure to understand their importance to the biosphere and human affairs. As a burgeoning plant nerd myself, I am so simultaneously excited for this talk and enraged by this topic.]
Paula Comeau is a prairie reconstruction ecologist with an emphasis on how natural systems improve human community health and wellbeing. In true nerd fashion, she has an A.S. in Biology, B.S. in Zoology, M.A in Composition and Rhetoric, a Ph.D. in Natural Resource Management, and soon a Master’s of Public Health (Dec 2025). She has done cornerstone work in the area of understanding plant blindness, and currently works for NDSU Extension, as well as being the Soil and Water Leadership Development State Program Coordinator.
Plus our usual drinks, laughs, and doorprizes. We are so excited to welcome you back for the resuming of FNN next Thursday, September 18th, 7PM (doors at 6:30), at The Cellar at Front Street Taproom. Tickets available on Eventbrite, or just bring $10 cash to the door.
See your beautiful faces there.
🙂 T
