Nerd Nite Edmonton

Hi, we didn't record it. These tipsy skeets are the only record we have. It was ... a moment in time.

😳

Omg I sound like god, I should go to bed

The cover 😄

It was good.

Tonight, I’m gonna give a public lecture about Alternate History.

Should be good.

@hugobookclub.bsky.social please reply with the name of the heroic fantasy Hitler book

In Olav's opinion, hallmarks of great alternative history include a very small point of divergence and a sincere effort to be realistic about the effects.

TIL Next fucking Gingrich wrote a book. And it's about WWII of course. And it's bad.

Meanwhile, Orson Scott Card "completely ignores the fact that genocide is bad"

Rofl

Points of divergence could be an election going a different way, or a ear, or simply a letter going missing. "The literature of causality"

Apparently Grover Cleveland got surgery in a boat? Which seems like a pretty dumb idea. Olav is here to talk about alternate histories.

The problem with Olav is you can't tell when he's doing a bit and his talk tonight is like, a bit? But it's a bit on top of a bit, and I'm drunk, and very confused

Oh it's @hugobookclub.bsky.social and he's gonna fire me as his friend after that debacle

Up next: the incredibly u charismatic and unfunny Olav from @hugosclub which will not auto fill for me, probably in protest if my bad joke

"also we kind of just look at the rover and see that's wrong."

Audience question: your a student club. How do you pass information on to each generation of students?

Answer: Instagram. (Just kidding, documentation)

Me, silently in my Bkuesky peanut gallery: Instagram is documentation.

Answer: it was based on how USB plug ins work and distribute information and plug-in ability.

Before: electronics were in a box. After: integrated into the structure.

At question time I'm going to ask if they were inspired by octopuses or spiders, whose brains are also in their limbs.

They also test on campus, hence snow. I don't remember if there is snow on Mars in real life, but there is in the brilliant film "Robinson Crusoe on Mars" which you probably don't care about.

Rover competitions are intended to mimic what it would be like on Mars, so they run them in Drumheller.

There is a space object/dinosaur joke in here.

And they have basically no budget.

But that's good because it means they have to think around it.

How do you make a Mars-grade rover on a student budget?

They're working on building rivers as part of their @ualberta.bsky.social robotics club.

Up next: Henry. And also Henry. "You can call us Henry"

Although one of them has the hobby of "disappointing my Asian parents" so you can tack that on as an epigraph

If you're in Edmonton... You know what this means.

Then they had to get the candidates to answer the survey first, so that when voters did the survey, they could match candidates. They had almost 85% response from candidates, including all 13 mayoral candidates "even the not so serious candidates"

They wanted to avoid magical thinking - there's no way "all of the above" is possible in civic politics.

After using an LMM to sort out initial data, Mack's team of humans sat down and bashed out what would make the best questions for their voter survey.

In asking what citizens care about, they got ... A lot of responses.

One goal for @taprootedmonton.ca for this election cycle is to inform citizens so the election doesn't turn into a sport.