Date: Wednesday September 7, 2011
Time: 8pm
Location: Genna’s Lounge (map)
Urination Explanation – What Is Pee and Why Is It So Awesome?!!?!
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Summary: Pee!!! Jokes about it will never stop being funny and facts about it will never stop being interesting! This talk will explain what pee is, why it is yellow, why it smells, how it connects us with the rest of life on earth, and how humans have used it to learn more about the nature of the universe. Teaser fact: humans used pee to make the worlds first explosives! Get ready for an unruly undertaking of urinary utterances!
Presenter bio: Lee Bishop is a PhD chemist and professional science enthusiast. When not pushing the boundaries of knowledge in his research as a postdoctoral fellow at UW-Madison he is trying to come up with simple explanations for our complex universe for his blog Science Minus Details. Lee loves to pee.
Mind-Bending Morphology and the Science of Human Language
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Summary: Language pervades our reality; whether spoken, written, typed, or signed, language is an inescapable fact of human existence. One of the most basic functions of a human language is to describe events in the world around (and inside of!) us, and so it’s reasonable to start by examining the fundamentals: in a human language, how can you tell who did what to who(m)? This talk will dig beyond familiar European languages to show that the answers to this question are surprisingly diverse!
Presenter bio: Hunter Thompson Lockwood is a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been speaking human languages in his personal life since the mid-to-late 1980’s. He is currently putting his nerdish obsessions over minutiae to good use by helping the Potawatomi people put together the first real dictionary for their language. In his spare time he rambles to his fiancée and cat.
“Endless Forms Most Beautiful and Most Wonderful” – The Evolution of Penis Morphology
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Summary: Penises are perhaps simultaneously the most studied and least studied adaptations in the animal kingdom. Hobbyists have been examining them for millennia, however until recently, evolutionary biologists have paid little attention. This talk will explore the different selective pressures on penis morphology, with colorful illustrations and explanations of some of nature’s strangest penises. It will conclude by considering how these forces have shaped the human penis.
Presenter bio: Hayley Clatterbuck is a graduate student studying the philosophy of biology at UW-Madison. She is interested in evolutionary biology and anthropology, and she always appreciates a salacious scientific anecdote. Hayley does not have a penis.