We have an awesome trio of talks on tap this month! Laser artist Mike Gould gives us the skinny on building amazing light displays (with demos!), tech wizard Dave Strenski takes us on a historical tour of uber-powered computers, and urban planner Margi Dewar talks about the future of Detroit. You don’t want to miss it! So grab a friend, grab a beer, and cool your heels at Nerd Nite Ann Arbor!

When: July 23: 6:30 doors, 7pm nerd stuff

Where: LIVE, 102 S First St, Ann Arbor

$$$: NO COVER because Ann Arbor District Library!

Runs with Lasers – Mike Gould

Local laser artist Mike Gould discusses his recent experiences with the Illuminatus Lasers Troupe, including:

– The Quest for Mystic Fire – Lasers at Saline Celtic Festival (because, of course).

– Talks with Lasers lecture/demo to educate kids and families to the wonders of coherency.

– Tetraptych: 4 Panels, 12 Lasers, One Wall art piece for DLECTRICITY 2014

– L is for Laser, his science museum piece.

Mike has also done lasers for the UM Stadium half-time show during a night game. (Notre Dame, we won). He’s go an upcoming entry into the Ann Arbor Art Center’s tech+art exhibit, and has made appearances at various Maker Faires, Art Prize, Ignite, FoolMoon, etc. For more about Mike, wander over yonder:

Calculating 10^18 Results per Second – Dave Strenski

The world of high performance computing is changing. This presentation will run through a short history of computing highlighting the different types of computations used in computing’s past, including vectorization, parallelization, accelerators, and reconfigurable computing. From this historical perspective, the discussion will lead to what’s needed for the future to reach exa-scale (10^18 floating point operation per second) computing. It will also cover the types of applications that need exa-scale computing and the merging of high performance computing and data analytics. More deets: www.Cray.com and www.SolarYpsi.org.

Detroit: Planning a City After Abandonment – Margi Dewar