Wednesday, 10/19
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8
All ages
Nerd Nite SF guarantees to give you the creeps during this, the creepiest month of the year, as our speakers expound on the creeping, self-enhancing diversity enabled by open source and data, what’s creeping into the brains of cat ladies, and how the terrible–and terribly good–B-horror movie creeps up and down the subject of science. (And if the word “creep” doesn’t look weird to you by now, we don’t know what will.) Join Bart, Lucy, and our special co-host, zombie brain expert Bradley Voytek, creep up to the Rickshaw’s bar, mingle with your fellow nerds, and allow the slow creep of knowledge and Alpha Bravo’s music to invade your brain. Be there and be creepy, um, square!
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“Sharing Is Caring: How Open Source and Open Data Are Changing the World” by Curtis Chambers
Open-source software has profoundly changed the world and the way we interact with it. Systems from the largest Fortune 500 companies to the leanest startups owe their code foundations to open software like Linux and Apache. And while companies once believed that proprietary software was the only way to succeed, they now know that collaboration breeds innovation. Curtis Chambers will show how freely accessible software liberates companies from constantly reinventing the digital wheel, and how open source and open data are spreading beyond Silicon Valley to other realms. Release the data and put the world to work!
Curtis is the engineering manager at www.uber.com, where he spends his days building the future of transportation using open source and open data (specifically node.js and MongoDB). Prior to that, he angered the corporate world at www.expensify.com, and for the two decades prior to that he was a huge computer nerd.
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“Creepy KOFY Science from the B-Movie Black Lagoon” by Scott Weitze
Giant bats and rubber masks! Plot holes and low production values! Resurrected monsters and red dye #5! Every Saturday night Creepy KOFY Movie Time brings San Francisco the best of the worst horror movies from the last 50 years. But is drinking jaguar blood really a good idea? Could zombies exist? Aren’t we all just a little bit werewolf? And what’s the biology behind centuries of vampire legends? Creepy KOFY TV Scientist Scott Weitze will talk about what B-horror movies get wrong (and sometimes right) about science.
Scott appears as the science expert on Creepy KOFY Movie Time, effectively contradicting any credibility for his work on sustainable biotechnology instrumentation and teaching genetics at SFSU. He also serves as a cautionary tale on the dangers of drinking bourbon right before a segment.
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“Leashed to Your Pussy: Toxoplasma gondii and Mind Control” by Patrick House
Toxoplasma gondii, a tiny single-celled parasite, uses the cat as its ultimate host and spends its life needing to get from one pussy to the next. Sans legs of its own, it infects small rodent brains and makes them attracted to their feline predators–a veritable intermediate host taxi service. Alarmingly for Indeterminists, Toxoplasma is also lying dormant in the brains of over two billion humans. What it does in the brains of mice and men is still largely unknown, but there are clues that it might be changing human behaviors, too. Join us as we travel from ancient Egypt, to orphanages in 1950’s France, to the amygdalae of middle-aged Russian mistresses and unravel the story of one of the most successful and terrifying challenges to free will humanity has ever faced.
Patrick is getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Stanford, studying Toxoplasma gondii infection and the brain. But he has already peaked, having won The New Yorker‘s Cartoon Caption Contest a few years ago. Since then he has had trouble living up to the expectation of being witty, which he is not.
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Plus: DJ Alpha Bravo selects vinyl cuts to illuminate our presenters’ themes. Alpha Bravo is VP of left-field pop label, Radio Khartoum, and was one of the forces behind legendary SF pop-club nights, Anisette and Schokolade.