King tides foretelling global warming’s global flooding! Grown-up Lego enthusiasts and the bricks they love! The history of sex science and teledildonics! All these lectures and the pleasures of drink, music, and nerd fellowship await you at this month’s Nerd Nite SF. Be there and be square!
Wednesday, 2/15
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8
All ages
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“Strange Waters: King Tides + Sea Level Rise, Rollin’ up to a Coast Near You” by Taylor Nairn
Let’s set aside for a moment whether one “believes” in dinosaurs, yetis, 2Pac still recording music – or climate change. The photographs speak for themselves. The California King Tide Initiative will showcase pics from you – yes, you provided the evidence! – of seasonal king tides (which are higher-than-normal high tides) to demonstrate what rising sea levels could look like along our coast. From Sutro Baths to Jack London Square, the Embarcadero to Sausalito, Taylor Nairn will discuss the community-based initiative to visualize the impact of rising waters, and win hearts and minds in the process.
Taylor Nairn works for the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary. She calls her project partners The Sea Level Rise Sisters, which was cute only once.
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“LEGO® and Grown-Ups: Instructions Not Included” by Brendan Mauro
Remember raking through piles of bricks, searching for the precisely sized piece of injection-molded plastic to finish your masterpiece? The telltale rattle of a new set wrapped and under the Christmas tree? The click and snap and smooth perfection of two bits fitting together? For the subculture of grown-up Lego enthusiasts, these pleasures aren’t just nostalgia. Brendan Mauro presents an insider’s view on the quirks, talents, and habits of the adult Lego community, what it’s like being the guy in the Lego store who’s outlived the recommended ages on all the boxes, and what makes the brick – still considered a children’s toy by most – so compelling as a hobby and artistic medium.
Brendan is lead artist at an independent game developer in San Francisco. He started playing with Lego bricks when he was five and never really stopped.
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“The Politics, History, and Future of Physiological Sex Science” by Ned Mayhem
This talk will argue that rigorous and candid science about sex is important for individual freedom and social justice, and that it the current system of academic science is failing in this distressingly controversial field. The most important experiments are the least likely to be funded or published in the current system. The tools necessary to do these experiments are becoming increasingly accessible and robust, so it is now possible for an independent scientific community to do cutting edge research. To give context to this perspective, I will give a brief and selective overview of the history of sex science in the modern system of academic science. I will then present the PSIgasm devices, created by myself and my partner Maggie Mayhem to measure physiological sexual response quickly and robustly at home.
Ned Mayhem is a queer scientist and pornographer who splits his time between quantum physics research and on-camera sex acts. Ned created the software that runs Meet The Mayhems (http://MeetTheMayhems.com/), a couples porn site featuring Ned and his partner Maggie Mayhem. He is now working to make this software available to other performers and sex workers interested in any kind of online media or product sales. Ned and Maggie also run the PSIgasm Project, an open source independent science project which creates devices to measure arousal and orgasm in the body directly.
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.