Hey. What are YOU up to this summer? Taken any trips lately? You’ve come to the right place for some travel advice. If you’re feeling the heat, why not enjoy the cool cozy confines of a cave? If you’re ready to see the world, why not follow in the surprisingly medicinal steps of one of the all time drinks, the Gin and Tonic? If all this travel has you feeling revved up, what better way to party down than by blowing up some wires with absurd amounts of electricity? Alternatively, you can save yourself the hassle and join us at Rickshaw Stop at 7pm on August 18th and let our speakers show you the woooooooorld!
Caving 101: An Insider’s Guide to Exploring the Underground
Vivek Zilpelwar
While most of the Earth’s surface has been mapped and explored, a vast frontier still exists completely out of sight right beneath us. This talk provides an exclusive insider’s look into caving – a niche technical sport which requires constant problem-solving, physical/mental endurance, and serious teamwork. Discover what it truly feels like to step into the unknown, navigate challenging environments, and stand in places where very few people have been before.
Vivek Zilpelwar is a hardware reliability engineer in San Francisco with a background in transportation-based product development. For the last eight years, he has been a technical caver, exploring primarily in the Southwest US as well as internationally. When above ground, he enjoys self-improvement, all things adventure related, and meeting interesting new people.
Around the World with the Gin & Tonic
By: Camper English
The history of the G&T includes the history of malaria (prevented and cured by quinine in tonic), the Black Death (repelled by juniper), Jesuit missionaries in Peru, the swamps of Rome, the Belgian Congo, horse races in India, Greek medicinal wines, the World Health Organization, the Dutch in Indonesia, Australians in Bolivia, French scientists in the lab, and if there’s time we’ll include cats dropped out of airplanes, the invention of the color mauve, Little House on the Prairie, the birth of chemotherapy, the Official Preppy Handbook, and how the wrong ice machine inspired the creation of the Spanish-style Gin and Tonic.
Camper English is a cocktails and spirits journalist who has been covering drinks in SF for decades. He is the author of Doctors and Distillers: The Remarkable Medicinal History of Beer, Wine, Spirits, and Cocktails, and also a book about ice cubes. Check out his writing, classes, and bar history tours on Alcademics.com.
EX-pinch: Surprising Physics from Terawatt Wire Explosions
Glenn Carroll
The field of exploding wires is littered with discredited theories, not-quite-accurate models, and fraught speculations. The X-pinch variant of exploding wires is quite simple: two (or more) wires are twisted together to form an X and then electrically detonated. Unexpectedly, X-pinch has novel, spectacular, and highly useful behavior, proving that explosions can be not only fun, but also practical and handy tools for science!
Glenn Carroll is the son of an experimental high-energy physicist, and has always believed that physics is too much fun to leave it to government-funded bureaucracy. Besides reading the history and academic papers on ex-wires, he has “experimented” with detonating a half-dozen different metals, at lengths up to 10 meters, in several shapes, as well as firing multi-wire arrays, underwater detonations, foil squares, a disco ball, and so on.
With Friends of the Show: