Our speaker Stepy Kamei will not be able to make it for this month’s show due to unforeseen circumstances; HOWEVER, the brilliant and generous Sahil Bansal will be stepping in to give a talk about SPACE, the celestial objects in it, and the people who have pursued them throughout history:
“Chasing Shadows – Tales of the Greatest(?) Eclipse Chasers”
From ancient civilizations to modern day American presidents, solar eclipses have fascinated us all. This talk is about those people who dared to go beyond the ordinary, running across the surface of the Earth in epic quests to chase our Moon’s shadow. Want to know about these fun/whimsical/ill-advised voyages and how they informed our modern sense of wonder and curiosity about space? Let’s dive right in!
About Sahil:
Aside from being an amateur solar eclipse chaser, Sahil works by day trying to make the internet a better place as a product manager in cloud storage. You can talk to him about all that goes into orchestrating a synchronized dance of electrons to bring you cat videos anytime, anywhere. Care to become a fellow eclipse chaser? Come say hi!
Some sad news, next month will be our last event at the Rickshaw Stop after years of calling them our home. They will continue to host their awesome lineups of emerging artists and dance parties, but Nerd Nite SF will be moving to a new, nerdy (and smaller) space. Stay tuned!
In the meantime, save the date for either October 19 or 20 (hope to nail down the day soon) to come out and celebrate our last Rickshaw show by drinking and thinking with us! Also, the return of our drunken spelling bee.
But some good news: we have officially welcomed David Faulkner, toxicologist comedian extraordinaire, into Nerd Nite cohost nerd-dom. Maybe you met him this month, and if you didn’t then come on out and meet him next month!
Announcing our 2022 return on 2/16/22 + launch of our Kickstarter campaign to bring nerdy goodness to everyone!
Kickstarter
Nerd Nite SF is one of many Nerd Nites around the globe, and this month we are fundraising for a new web series and professional video editing. If you have a couple of extra bucks to spare for our nerdy cause, please consider donating to our Kickstarter by February 8. The pandemic hit all of us at Nerd Nite, but you can help us come back better, stronger, and nerdier than ever!
Nerd Nite SF #122: Glass, Ecology, Identity!
Wednesday, February 16 , 2022 Doors at 7pm, show at 8pm Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St @Van Ness $10 advance, $15 at the door. Vaccine proof and masks required. Tickets here
(ps Odd Salon members now get 50% off Nerd Nite admission all year!)
We’re back folks! Hope you can join us for our return to 2022 after taking a small holiday/covid break. Our speakers will be:
Nate Watson, Executive Director of Public Glass, San Francisco’s only public glass studio and school. He will be getting nerdy about glass art with us, and sharing how he’s improved access to glass making.
Dr. Suzanne Pierre, Principal Investigator of the Critical Ecology Lab. She will be nerding out about developing the lab’s interdisciplinary framework that considers the social dimensions of global environmental change.
Jason Smith– Founder of Mixed Googlers, one of the first Fortune 100 employee resource groups for multiracial employees. Previously a Nerd Nite Austin fan, he will be taking the SF stage to share his nerdy insights into multiracial identities and rethinking identity paradigms.
DJ Alpha Bravo will provide our topical soundtrack for the evening.
We have some news for you all as we emerge out of covid hibernation. Nerd Nite SF will return on third Wednesdays at Rickshaw Stop beginning next month, on July 21! More details and a ticket link to come, but in the meantime we’d like everyone to know of a sea change in our SF nerd herding team. After an epic decade of organizing one of the best ways to learn something new over a beer or two, Bart and Lucy are passing the baton. They’ve written the message below for all you beautiful people who have supported the program over the past 10 years. Read it and weep :’)
Farewell and Thank You from Bart and Lucy: Remember how our desire for a bigger boat took us from a pleasure cruise around the bay to an aircraft carrier in Alameda to Alcatraz Island? Well, now the jolly tugboat of Nerd Nite SF is getting (drum roll) a new captain — and we are thrilled to hand the wheel to Maricela Abarca!
But before we jump ship, we would like to recognize the people who have made these 10+ years so wonderful. To the Rickshaw Stop: Dan Strachota, Noah Kincade, and all the fine folk who keep the place humming and the booze flowing, you are the best! Literally no other venue in town can match you (yes, because we are nerds, we did extensive research). Here’s to 10 more years (at least) of NNSF on your hallowed stage. THANK YOU.
Alpha Bravo (aka Alexander Bailey), your museum-worthy poster designs and delightfully obscure themed DJ sets (on vinyl no less!) have exceeded all our hopes and dreams. This whole thing wouldn’t have been nearly as fun without you. THANK YOU.
Joe Boyle, Bob Hermes, and Kevin Cressa, our videographers extraordinaire, jugglers of equipment, and capturers of angles, you have helped us document the amazing things that have happened on the NNSF stage and done so for the love of it—well, that and some free drinks. We admire your skill, generosity, enthusiasm, and all-around coolness. THANK YOU.
To our fellow Nerd Herders around the Bay Area and the world, and all those who work to bring fun educational programs to the masses, THANK YOU for your partnership, your ideas, your commiseration, and your inspiration. To our past speakers … what can we say? To continue the nautical theme: We’d have been sunk without you. In fact, you are the precious cargo that the tugboat NNSF pulls around. THANK YOU.
See you at future NNSF shows—we’ll be the ones WOO-ing the loudest. And please stay in touch: and . Love, Bart and Lucy (NNSF co-captains, ret.)
Congratulations! You have happened upon our website, where you’ll find information on all our future and past events (going back to 2010!). We are Nerd Nite SF, a monthly lecture-in-a-bar series where people from all walks of life give presentations on everything from video game design to historic shipwrecks. We’ve hosted mimes, musicians and everyone in between, with the goal of being entertaining, silly, and most of all, educational. Come learn a new fact, make a new friend, or try a new drink! Rickshaw Stop creates a special drink based on the month’s presentations!
Thanks to all for the great time last night! Kelly, Anna, and Drew were really fantastic, no? I bet you were super-inspired to learn more about their topics.
Let’s just get this out of the way: LL Cool J’s “Deepest Bluest (Shark’s Fin)”, a terrible song for a terrible movie. How terrible is it? The chorus is “Deepest, bluest, my hat is like a shark’s fin”. Repeat x8.
The Principles of Brain Evolution. Striedter, 2007
Bear In Mind by Susan Snyder. All the pictures of California Grizzlies you can handle, plus original source documents.
Monarch’s taxidermied hide is kept in the California Academ of Sciences’s Ornithology and Mammalogy collection, a research collection containing over 135,000(!) specimens.
