Wednesday, 5/16/2018
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here
Dodge those un-prettily parked sidewalk scooters and don’t trip on the way over to this month’s nerdering, where a singing scientist talks Bell’s palsy; a certified Legal Geek reviews the rules of a galaxy far, far away; and a transport expert tells us if it’s maybe okay to toss aforementioned scooters into the Bay or not. Grilled cheese, terrific tunes, and no bar maximum: Be there and be square!
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“About Face: How a Disability Turned a Singing Scientist into a Scientific Singer” with Heidi Moss Erickson
Face it – the face is important. We all use ours to express emotion and connect with others. But for singers the face is a vital part of the vocal instrument. After suffering cranial nerve damage, opera singer Heidi-on the cusp of a promising international career-lost control of her facial muscles, and neurologists doubted she’d ever be able to perform again. But this award-winning singer had a hidden talent: science! Through reductionist experimentation and diving into literature on the neuroscience of vocal learning, she has returned to the art she loves and the science she adores.
Heidi received a double degree in vocal performance and biology from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music, studied biochemistry at Penn and singing at Juilliard, and was covered by the New York Times for her research and her singing in the same year.
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“Star Wars Law!” with Joshua Gilliland
Could Darth Vader argue the insanity defense for following the Dark Side? Was it discrimination not to serve R2-D2 and C-3PO at the Mos Eisley Cantina? Was Han right to shoot first? Find out these answers and more from Joshua Gilliland, one of the attorney bloggers from The Legal Geeks at Star Wars Law.
Josh focuses his law practice on e-discovery and co-created the multi-award-winning blog The Legal Geeks. Josh has presented at legal conferences and comic book conventions across the United States. He also ties a mean bow tie.
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“Street Fights! Bicycle Politics in San Francisco & Copenhagen” with Jason Henderson
Jason is a professor of geography and environment at SF State, where he teaches courses in transportation and land use. He is currently writing a book about the politics of the bicycle and car in Copenhagen, where he spent a research sabbatical in 2016. Jason is also writing about the politics of “tech mobility,” including Uber/Lyft, driverless cars, and private bus systems.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the set list on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Glorious grilled cheese from the master of the sammie, Grilled Cheese Guy, who now has his own physical restaurant at 529 Stevenson St. in SF!
In an infinite universe there are infinite speaker lineups, but in this one we like to think you’re getting the best of them all. An astrophysicist will collapse the many-worlds theory of Hugh Everett down to a single tale, a geriatrician talks about our grayer and flappier but hopefully awesome future sex lives, and a computational psychologist shares what our digital footprints reveal about ourselves. All this plus DJ Alpha Bravo, drinks, bao, and lots of friendly nerds. Be there and be square!
Wednesday, 4/18/2018
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here ->
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“It Came from a Parallel World!” by Adam Becker
In 1957, the drunken prankster physicist Hugh Everett found good evidence for parallel universes buried in the mathematics of quantum physics. Learn the real science behind this bizarre idea — and the real history of how Everett’s idea was developed in the 1950s, almost immediately forgotten, and revived again over a decade later.
Adam is an astrophysicist, science writer, public speaker, and author of the book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics (http://whatisre.al, and we’ll have copies available at Nerd Nite). He’s also a visiting scholar in the Office for the History of Science and Technology at UC Berkeley. Adam once fought off a horde of feral geocentrists, but he still sometimes forgets that not everything revolves around him.
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“Granny Still Gets It On: Aging and Sexual Health” by Laura Perry
Why are we as Americans so terrified and grossed out by the idea of older adults having sexual lives? We’re just being prejudiced against our future selves. Dr. Laura Perry, a double board-certified geriatrician and primary care doctor, will talk about the many ways in which sexual lives change as time marches on. The good news: it’s not all bad news! The even better news: no one’s going to ask you to think about your grandparents going at it.
Dr. Perry is a clinical associate professor at UC San Francisco in the division of geriatrics and the associate medical director of adult primary care at Highland Hospital in Oakland.
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“The End of Privacy” by Michal Kosinski
A growing proportion of human activities such as social interactions, entertainment, shopping, and gathering information are now mediated by digital devices and services. Such digitally mediated activities produce an unprecedented amount of digital footprints that can be used to reveal our intimate traits, emotions, and predict future behavior. Given the progress in Artificial Intelligence and computing, we should get ready for the future where privacy is a privilege reserved for the few.
Dr. Kosinski is the Assistant Professor in Organizational Behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. He is a psychologist and data scientist. His research focuses on studying humans through the lenses of digital footprints left behind while using digital platforms and devices. Previously, Michal was the Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and a post-doc at Stanford’s Computer Science Department.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Delicious pork-belly bao and other bun goodness from Cross Hatch Eatery.
With nuclear physicist and comedian Kevin Peter Hickerson, Cal Academy of Sciences reef expert Rebecca Albright, and telecommunications policy lawyer Preston Thomas. Food by Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas and music by DJ Alpha Bravo. Be there and be square!
Nerd Nite SF #94: Saving Corals, Missing Neutrons, and more!
Wednesday, 3/21/2018
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here
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“Who the Hell Stole My Frozen Neutrons?” by Kevin Peter Hickerson
Neutrons are normally stowed safely in the dense nuclei of atoms. But when we knock a neutron loose like a break in billiards, it is unstable and only hangs around for about 15 minutes before turning into just another boring hydrogen atom. Measuring this exact length of time, however, is very tricky. One new way is to freeze them to insanely low temperatures, but these ultracold neutrons disappear faster than expected! Did we count wrong? Do they become dark matter or enter the mirror world? Where the hell do they go?
Kevin is a nuclear physicist, inventor and comedian. He has worked with ultracold neutrons for over a decade. He hosts the science and comedy podcast Surely You’re Joking.
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“Can We Save the Corals?!” by Rebecca Albright
Driven by urgency, scientists are trying increasingly bold and creative ways to conserve and restore reef ecosystems. They’re rapidly transplanting, fertilizing, and enhancing corals to help them adapt to warmer oceans, and they’re searching for techniques that are scalable and won’t break the bank. Rebecca will introduce us to some of the main challenges facing reefs today and the innovative ways scientists are trying to address these threats head-on. Join us for a peek into the future of coral reefs, and discover how you can be part of the solution.
Rebecca is a coral biologist, curator, and co-leader of the Hope for Reefs initiative at the California Academy of Sciences. She focuses on understanding how coral reef ecosystems cope with changing environmental conditions.
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“Running Out of Light” by Preston Thomas
Yes, Dorothy, there is an end to the rainbow, and we’re getting there far faster than we realize. When every wireless device needs a slice of the electromagnetic spectrum and seven–no, eight, no, nine–billion people want a wireless device (or two), we find ourselves in the middle of a most unusual land rush. From satphones to SETI, pirate radio to thermonuclear war, we’ll trip the light fantastic as we examine how spectrum gets used and used up, and discover the clever engineering and policy that goes into squeezing the most out of this strange intangible natural resource.
Preston is a lawyer, lockpicker, and amateur radio operator. He has worked in telecommunications policy for a decade.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Tantalizing tamales from Alicia’s Tamales los Mayas.
Nerd Nite goes musical this month, with toe-tapping talks on missing music venues, a performance about the apocalypse, and making a Faustian bargain for a golden iFiddle! Plus cocktails, grilled cheese sandwiches, and DJ’d tunes to keep things humming. Be there and be square!
Wednesday, 2/21/2018
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here
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“Bring The Noise, Bring Defunct: A Personal History of SF’s Deceased Music Venues” by Dan Strachota
You’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a million times: The San Francisco music scene is dead! All the cool venues are getting shut down! Everything used to be so much better here! Is it all really true? Dan will attempt to answer these questions by taking a walk down memory lane, uncovering the amazing and wild music venues of the past – and finding out just what happened to them.
Dan has written about music for SF Weekly, San Francisco magazine, SPIN.com, and the East Bay Express. He’s also the Talent Buyer at Rickshaw Stop and Phono Del Sol.
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“The End of The World As We Know It” by The Ten Thousand Ways
The Ten Thousand Ways, AKA Trisha Stan, Ph.D. and Gregory Bentsen, Up.G.* explore the probability of the world ending in various disasters, including death by asteroid, death by black hole, and various other apocalyptically delightful scenarios. We can’t promise that this will be a particularly uplifting presentation but we CAN promise you a super mario-themed explanation of black hole physics and GIFs of Justin Timberlake in space.
The Ten Thousand Ways is an americana-folk duo with a not-so-secret nerdy side. Trisha Stan and Gregory Bentsen met on the science podcast Goggles Optional, for which they regularly improved the lyrics to popular songs by making them about science.
*[Under-paid Graduate Student]
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“The Hybrid Mobile Instrument: Shredding on Smart-Devices” by Romain Michon
Digital music modules (controllers, synthesizers, etc.), smartphone-based instruments, and “traditional” acoustic instruments all have strengths and trade-offs. By blending these platforms into a hybrid instrument based on mobile devices and augmented with sensors and 3D-printed acoustic elements, we can create new instruments that go to eleven.
Romain Michon is a Ph.D. candidate at the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. His research focuses on physical modeling, 3D printing, musical interfaces development and the programming language FAUST (Functional AUdio STream).
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Glorious grilled cheese from the master of the sammie, Grilled Cheese Guy, who now has his own physical restaurant at 529 Stevenson St. in SF!
Wednesday, 1/17/2018
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here
A gender scholar, a mathematician, and a physicist walk into a bar… that can mean only one thing: It’s a new year of Nerd Nite! That bar is the Rickshaw Stop–located at the intersection of trans history, surreal math, and “artisanal” physics–and we have three stable geniuses ready to guide you. Add some music and cocktails and pork belly bao, and presto! You’re there and you’re square!
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“Trans Sanfrisco” by Susan Stryker
A renowned gender scholar looks at the history behind the city’s recent designation of parts of the Tenderloin neighborhood as the “Compton’s Transgender Cultural District.”
Susan is a theorist, filmmaker, author of several books about LGBT history and culture, and professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, director of the Institute for LGBT Studies, and founder of the Transgender Studies Initiative at the University of Arizona.
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“20 Mathematical Mysteries in 20 Minutes” by Roger Antonsen
We explore that world of strange, quirky, and beautiful mathematics you never learned about in school: paradoxes, puzzles, games, infinities, chaos, fractals, surreals, automata, art, and more.
Roger is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Oslo, Norway, and currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, California. He enjoys all things at the intersection of mathematics, philosophy, and computer science.
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“Slow Atoms, Slow Science” by Eric Copenhaver
Each morning, Eric saunters into a lab brimming with lasers enrobed in a bramble of criss-crossed cables and optical fibers. His lasers slow atoms from their supersonic, room-temperature speeds and turn them into an exotic sensor. He flips some switches to illuminate the lasers. Fiat lux. Even still, he’s in the dark. Something that worked yesterday doesn’t work today. This exposé will shed light on why science can move so slowly.
Eric was born on the day the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, but dreamed of being a rockstar. After a freshman year at Ohio’s University of Akron as a jazz guitar major, he hung up the axe and switched to physics. Now, as a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, he shoots lasers at atoms to exploit their quantum properties.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Delicious pork-belly bao and other bun goodness from Cross Hatch Eatery.
Wednesday, 12/20/2017
Doors at 7 pm, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8, all ages
Tickets here
Screw stockings–stuff your brain instead! An artist-hacker will teach us how to build our way to brain manipulation (great gift ideas), comics experts from the Cartoon Art Museum will bring a sleigh-full of holiday classics and clunkers, and our own co-boss Bart will transport us to an obscure battle fought on the plant science front of World War II. Tamales, tunes, and toddies of the hot variety round out the nite. Be there and be square!
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“Cyborg Your Mind” by Alex Glow
Explore electronics projects that you can build to manipulate your brain in strange, new, debatably useful ways!
Alex creates projects, tutorials, and video content for Hackster.io. She has been a FIRST Robotics kid, a director of the AHA and Noisebridge hackerspaces, and an artist-in-residence at Autodesk’s Pier 9. See also: music, language, bikes.
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“O Holy Night, Batman! The Cartoon Art Museum’s Best and Worst Holiday Comics” by Nina Taylor Kester and Andrew Farago
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at…Iron Man? Join San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum for a festive look at a century’s worth of holiday cartoons and comics, from timeless favorites like Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts and How the Grinch Stole Christmas to forgotten classics including Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol and a stocking full of bizarre holiday comics starring everyone from ALF to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. Cartoon Art Museum staff will share the secret stories behind some of the best–and worst–children’s books, comics, and animation the holidays have to offer.
With comic book colorist and Cartoon Art Museum Program Coordinator Nina Taylor Kester and award-winning author and Cartoon Art Museum Curator Andrew Farago.
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“The Botanists’ War” by Bart Bernhardt
Commando raids, political intrigue, heroic sacrifice and… plant science? This is the tale of two scientists on opposing sides–one Nazi, one Soviet–whose lives and research became strangely intertwined during World War II.
Bart is a co-organizer of Nerd Nite SF and is fascinated by great assholes in science history.
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With: Alpha Bravo, who’ll be spinning tunes specially selected to match the presenters’ themes. Follow the setlist on Twitter @djalphabravo.
Food: Tantalizing tamales from Alicia’s Tamales los Mayas.
Wednesday, 5/16/2018
