Nerd Nite SF

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

FB Event Page

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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.

 

Wednesday, 1/18
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8
All ages

Mad science turns its attention to ice cream making! A 19th-century suburb of SF made out of streetcars! Artificial development of antibodies – which will maybe help me get over this @*($% cold! But, wait, there’s more! We’re also celebrating the first issue of Nerd Nite: the Magazine! So come on down for some drinks, beats, lectures, and a free copy of our first issue. Be there and be square!

NERD NITE: THE MAGAZINE

Holy heck, we have a magazine, peoples. It features the best of the best from Nerd Nites around the world, coupled with gorgeous photos and infographics. The first issue covers: the history and future of the late Kim Jong-il’s favorite attire, the jumpsuit; an in-depth look at the romance novel industry; a cephalopod sex advice column written by Nerd Nite SF alum, Rich Ross, and more! We’re giving away FREE copies at this month’s Nerd Nite.

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“Closer to the Cow: Robyn’s Adventures in Ice Cream” by Robyn Sue Fisher and Cory Bloom

After graduating from Stanford Business School in 2007, Robyn Sue Fisher attended ice cream school (which is even more fun than it sounds) at Penn State University, where she met cows that told her they were really, really disappointed with how their milk was being churned into icy, way-too-sugary ice cream that was loaded with preservatives. She decided to perfect the ice cream freezing process using liquid nitrogen, so she spent a few years in her super top-secret underground workshop building “Kelvin,” her patented ice cream making machine. In late 2009, she began wheeling Kelvin around the streets of San Francisco atop a Radio Flyer wagon, powered with a homemade battery pack, equipped with off-road wagon wheels, and armed with Twitter and a dewar of LN2. She’s now the proud owner of the first San Francisco made-to-order scoop shop, which is in nearby Hayes Valley.

Robyn will talk about her invention process, entrepreneurial passions, and New Year’s Resolution to make new, old fashioned ice cream for each and every resident of San Francisco. She will be joined by “The Kelvin Doctor,” Cory Bloome, the engineer responsible for bringing the next generation of Kelvins to life.

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“Carville-by-the-Sea: San Francisco’s Streetcar Suburb” by Woody LaBounty and David Gallagher

“Carville-by-the-Sea,” one of the quirkiest and least-remembered communities in San Francisco’s history, flowered as an 1890s beach retreat on the sand dunes south of Golden Gate Park. Prominent bohemians, judges, lady bicyclists, and sand-bath-prescribing physicians transformed old transit cars into cottages and clubhouses, mansions and churches. See what creative carpenters of a century ago could make with obsolete horsecars, cable cars, and trolley cars. Famous capitalists, writers, painters, and journalists visited Carville to work, play, and enjoy what was touted as the “oddest village in the world.”

Woody LaBounty and David Gallagher are the founders of the Western Neighborhoods Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the history of western San Francisco (www.outsidelands.org). Rather than get history degrees, the two have relied on wearing old-timey hats to appear credible.

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“Antibody Engineering (or at least something close)” by Sai Duriseti

Do you get sick? Yes? Well, me, too. Now that we’ve cleared that up, let’s talk about those little guys that help you fight off disease. That’s right, I’m talking about antibodies; they rock. They rock so hard that, in fact, there is a whole scientific field dedicated to the artificial development of antibodies to fight disease. We call this field: antibody engineering. Men have spent fortunes, leveraged their homes, and sold their spouses in order to bankroll efforts to find an antibody-based magic bullet for diseases. As I’ll explain to you, however, this task is much harder than it seems. We ingenious humans, however, have found some PAR codes (shame on you if you know what those are) for this seemingly insurmountable task. We’ll talk about antibodies and the current status of this awesome field.

Sai is a PhD student at UCSF. He is a gentleman, a scholar, and a troublemaker.

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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.

Wednesday, 12/21
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @ Van Ness
$8
All ages

Wednesday, 11/16
Doors at 7:30pm, show at 8pm
Rickshaw Stop
155 Fell St. @ Van Ness
San Francisco, CA
Cover: $8

Facebook Event

Come to the Rickshaw Stop for more nerdy lectures and beers! This month, we have lots for you to learn and laugh about. We’re featuring speakers on: electric vehicles! And one solution to the chicken/egg dilemma of EV infrastructure. Skeeball! The history, the sport, the beer-drinking. Concentrated solar power! No, not frying poor little ants with a magnifying glass, this is a potentially powerful renewable energy solution. And we have a guest MC – the entertaining Jennifer Tharp. So join us for some learning with beer, nerd-mingling, and DJ Alpha Bravo’s tunes. Be there and be square for only $8!

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“Electric Vehicle Infrastructure: The Cure for Range Anxiety” by Obrie Hostetter

Do you ever have anxiety about not quite getting “there”? Stressed over the embarrassment of falling short? Worried about the size of your battery? Premature capacity discharge? If so, talk to your Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Director about range anxiety. There is help in the form of EV charging stations. Side effects may include a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, economic stimulus, energy security, and an increase in smugness.

Obrie Hostetter has an MBA in Sustainability Management and is the Northern California EV Infrastructure Director for 350Green, LLC (http://350green.com/). That means juggling the demands of municipalities, businesses, and consumers to make EVs viable. She also spent two years sailing around the world because why the hell not, that’s why.

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“Skeeball 101 – Roll Like a Champion” by Joey the Cat & Kristian Hansen

We’ve all seen the movie montages where the hero trains under a grueling regimen, suffers setbacks, but eventually triumphs to becomes a champion, like in Rocky or the Karate Kid. For Joey the Cat, it was 10,000 hours of practice, persistence, and Pabst Blue Ribbon to become Brewskie-Ball National Champion. In this talk, you’ll learn how skeeball was originally a “strongman’s” game, about its rise as a modern competitive bar sport, to how to become a champion, and more! All from one of the legends of the game.

Joey the Cat (joeythecat.com) is a competitive Skeeball player in the San Francisco Brewskee-Ball league and an avid collector of classic Skeeball machines. He’s been interviewed by NPR, The New York Times, the Bold Italic, and more.

Kristian (http://kristian.tumblr.com), aka Black Devil, is an urban explorer, technologist, and designer based in San Francisco and is currently working on a dissertation surrounding the Global History of Skeeball. He has been featured on Gawker and The Business Insider.

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“Concentrated Solar Power: Renewable Energy for the 21st Century or a Complicated Way to Boil Water?” by Joe Cordaro

Joe Cordaro needs a PhD in chemistry, 3 years of post-doc, and Sandia National Labs to boil water. OK, it’s not just boiling water – it’s a fancy way of boiling water and it could be the energy source of the future. In this talk, Joe will explain how engineers and scientists are inventing new ways to concentrate solar power to boil water like it’s never been boiled before, and possibly changing the renewable energy landscape.

Joe Cordaro is one of the few people who can spell “Albuquerque” correctly without spellcheck, since he was born there. He’s a synthetic chemist who spends half his working time at Sandia National Labs researching new materials for concentrated solar energy, the other half he’d have to kill you if he told you about it. Outside of chemistry, Joe enjoys reading about economics and politics so he can get upset over the current funding levels science receives in our country.

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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. You can follow his live-tweeted set list at @djalphabravo

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sf.nerdnite.com

Wednesday, 10/19
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8
All ages

Facebook event

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.

Wednesday, 9/21
Doors at 7:30, show at 8
Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell Street @Van Ness
$8
All ages

Facebook event

Beer! The city! Tiny, intricate spaceships that get blown up! Name something cool and we gotcher nerds who’ll learn you all about it. September brings back-to-school back-to-stage and back-to-the-bar, as we meet, mingle, and nod our heads to the beat of obscure records–oh, and also hear from experts on practical special effects, the history of your favorite frothy beverage, and the urban land- and mindscape. Be there and be square!

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“Practical Special Effects: Livin’ Large in Miniature” by Fon Davis

Fon may appear to be a grown man who plays with toys–and he is–but he has also built models and props for movies for over 20 years, from The Nightmare Before Christmas to the Star Wars series. While computer-generated effects have snagged all the headlines in recent years, practical effects are often the best approach for some visual effects challenges, especially if you want something to blow up, burn, or shatter. Nothing looks more realistic than actual explosions, fires, and crashes! Yeah, in this industry, it’s best if you don’t get too attached to your work. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at practical effects in movies and the role they will play in the future.

Davis is a visual effects veteran with over 20 years of experience, having worked on such films as the Star Wars prequels. He had nothing to do with Jar-Jar, so please don’t blame him. Fon runs his own shop, Fonco Creative, is the creator of MORAV and has just released a DVD on professional model-making called Introduction to Professional Model Making with Fon Davis.

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“Worth Its Weight in Gold: A History of Beer” by Yug Varma

While most of us imbibe beer in all its forms frequently and freely, few of us stop to consider the sheer weight of history that has molded beer into its present form. Beer, in turn, has molded history as well, from its ancient origins in times shrouded in mystery, through war and peace, celebrated and persecuted in equal measure: Its story is as riveting as it is long. Beer also figures prominently in many events in American history, such as shaping the migration of early American settlers, and from the War of Independence to witchcraft. Yug takes us through a woefully short but delightfully twisting journey through the history of the world’s favorite alcoholic beverage.

Varma is a postdoc in the Fischbach lab at UCSF, where he studies the human microbiome and the consequences of its interactions with the human body. An avid cook, homebrewer and cocktail enthusiast, he loves to salsa and travel. When he’s not stuffing his face, he will speak to you with a fake accent and inundate you with a torrent of trivia.

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“Urbanism: 1,000 Years of Error, Accident, and Serendipity” by Benjamin Grant

From Jerusalem to Black Rock City, urbanism has always had a central place in the human imagination. Cities are real physical and organic phenomena, with pressing problems like traffic, disease, and conflict. But cities are also the arena for our aspirations, fears, and hare-brained schemes, appearing continually in art, film, and literature. Utopian visions often come with vivid urban plans, as if we can’t imagine reforming ourselves without reforming built space. Real cities are shaped by the messy collision of these practical and imaginative impulses, and become living artifacts of our culture and consciousness. Urban designer, curator, and writer Benjamin Grant will examine some of the most interesting, illuminating, and preposterous episodes in the history of urban form, asking, among other things: Straight or curvy? Were things better back then? Where are our personal hovercrafts? Skyscrapers: the disease or the cure?

Grant is SPUR‘s Urban Design and Public Realm Program Manager, and an urban form nerd. He has curated numerous exhibitions both at the SPUR Urban Center and with city/space, a nonprofit he co-founded in 2001. He has taught courses in urban design and the history of urban form at San Jose State University and the San Francisco Art Institute and has worked on a wide variety of planning and urban design projects for public and private clients, including an ongoing master plan for San Francisco’s Ocean Beach.

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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.