Let’s get back to our ABCs this month. Justin Quimby opens our set with a talk on airships (and blimps and zeppelins and dirigibles and whatever other lighter-than-air aircraft you please). I’m sure that his mention of “metallurgy” in the abstract is not just to placate me. We’re pleased to have George Baker from T.Y. Lin, who is helping to replace the East Bay Bridge. The bridge has been in the news lately, and we’re really excited to hear about the engineering that is making it safe. Darin Jensen is rounding out our set with a talk on cartography. His recently kickstarted Food: An Atlas has made me hungry to learn more about maps and map making.
DJ Ion the Prize and Rick and Rebecca will host through the evening, as usual. Be there and be square!
Monday 4/29 Doors at 7 pm, show at 8 The New Parkway, 474 24th St, Oakland (less than half-a-mile from the 19th St BART) $8 All Ages Tickets FB event g+ event
ZEPPELINS: NOT JUST EXPLOSIONS AND MEMES by Justin Quimby
Mention Zeppelins in casual conversation and you’ll get 1) humor: an ‘oh the humanity’ joke 2) confusion: “I love that band” 3) panic: stammering and then the sound of footsteps rapidly walking away from you. But Zeppelins are so much more than grainy newsreel footage! The talk will cover how Zeppelins impacted the politics, metallurgy, energy policy, and military doctrine of Europe and America in the first half of the 20th century. You’ll learn the difference between a Zeppelin, airship, dirigible, and blimp. You’ll learn why you should hate children’s birthday parties and how airships influenced the Wright brothers and other early airplane developers. The historical threads will be pulled through to present day, with an explanation of the modern resurgence of the airship. Plus, there will be a lot of sweet pictures of Zeppelins.
Justin Quimby has been obsessed with Zeppelins and airships since he was a kid. When not reading about antiquated transportation technology, he has worked in the video game industry for over 15 years. Starting as a programmer and then transforming into a pointy-haired boss, his games include Glitch, Spore, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Lord of the Rings Online, Asheron’s Call, and a bunch of mobile social html5 games you haven’t heard of. Most recently, Justin works as a consultant in the architectural software field.
CROSSING THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY DURING THE NEXT BIG EARTHQUAKE by George Baker
The seismically vulnerable East Span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge is being replaced with a 2 ¼ mile long dual roadway structure. The Self Anchored Suspension portion of the Bay Bridge is a unique and iconic structure that required innovative solutions and departures from conventional design.
- How does one prepare an elegant structure to resist the strongest earthquake of the millennium?
- How does one think out of the box and tie everything together?
The methods and technologies developed to meet these challenges resulted in a world class structure, an architectural icon, and a seismic innovation all at one time in one of the most seismically challenging areas in the world.
The bridge will be open to traffic later this year. You will want to be on it during the next big earthquake.
George Baker is a bridge expert with thirty-two years of experience working with the design and rehabilitation of suspension bridges. His expertise encompasses the design of cable systems and steel orthotropic decks, as well as the seismic design and rehabilitation of suspension bridges in active seismic zones. George has played a major role since 1998 in the design and construction the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Works in his career include: The first cutting and reattaching of the main cable of a suspension bridge (Manhattan Bridge, NY); analysis for supporting artwork by Christo on the Brooklyn Bridge (NY); downhill racing carts and a treehouse.
CARTOGRAPHY IN A DIGITAL AGE, OR WHY YOUR MAP APP ISN’T ONE by Darin Jensen
In an age of digital everything, maps have become ubiquitous on smart phones, car dashboards and interactive mapping websites. Darin will explain how these are not really maps and discuss the map as a narrative device that fuses traditional cartography, poster art, info-graphics, and journalistic text blocking. He will also discuss the concept of guerrilla cartography–collaborative knowledge-caching as a new model for data-collection and content sourcing.
Darin Jensen is a high-school dropout and the Staff Cartographer and Continuing Lecturer of Geography at UC Berkeley. His recently published Food: An Atlas and Mission Possible: A Neighborhood Atlas.