We ring in the the 90th day of the year and the 125th anniversary of the Eiffel Tower with three fantastic talks. First, Michael Schiess and Larry Zartarian from the Pacific Pinball Museum will touch on the technology, aesthetics, and historical context of the best coin-operated games ever. Then, Robert Kolasinski is back to deliver the talk we rescheduled during Nerd Nite #14 on missed on the largest and most promising international effort at producing fusion energy in the future. Finally, Shivani Garg Patel will tell us about surgery in the field.

DJ Ion the Prize, Rick, and Rebecca will Launch Those Geese.

Monday 3/31
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
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EARLY PINBALL ART by Michael Schiess and Larry Zartarian (Pacific Pinball Museum)

Our discussion will focus on the development of art used on pinball machines from the 1930s through the late 40s. The evolution of the games technology and the purpose of the art in attracting players. The differences between the styles of the 2 main artists and their roles in defining the genre. We will highlight pinball art as reflections of popular culture during the times they were introduced and enjoyed by the public. We will be discussing the role of the museum in presenting and preserving the art of pinball and lastly, the museum’s goals for establishing a permanent institution for pinball.

Michael Schiessis the Founder of Lucky Ju Ju Pinball and the Founder and current Executive Director of the Pacific Pinball Museum. He invented and built the Visible Pinball Machine, Pinbowl, Lil Ju Ju and other pinball accessories and art projects. He does freelance work for the Exploratorium.

Larry Zartarian is President and Treasurer of the Board of Directors, a collector of ’40s, ’50s and ’60s rare pinball machines. He has worked with PPM for the past 8 years, and served as Board President for 6 years. He leads the board in its drive to improve all the museum’s programs. As an ambassador of pinball, who loves to introduce new people to the game, he has loaned his entire collection of rare pinball games — among the most significant in the world — to PPM. His professional background in investing and unparalleled understanding of the games complements the museum leadership. During his copious amounts of spare time, Larry is an investment adviser at Rand and Associates in San Francisco.

THE ITER PROJECT: THE WAY TOWARD MAGNETIC FUSION ENERGY by Robert Kolasinski

ITER is a physics experiment under construction at the Cadarache facility in southern France. With seven contributing international partners including the U.S., its overall goal is to demonstrate many aspects of magnetic fusion energy for the first time after it becomes operational in 2020. The ITER reactor will use a 78-ft diameter toroid-shaped vacuum chamber known as a tokamak to generate an intense plasma of deuterium and tritium ions. Using superconducting electromagnetic coils, researchers will attempt to confine the plasma for long enough to exceed breakeven, the point where the energy released by fusion reactions equals the input heating. If successful, ITER will generate over 400 MW of fusion power and could serve as a pathway toward a future large-scale energy source. As one might expect, developing reactor materials that withstand such intense plasmas is enormously difficult, but researchers from around the world are working to develop innovative new technologies to address these unique challenges. In the meantime, Iron Man enthusiasts hoping for a reactor design that can power their home-built exoskeleton armor may have to wait until a more compact version of ITER can be developed.

Rob Kolasinski is a surface scientist in the Hydrogen and Metallurgical Science Department at Sandia National Laboratories, Livermore. His interest in plasmas began during grad student at Caltech, when a friend who convinced him to take a class on space propulsion. Seduced by the glamorous world of plasmas, Rob decided to collaborate with the nearby Jet Propulsion Laboratory to study plasma-surface effects in ion thrusters for his thesis. He would eventually receive a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, but not before the hard-living celebrity culture of JPL and southern CA had taken its toll. Needing a place to recuperate and “disappear” from the public eye for a while, Rob then took a position at Sandia. Here he continued his study of plasma science, but now related to magnetic fusion energy. His research interests also include a variety of other topics, including fundamental surface science and hydrogen in materials.

SOLVING AN UNKNOWN PROBLEM: GLOBAL SURGERY by Shivani Garg Patel

Dr. Paul Farmer calls global surgery “the neglected step child of global health.” In our discussion we will examine the impact of global surgery that is all too often not discussed in the broader global health dialogue. Millions are suffering from treatable conditions but lack the funds to seek treatment. We will dive into the types of essential surgeries and their impact on the global burden of disease and individual suffering. There are hundreds of organizations working to bridge the gap of access to basic surgical care for those who cannot afford treatment. We’ll discuss these organizations, review emerging efforts to shine a light on the field and highlight the resources required to enable people to receive treatment to treatable conditions.

Shivani Garg Patel is Co-founder of Samahope, a crowdfunding site for doctors providing critical medical treatments for the world’s poorest. She is a former Microsoft product manager, McKinsey consultant turned social entrepreneur. Her technology-driven social innovation work spans the Grameen Foundation, World Bank and World Health Organization. Her work with Samahope is inspired partly by her time in college leading a non-profit that provided free medical and social services to the low-income population of Berkeley. Shivani has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a B.A. in Cognitive Science from U.C. Berkeley and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management. She also spent 3 months studying Shakespeare at Oxford University.

After a great time at Chabot, we return to the New Parkway for the the 2^4th regular installment of Nerd Nite East Bay… Now with a lower packing density! Joel Sipe discusses how Hollywood gets fires wrong, Byron Dote from Sweet Maria’s Coffee will show how a cherry becomes black gold, and Vincent Tanguay will teach us about hypervelocity launchers.

DJ Citizen Zain, Rick, and Rebecca will ensure that Joel won’t yell fire too loudly.

Monday 2/24
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
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EXPLOSIONS, BACKDRAFTS, AND SPRINKLERS: HOW HOLLYWOOD GETS FIRE SCIENCE WRONG by Joel Sipe

Fires and explosions are key elements in most Hollywood blockbusters, yet they are often absurdly misrepresented, much to the chagrin of fire scientists (yes, fire scientists are a real thing). The movie Backdraft is notoriously inaccurate, but finding films with correct portrayals of fires, explosions, or fire protection systems is surprisingly difficult. Spoiler alert: car gas tanks don’t really explode when you shoot them with a handgun. Come learn about the real fire science behind some common Hollywood goofs.

Joel Sipe, Ph.D, is a Senior Engineer at Exponent Failure Analysis Inc. where he investigates fires, explosions, and thermal issues related to consumer product fire safety and skin burns. From an early age, Joel had an obsession with all things having to do with fire. His friends think it’s more than a little suspicious that he always knows where the fire started…

HOME COFFEE ROASTING: ON THE CHEAP WITH TOOLS YOU PROBABLY ALREADY HAVE by Byron Dote

Learn about where coffee comes from and the stages it goes through before it ends as a hot beverage. We will show you how simple the roasting process can be and discuss the different methods used for home roasting. Get up close and personal with a live demonstration of roasting coffee with an electric popcorn popper.

Sweet Maria’s Coffee is an online information and retail source for home coffee roasting. We are based out of West Oakland, and enjoy sharing our passion with Bay Area coffee lovers.

Byron Dote is the marketing guy and merchandise buyer at Sweet Maria’s Coffee. He’s been with the company for 3 years. Before that, he worked in the photo marketing and film production industries. Byron loves living in Oakland, hanging out with his dogs, listening to good music, eating ice cream, yelping Mexican restaurants and drinking excellent coffee.

HYPERVELOCITY LAUNCHERS: HOW TO LAUNCH A PROJECTILE AT 10 MILES/SECOND? (THAT’S RIGHT, PER SECOND) by Vincent Tanguay

The above video is from Vincent’s NNSF talk in 2015.

From bows and arrows to rail guns, man has been perfecting tools to launch projectiles at ever greater speeds for tens of thousands of years. Launching projectiles at hypervelocity is routine today and these launchers are very useful for science. While they have enabled major breakthroughs (think access to space), scientists always need more speed! We’ll discuss what hypervelocity is, its applications, and the various technologies that make it possible. Of course, we’ll talk about their limitations and how to push the frontier of possibilities. Somehow, we’ll manage to include some explosions in there – hopefully we get it right!

Vincent Tanguay, Ph.D., has a background in explosives and detonations and formerly worked as a scientist for a Canadian National Lab. When not busy blowing stuff up, he was developing an explosive-driven hypervelocity launcher.

Nerd Nite East Bay is back from our short hibernation for our first show of 2014! We’ll announce a new field trip opportunity at this show, which features three great talks. First, Nerd Nite San Francisco alum Bradley Voytek will guide you through how scientists properly (and, sometimes, improperly) leverage and present some of the vast amounts of data available. Then Chabot’s Benjamin Burress will point us to where we might expect to find life off this planet. Finally, KQED’s Lisa Aliferis will tell you what you need to know about Obamacare.

DJ Ion the Prize spins the tunes.

Rick and Rebecca will try to make sure you can register in advance…unlike. um. you know.

Monday 1/27
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
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DATA SCIENCE!?: I’M (STATISTICALLY) A DEAD, CHRISTIAN, CHINESE DUDE by Bradley Voytek

90% of all digital data didn’t exist two years ago. Researchers are leveraging “big data” to uncover new insights into human behavior, intelligence, and culture. But what does this data deluge really tell us, and how can it lead us astray?

Bradley Voytek is a Nerd Nite alum, thrice-named Time Person of the year (1960, 2006 and 2011, split prize), professor of computational cognitive science and neuroscience at UC San Diego, director of the Cognitive and Neural Dynamics Lab, Data Evangelist for Uber, and world’s zombie brain expert.

EARTH TO UNIVERSE: IS ANYONE ALIVE OUT THERE? by Benjamin Burress

Prior to only a couple of decades ago, the solar system outside of the Earth seemed quite a barren frontier, and the idea of extra-solar planets was only a twinkle in the eye of those who expected they were out there. Today, not only have we found wet and wild hydrological features in several places in the solar system, we have found and confirmed the presence of planets orbiting other stars–lots of them. And most recently, by virtue of NASA’s late great Kepler mission, we’ve not only begun to zero in on the Holy Grail of exoplanets–Earth-sized worlds at Earth-like distances from their stars, places we might hope to find signs of life–we’ve found that Holy Grails of this type may well be very common in the galaxy.

Benjamin Burress has been a staff astronomer at Chabot Space & Science Center since July 1999. He graduated from Sonoma State University in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in physics (and minor in astronomy), after which he signed on for a two-year stint in the Peace Corps, where he taught physics and mathematics in the African nation of Cameroon. From 1989-96 he served on the crew of NASA’s Kuiper Airborne Observatory at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA. From 1996-99, he was Head Observer at the Naval Prototype Optical Interferometer program at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ.

OBAMACARE EXPLAINED: A GUIDE FOR CALIFORNIANS by Lisa Aliferis

Look folks, you’re risking financial catastrophe if you don’t have health insurance. It’s the law for most people to have insurance or pay a fine. Sure, the Affordable Care Act is not perfect, but it provides access for to insurance for many people currently denied. Come find out the highlights of what you need to know.

Lisa Aliferis is the Editor of State of Health, a health blog at KQED News. She focuses on health policy, public health and health disparities. Aliferis has twenty years’ experience producing health reports for television as well as health-related videos for nonprofit clients. Earlier, she worked in the health unit at Dateline NBC. And she has health insurance!

Let’s all be thankful for the last Nerd Nite East bay of 2013! As usual, we present you with three diverse talks: Will Johnson will describe the entire universe…or at least those parts that can be crammed into a single page of equations. Anna Lieb will hopefully reveal that the reason my weight keeps increasing may be due to the shrinking kilogram. Finally, Donnelly Gillen will unlock some secrets of early surrealistic art.

DJ Citizen Zain and Rick and Rebecca will keep the turkeys at bay.

Monday 11/25
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
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DESCRIBING EVERYTHING by Will Johnson

How much math does it take to describe how everything can interact and behave? How many assumptions do you have to make to do this? And is it even reasonable to expect math to be able to describe all the rules of our reality? Come and find out about one of sciences most lofty goals: to describe everything.

Will studied high energy experimental particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Lab while a grad student at UC Davis; he failed to find Supersymmetry. Now he detects nefarious nuclear devices and builds fusion reactors at Sandia National Lab.

THE FICKLE KILOGRAM by Anna Lieb

How much mass is there in a kilogram? It depends on when you ask the question! The SI unit of mass, based on a lump of metal locked in a vault in Paris, is getting smaller by the century. Why does this matter? What can we do? To understand the perilous past and uncertain future of SI units is to go from French Revolution-era politics to fundamental constants of nature, and to peer inside the quantum mechanical machinery that drives one of the world’s most unconventional clocks.

Anna Lieb is a PhD student in Applied Mathematics at UC Berkeley, where she works on computational fluid dynamics and optimization. In her spare time, she is often found cooking, trail running, cycling, or, on occasion, getting lost on account of her unreliable sense of direction.

THE SCUOLA METAPHYSICA: FAR AHEAD OF ITS TIME? by Donnelly Gillen

When is an art movement not really an art movement? The scuola metaphysica, or metaphysical school of early 20th century Italy, wasn’t an organized group of artists who viewed each other’s work and shared ideas. In fact it’s more useful to think of the “school” as a state of mind, or a way of seeing, rather than a movement. This talk will focus on the work and philosophy of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), a Grecian born Italian, who was the genesis of the metaphysical art movement. Comparing De Chirico’s work to that of contemporary movements, we’ll get a visual comparison highlighting how he attempted to use paint and canvas to express his philosophical manifesto. Unfortunately for De Chirico and the other metaphysicians, their approach may have been too subtle; their visual messages proved elusive for the public. But now that modern and contemporary art have thoroughly deconstructed classical painterly traditions, the public (that means you!) may be ready to discern and appreciate the more subtle variations and distortions of traditional painting evident in De Chirico and his brothers’ work.

Donnelly Gillen is a lawyer by trade who spent her college years nerding-out on art history. She jumped at the chance speak at Nerd Nite and reawaken her brain to the world of modern art and to hopefully teach her peers a little something or two in the process. When not practicing law she is usually busy riding horses, going to indie concerts, swimming in the bay, or drinking too much wine.

Put on your birthday hats: Nerd Nite East bay is 1 year old! To celebrate the Bay Area Science Festival, we bring you a night of science and technology talks. Paul Constantine will let us know why the supercomputers of the future will be smarter and less malignant than HAL 9000. Then Wild Oakland’s Constance Taylor will take us on a tour of Lake Merritt’s flora and fauna, including the sharks! Finally, Damon Tighe informs us of the latest and greatest in DNA sequencing technologies. Be there and be square!

Get blinded with science by DJ Ion the Prize and hosts Rick and Rebecca!

Monday 10/28
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
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WHEN WILL SUPERCOMPUTERS TAKE OVER THE WORLD? by Paul Constantine

The world’s biggest computers keep getting bigger, faster, and more powerful. In the last few decades, we’ve seen a consistent exponential increase in computing capability as measured by floating point operations per second, with many modern machines now operating at the petaflop scale—in other words, a thousand million million operations per second. This astonishing progress has inspired many futurists to posit the day when some beefy calculator with glowing red eye-like LEDs will become self-aware and take control of the world. In reality, scientists in our nation’s top research laboratories and universities harness this computing power daily to make scientific progress with sophisticated simulations—and no legitimate threat of Skynet. I will discuss some trends in supercomputers and survey the science being done with them.

Paul Constantine is an assistant professor in applied math and statistics at Colorado School of Mines. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering in 2009 and was awarded the John von Neumann Fellowship in Computational Science at Sandia National Laboratories. His research interests in computational science include uncertainty quantification, where the goal is to devise and compute measures of confidence for big computer simulations. He’s also seen Terminator, like, twice.

THE SIX KINGDOMS OF LAKE MERRITT: LINNAEUS AT THE LOCH by Constance Taylor

It’s not actually a lake! All the squirrels are imports! And yes, there are sharks that patrol the waters of our beloved urban slough. We’ll go on a whirlwind tour of all six Linnaean kingdoms and learn how some of the animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, protists, and archaea fit together in this bioregion.

Established in 1870 as America’s first wildlife refuge, the area we know as Lake Merritt has changed dramatically over the past century and a half. From tidal estuary to… er… a more human-impacted tidal estuary, this beleaguered environment is still home to a surprising array of species. Hopefully on your post-Nerd Nite visits to Lake Merritt you’ll notice the red-shouldered hawks perched on buildings scouting for prey, bat rays crunching clams, the jellyfish blooping in the Glen Echo finger, the domestic fowland freshwater turtles people abandon at the lake, the cliff swallows swooping to catch insects to carry back to their mud nests at Laney College, and think about ancient life forms when you see (and smell) all that lovely mud.

Constance Taylor started an organization called Wild Oakland in 2012, a non-profit dedicated to providing free, local environmental education for adults. She likes to think of WO as an “urban ecological sampler”- topics covered on the walks have ranged from bird illustration techniques to insect identification to how the 7th Street flood control station works to keep Lake Merritt from flooding Oakland during heavy rains. She’s learned quite a bit about the social and natural history of Lake Merritt, but is always discovering new and surprising things about this oft-misunderstood ecosystem.

THE EVOLUTION OF DNA SEQUENCING TECHNOLOGIES by Damon Tighe

How exactly do you you sequence a whole freaking genome? Warm up your neurological thermal cycler and get ready for this medium level technical dive through the past ten years of DNA Sequencing technologies. We will start with the classic method of Sanger Terminator DNA Sequencing; the backbone of the Human Genome Project and make our way through contemporary technologies that now allow for the sequencing of a whole human genome in less then a week for an almost almost affordable cost. There will be a quick eye forward to some of the emerging technologies like the super sexy nanopore that biologists and physicists can both delight at. GATACA? Yeah, its almost here!

Damon Tighe works for Bio-Rad Laboratories where he supports educators across the western United States teaching biotechnology through hands on training and curriculum development. He grew up in the frog jumping capital of Calaveras county and attended Saint Mary’s College in Moraga. He taught high school in Portland, Oregon in between beer binges, but moved back to the bay for sobriety and to work on the Human Genome Project. He hung around for the free lab alcohol and worked on “Biofuel” related DNA Sequencing projects and deciphering the bugs in the ass side of a termite at Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs. He also pretends to run a small photography business in between foraging for mushrooms and manages an apartment complex in downtown Oakland.

September marks our twelfth installment of Nerd Nite East Bay (and our tenth at the New Parkway for those nerds celebrating the decimal calendar). We’re happy to have our friends from Oakland Public Library back again and will tease you with a bit of anniversary schwag. But, most importantly, we’ll have some excellent nerdy talks. We have NNSF alum Mark Rosin back. Last time, he used a few hundred inflated balloons and a fantastic bass amp to showoff resonance in a “rave for the blind”. This time, he’ll let you know why Venus is for lovers and why you’ll want to ski Pluto. Staci Dresher from the James Mintz group will give us the inside scoop on the world of private investigators. And Ryan Smith has been as busy as a beaver in preparing his sweet as sugar talk on the honeybee.

With DJ Citizen Zain and your hosts Rick and Rebecca. Be there and be square.

Monday 9/30
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
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THE INTERGALACTIC TRAVEL BUREAU by Mark Rosin

Mars is for outdoorsy types. Jupiter is for the artistically inclined. Step right up to visit the World’s first Intergalactic Travel Bureau, and let us plan your vacation of a lifetime.

Mark Rosin is a physicist at UCLA, and the US director of Guerilla Science. We mix science with art, music and play.

TRENCHCOAT OPTIONAL: TRICKS OF A CORPORATE SLEUTH by Staci Dresher

This is not about finding cheating spouses or fake broken legs. Private investigators are trained to be creative when searching for facts in a highly privatized world. We get you to spill the beans during interviews without you even realizing it. We file creative public record requests to government agencies that can’t be traced back to our client. An investigation is like an onion, with new facts and leads discovered as each layer is pulled away. I’ll give you the insider’s scoop into this world. We’ll discuss the history of the private detective industry, from railroad robberies to corporate sleuthing, and what it takes to successfully interview a witness and vet a potential business partner.

Staci is a recovering litigator who jumped ship to become a private Jane in 2006. She studied international relations in college, politics in Bristol, England and traveled extensively throughout Latin America learning Spanish and volunteering before graduating from Hastings College of the Law and working as an Intellectual Property lawyer at two big law firms. Realizing that the fact-gathering aspect of the lawsuit was most exciting, she went from client to employee of the Mintz Group, where she’s partner and in-house counsel, managing anti-corruption, intellectual property and due-diligence investigations around the world.

SEX, WAX, AND POLLEN: THE HONEYBEE SUPER-ORGANISM by Ryan Smith

Ryan reprised this talk at Nerd Nite San Francisco. Video is above.

Bees are highly industrious dance fanatics who have a knack for mathematics and are obsessed with pleasing their queen. These goddesses of the garden have helped humans for thousands of years to make candles, get drunk, sweeten our lives, and most importantly: put food on our plates. But as global populations of honeybees are declining, we are scrambling to find out the roots of the imbalance. Let’s fly into the hive to understand the big story of this tiny bug and how we can keep the sweetness flowing.

Dr. Ryan Smith is a laser physicist, musician, and seasoned beekeeper. Now researching solar materials at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, he has also taught university courses, including “Physics for Future Presidents.” While his bee-keeping interests began in the Southeastern U.S., he is now an advocate on the sweet west coast.

At August’s Nerd Nite East Bay, Heather Jackson will talk about the strength of materials, Lita Stephenson will discuss platypusseseses, and Greg Babinecz will share his knowledge of oysters, as well as some samples.

DJ Ion the Prize and your hosts Rick and Rebecca will slurp down the extras.

Monday 8/26
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
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HOW STUFF BREAKS OR: FAILURE IS AN OPTION by Heather Jackson

Materials are like people…it’s their defects that make them interesting. If real materials were perfect, we’d be missing out on steel, laser pointers, pop-top soda cans, and much more. On the other hand, defects sank the Titanic as well as square windows on airplanes. So, stuff breaks, and the structure and properties of materials has something to do with it. But how? Everyone knows that windows shatter and car bumpers dent, but what about the chassis that crumples in some places and is rigid in others? When design tweaks only take us so far, how can materials and process engineering optimize the performance of the structures, machines, and vehicles we depend on, and make them less likely to kill us or waste our money?

As a consulting engineer at Structural Integrity Associates in San Jose, Heather Jackson helps keeps the lights on. She works to prevent failures of structural components at nuclear and fossil power plants by harnessing lessons learned from metallurgy, corrosion, and fracture mechanics. Before that, she kept busy breaking stuff at Sandia National Labs and figuring out how stuff broke at NASA Johnson Space Center. Heather is an alum of MIT and Imperial College London and reckons the terrible weather helped by never distracting her from her studies.

PLATYPUS 2: ELECTRIC BOOGALOO by Lita Stephenson

It’s a duck! It’s a beaver! It’s a mole! It’s some kind of … what the hell is that thing? It’s a platypus! Arguably nature’s silliest creature, these adorable little guys have a lot of oddness going on. An ancient mammal, the platypus is the only living member of their family and genus. Among other bizarre traits, it is venomous, lays eggs, produces milk, but has no nipples, and is also one of the only mammals able to perceive environmental electrical signals. As long-time platypus dork and sensory-system enthusiast, I’ll give you a closer look at how these charming little beasts use this electroreception system in combination with mechanical stimuli, without other senses, to locate and capture their fleeing prey in 3-dimensional space. We may even tackle the age-old question: “What is the proper plural form of ‘platypus’?”.

Lita Stephenson began life as the child of two lunatics who dragged her, kicking and screaming, all over the planet. Along the way, she developed a great passion for weird and ugly animals, and pursued further information relentlessly. She used her appropriately abbreviated B.S. in Neurobiology and Physiology from UC Davis to spend as much time studying the platypus as she could get away with, but the crushing realization that she’d have to euthanize one at some point led her to pursue molecular cytogenetics at UCSF instead. Since then she’s filled her time telling people what’s wrong with them, professionally and personally, and writing badly about other people’s science.

BI-VALVE CURIOUS: THE IMPORTANCE OF OYSTERS by Greg Babinecz

Few foods create such a spark of excitement or gasp of revulsion in people. It certainly takes a culinary stalwart to slurp back his or her first briny bivalve. They are, after all, the only things we eat raw and alive besides each other. And, of course, we all know what they say about oysters. I’d be lying if I said that a few dozen have’t led to some amorous activity in my past and will hopefully continue to do so. However, the true value of oysters to us goes way beyond their gastronomic provocation or role as an aphrodisiac. We’ll discuss the historical importance of oysters in 19th century American development, oysters’ lifecycles and ecological impact, and their role as the most sustainable form of aquaculture. We’ll also explore what makes oysters so unique as to elicit so many cultural tributes such as poems, folklore, and festivals. You wouldn’t, after all, find M.F.K. Fisher writing a book titled “Consider the Crab.” Oh, and we’re serving free oysters!

Greg Babinecz received his BA from Johns Hopkins University in 2008 in Baltimore, Maryland. Working at a local fish market while completing a post graduate internship at University of Penn ignited Greg’s interest in local, sustainable seafood. He spent two years in Central America working on Pre-Colombian archaeological projects and teaching English. Upon returning to the States 2010, Greg moved to San Francisco where began moonlighting at Waterbar, a Bay Area Top 100 seafood restaurant. In 2012, Greg quit his day job and began managing the raw bar full time at Waterbar, where he continues to further his knowledge of oysters, aquaculture and sustainable fisheries. He is devoted to local food sourcing, supporting the reinstatement of Oysters in the Bay through the Watershed Project, and spends whatever little free time he has writing his blog.

The dog days of summer bring more nerdiness. Eric Simons tells us why we root, root, root for the home team; Consuelo Crosby reveals some of the incredible things that structural engineers are able to get away with, and Savino Sguera shares the labwork he does for one of California’s marijuana testing faciltiies.

DJ Citizen Zain, Rick, and Rebecca help you slide into summer. Be there and be square!

Monday 7/29
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
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SPORTS FANS: CRAZY? WHAT THE SCIENCE SAYS by Eric Simons

If you’re a sports fan like me, or you’ve ever just sat, like Jane Goodall, and observed a sports fan in its natural habitat, you can be forgiven for thinking that this is probably the stupidest, most irrational thing that human beings do. And that several billion people do it, with such enthusiasm, is all the more puzzling. But it’s not so irrational as it looks on the surface, which is what we’re going to talk about. We’ll start with the basics: what happens in a sports fan’s brain and body when they watch other people playing a game? Like what, for example, is happening to the testosterone of those young men setting city buses on fire following a game their team won. (Won! Seriously!) Then we’ll talk about some of the ways we control and interpret those reflexes — the way we use the newer parts of the brain to tell the reptile parts to fall in line, the way our apparent lack of free will in following the Cleveland Indians through misery and more misery is in fact not so pre-determined (or irrational) after all. And then we’ll talk about all the ways our high, refined culture influences our biology, with illustrative pictures of a dude who has worn a gorilla suit to every Oakland Raiders games for the last sixteen years. Perhaps, after seeing this guy’s wedding march, you will have some questions. I’ll leave a little extra time.

Eric Simons is a San Francisco based writer, the author of The Secret Lives of Sports Fans: The Science of Sports Obsession, and co-host of the Field Trip Podcast. He’s taught reporting at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and written a previous book, Darwin Slept Here, about Charles Darwin’s four years on mainland South America. He is a sports fan, much to his own consternation, and considers that maybe if any of the teams he likes ever won anything, even once, he could just quit and happily devote his life to gardening.

THAT SHOULD FALL DOWN… by Consuelo Crosby

90% of your daily existence relies on a built structure, yet no one knows what a structural engineer does. In reply, I say I design buildings. Oh, like an architect. No. Contractor? No, I defy gravity. Oh, you’re a plastic surgeon. Not to be defeated, we engineers go where no man, er, woman, has gone before in creating structures that defy the Forces of Nature. At times, the systems we design mimic the impossibility of science fiction and the courage of superheroes. And then there ones that seem dreamed up over too many shots of tequila. From cantilevers dangling 4000 feet above ground to a 1600 foot tall building relying on giant steel balls, the structures on this planet are testament to the wackiness of humans with too much freedom to complete their science projects. I will take you through the structures that have stood the test of time but really, should fall down.

After her idea of becoming a record album cover artist was dismantled by unapproving parents, Consuelo Crosby went on to use both sides of her brain as an engineer with creative aesthetic and sexy boots. She has worked over 25 years in the industry regardless of the hazing of being the first female hired by a large S.F. firm at the tender age of 21. Some of her handiwork can be seen in Oracle Headquarters in Redwood City and the highrise at the corner of 8th and Figueroa in L.A. Consuelo’s efforts at infusing the structural engineering profession with femininity are evident in a collaborative website, Nerdynista.com.

CANNABIS: FROM THE INSIDE OUT by Savino Sguera

What are YOU smoking? The director of the nation’s largest cannabis analysis laboratory guides us through the scientific secrets behind cannabis and its effects on people. What begins as a plant defense against invaders turns out to be a powerful medicinal tool for the human body (with the help of an entourage of terpenoid sidekicks). Whether a smoke, vapor, spray, capsule, tincture, cream, or suppository, these compositions have the potential to be controlled from growth through extraction and processing to achieve customized medicines directed at particular ailments. None of this can be achieved without studying cannabis in agonizing detail through the eye of modern technology and the edges scientific thought.

Savino Sguera has been the Laboratory Director and Chemist of Steep Hill Labs in Oakland, CA for the past two years. His time spent there has seen the lab grow from a small room to a large facility in East Oakland conducting analytical tests for potency, fungus, and residual chemicals using gas and liquid chromatography as well as mass spectrometry and near-infrared spectroscopy. Savino earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University in 2008 specializing in cell and tissue culture, drug delivery, and biomedical devices. Since then he has worked to fabricate composite prosthetics, orthotics, and medical devices as well as compounding pharmaceuticals.

Join us for June’s Nerd Nite East Bay, where Jennifer Schiffner will entice you with tales of Bettie Page, Mark Lescroart may make you trade the corset for a tinfoil hat as you hide your thoughts from functional magnetic resonance imaging machines, and Laith Ullaby will play us out with the pop music of the Arab Spring.

DJ Ion the Prize, Rick, and Rebecca are your East Bay dissonant dissidents for the evening. Be there and be square!

Monday 6/24
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
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LOW-DOWN ON THE PIN-UP: A FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE ON FISHNETS AND FAME DURING THE 1950S by Jennifer Schiffner

Let’s talk about SEX, baby. No, really, let’s talk about S.E.X. The Situational context of the 1950s; the Erotic art of bondage and fetish photography; the eXhilarating and eXotic Bettie Page. We’re going to explore a bit of her-story by examining a modicum of culture from the decade of Leave It To Beaver. By analyzing the context and cultural dynamics of an era typified by gender-normative Americana, we can understand how the concept of gender roles and gender stereotyping evolved during the mid-20th century and, consequently, how this evolution created an underground movement of erotic and fetish art. But how, pray tell, do you really understand the 1950s as a bridge connecting the first and second wave feminist movements? Like any scientist, we have a model. The indelible Bettie Page serves as a metaphor for the abeyance structures in the feminist movements. We’ll examine her life, her career, and of course, her boobies. So tighten up your corset, Mr. Draper, it’s going to be a titillating ride.

When Jennifer Schiffner isn’t mourning her lost career as a trapeze artist or film critic, she practices law in San Jose (but don’t hold that against her). Before becoming an attorney (yawn), Jen took an interest in Bettie Page and gender-bending art during the 1950s. She finally convinced her conservative Catholic college to let her write a book on the topic called, “The Transcendent Bettie Page: The Art of Retro Erotica and Metaphorical Abeyance Structures in the Feminist Movement of the 1950s.” She still peruses her old Playboys for sport and has a lovely collection of fishnets, which she wears under most of her work suits.

FMRI: NEO-PHRENOLOGY OR “WINDOW INTO THE MOVIES IN OUR MIND”? by Mark Lescroart

Search the popular press and you can find stories about lie detection and dream reading via brain scans, or about the “neural correlates” of addiction or romantic love. These stories have gotten so much attention that a cottage industry of de-bunkers has emerged to counter the more grandiose claims of the neuro-imagers. Nay-sayers point to bad statistics, unreliable effects and over-blown conclusions in the fMRI literature. So what should we believe? What do the appealing flickers of color over the brain pictures next to pop neuroscience articles mean, anyway? Why involve magnets at all, and what is “resonating”? I’ll run through how an fMRI scan is different from a picture or X-ray, and explain what functional magnetic resonance imaging can and cannot measure with as little hand-waving as possible. By the time I’m through, you’ll know whether you need to worry about the government eavesdropping on your thoughts, whether you can trust an fMRI scan to tell a lie from the truth in a court of law, and generally what to look out for when interpreting claims based on fMRI evidence.

Mark Lescroart is a postdoctoral researcher in the Gallant laboratory at UC Berkeley. He got his PhD in 2011, working with Irving Biederman at the University of Southern California. Mark also went to USC for undergrad, and graduated in 2002 with a B.S. in Psychobiology and a minor in Japanese. Mark studies the way our brains transform patterns of light on our retinas into useful information about the shape and structure of objects in the world. That can be spooky. He has also written popular science articles for Scientific American Mind, and received a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award Fellowship in 2012.

OVERTURE OF THE ARAB SPRING: MUSIC AND REVOLUTION(S) by Laith Ulaby

From Tunisian hip-hop to 8-bit Egyptian party music, Lebanese indie-rock, a coup d’état scheduled around concerts in Libya, and assassinated Syrian folk singers—music can give us a unique insight into the lives and experiences of the people in the Arab world. This has proved especially true as the events of the 2011 January 25th protest unfolded in Egypt and thousands of people filled Tahrir Square to voice political dissent. Amid the turmoil many of the country’s biggest celebrities came out in support of the regime and denounced the revolution. The backlash against Egyptian pop stars resulted not only in a few high-profile TMZ worthy meltdowns, but the upending of the region’s music industry. The new terrain of the post-revolution landscape has also created opportunities for exciting new voices to emerge. This talk will look at the ways in which music has been intertwined with the events that have swept the region, before, during, and after the Arab Spring.

Laith Ulaby has a PhD in ethnomusicology and has conducted over 3 years of fieldwork in the Middle East. He enjoys explaining what he does and where he has been to the Department of Homeland Security when he returns home. Ulaby has also worked as a musician in Los Angeles contributing music to TV shows and documentary films. He currently lives in Oakland and works as an ethnographer.

Memorial Day brings us the next installment of Nerd Nite East Bay. First, Kate Poirier will teach you just enough topology to secure your bike. Then, we’ll hear new talk from NNSF alumni. Bioengineer Terry Johnson will discuss how we build new DNA from scratch and why and drawer of cute things Megan Elizabeth Carlsen will talk about color theory.

DJ Citizen Zain will keep you dancing while Rebecca and Rick will remind you to return to your seats. Be there and be square!

Monday 5/27
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
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THE POINCARÉ CONJECTURE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOCK MY BIKE by Kate Poirier

At the beginning of the 20th century, Henri Poincaré, a French mathematician, stated a conjecture that would stump the mathematics world for a hundred years. At the beginning of the 21st century, Grigori Perelman, a Russian mathematician, announced a proof of Poincaré’s conjecture. Around the SAME TIME, Kate Poirier, a young mathematics student in Toronto, Canada, had her bike stolen. Coincidence? Perhaps. In this talk, we examine the statement of the conjecture, its history, and what, if anything, its proof has to do with bike theft. It’s a story of math, and love, and bikes…but mostly math. No mathematical expertise will be required, but some experience locking your bike may come in handy. We’ll make broad, uninformed, and likely wildly inaccurate claims about the shape of the universe, so any actual physics you know may count against you.

Kate Poirier got her start as a flaky art student in Toronto. She later learned that mathematicians can also spend all day drawing pictures, and they don’t even have to be any good at it to be taken seriously! She got her Ph.D. in math at the City University of New York and is currently a visiting assistant professor in the math department at UC Berkeley. She has four bikes as well as one cat, whose name is Batman.

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY: BEATING THE CELL AT ITS OWN GAME by Terry Johnson

Ten thousand years ago, give or take, humanity first attempted the deliberate use of microbes to create a particular product. That product was beer; joy and civilization soon followed. Today, synthetic biologists aim to produce biofuels, medicines, and commodity chemicals using wee little beasties, and to control wee little beastie behavior in ever more complex ways. To do this, we need to develop new ways to work with DNA, both physically and in the abstract.

Terry D. Johnson has a master’s degree in chemical engineering from MIT and is currently teaching bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He hopes that by doing so, he will be giving students the tools that they will need to repair him as he gets older. He teaches courses in a wide range of subjects, displaying a versatility that has prevented him from achieving any actual expertise. He is an international genetically engineered machine (iGEM) advisor and co-author of How to Defeat Your Own Clone (and other tips for surviving the biotech revolution).

DRUNK ON COLOR: FROM PIGMENT TO PIXELS by Megan Elizabeth Carlsen

Cows being fed mango leaves to make Indian yellow from their pee. Insects boiled in ammonia to manufacture Carmine red for lipstick. Burnt human bones used to create the darkest black for Rembrandt’s portraits. Our quest to produce the perception of color is filled with fables and facts. Let’s look back to a time when artists’ paint was packaged in small chunks of pig bladders instead of a nifty little tube. Have certain colors have been lost forever in our progress? Though time may have claimed some hues existence, what new colors have been born out of chemicals and screens? How might these new hues change our lives? We’ll explore a history and future riddled with adventure and death, all in the name of creating something that doesn’t exactly exist.

Megan Elizabeth Carlsen is an illustrator living in San Francisco. Currently she works as a Game Artist at TinyCo, making cool stuff for you to play while you are on BART or pooping. Her passions include creating illustrations in traditional watercolor, creating characters that connect with people, and teaching others to do the same. You can check out her art at www.meganillustration.com.