Manufacturing Meat with Math!
Women and the Black Panther Party!
Regional Design Wonders with 99% Invisible and WebUrbanist!
Start your night when the doors open at 7PM with games by Ann-Marie Benz, beats by Rubberband Girl and eats by Miss Arepita, then grab a drink and a seat as talks begin at 8PM.
Women and the Black Panther Party
Oakland shaped the evolution of the Black Panther Party, and the city served as the launching point for the BPP’s nationwide expansion and critical social programs for communities of color. Learn about the history of strong women in the Bay Area Black Panther Party, the fight against the FBI’s counterintelligence program, and the sometimes forgotten stories of Panthers’ progressive political alliances, alternative community schooling and focus on LGBTQ rights that continue to shape California’s culture today.
Robyn C. Spencer is the author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender and the Black Panther Party and a historian at Lehman College in the Bronx (robyncspencer.com). She teaches courses on gender, Black radicalism and social protest after WWII. She continues to bring the Sixties back to life in her next book on the anti-Vietnam War movement in the Black community.
Regional Design Wonders of the World
Learn how 99% Invisible creates episodes and discover region-specific design solutions from around the world. From German’s tilt-and-turn windows and heated Japanese kotatsu tables to Calgary street signs, Finnish dish-drying cabinets and rotary clotheslines in Australia, see how objects designed in response to a region’s unique cultural and physical conditions can teach us about a place and the people who live there. Also peek behind the curtain at how 99% Invisible finds topics and creates their famous podcast episodes and multimedia articles about design.
Kurt Kohlstedt is a producer at 99% Invisible (99pi.org) and founder of WebUrbanist (weburbanist.com). He has been writing about urban art, architecture and design for over a decade. A recent transplant to the East Bay, he can regularly be seen photographing things like manhole covers and utility location tags on the streets of beautiful downtown Oakland, California.
Manufacturing Meat with Math
Science and math are turning plants directly into meat in Oakland, with no cows as highly inefficient meat machine middle men required. Learn how predictive models of olfactory perception can analyze plant-derived molecules and match them to chemical structures to create the flavor profiles of meats and dairy, and how statistical techniques can screen large libraries of small molecules for protein binding to generate the identical sensation of taste. Discover how combinatorial chemistry, gas chromatography, algorithms and veggies can create the next great burger and sustainably feed the world’s growing population.
Oliver Zahn is the Head of Data Science at Impossible Foods in Oakland. He was the Director of UC Berkeley’s Center for Cosmological Physics before deciding to use his experience with vast and complex real world data to unlock the world’s abundant plant-based protein stores and contribute to the survival of our planet and species.