The Island of Independent Baseball
Hustle and Fun Running an Indie Sports Team

Learn about the challenges and exciting advantages of Independent Baseball!
How do independent teams find players and keep fans?
How many behind the scenes jobs happen before and during game day?
Hear about good, bad, and outside the box promotions

Speaker: Vinnie Longo is the Assistant General Manager, Radio Play by Play Broadcaster, and Director of Media Relations for the San Rafael Pacifics Baseball Club. In 2015, he organized the "Robo Ump" games where a computerized strike zone called balls and strikes for the first time in professional baseball history.

The Big Bang Query
Understanding Reality and Einstein's Relativity

Answer the complex question of fast you are moving RIGHT NOW!
Learn about the critical differences between the Galileo and Einstein Theories of Relativity.
How fast does a light beam move, and why is that question hard?
See video demonstrations and walk through thought experiments that address the fundamental questions at the heart of Relativity

Speaker: Tucker Hiatt is the Executive Director of Wonderfest. He won the Amgen Award for Science Teaching Excellence, built exhibits for the Exploratorium, wrote a guide book, and worked with UC Berkeley's Space Astrophysics Group on the SETI@home software. He is a Board member of the Bay Area Skeptics and held the position of Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Chemistry Department.

Hooray For Hydrowood
Sunken Wood and the Critters Who Call It Home

Learn how deep-sea animals survive without sunlight!
How do dead whales create complex islands of life on the ocean floor?
Why do different species of wood sinking to the bottom of the ocean create diverse deep sea communities?

Speaker: Jenna Judge earned her PhD from UC Berkeley studying patterns of diversity in the deep sea. She taught the Invertebrate Zoology course at UC Berkeley and is starting a fellowship that aims to make the SF Bay and outer coast resilient to sea-level rise and coastal inundation. Jenna has been known to write haikus about deep-sea worms and perform interpretive dances about copepod feeding to reach students with a range of learning styles.