Nerd Nite SF #72: Submarines, Protein Movies, and Affordable SF Housing!

This month we're dealing in the UNBELIEVABLE: wonderful weirdos of the ocean, molecular movies made with lasers, and–the farthest of the fetched–affordable housing in San Francisco. So, take a deep breath and a big sip of your drink as our expert presenters, bartenders, deejay, librarians, and the Grilled Cheese Guy help us come to terms with it all. But only if you do this in the first place: Be there and be square!

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"Submarine in the Abyss: Exploring the Ocean from a Tiny Metal Tube" by Erika Bergman

We hope you are wearing clean socks, because you are about to kick off your boat shoes and climb into a deep-sea submersible! Explore an underwater world dominated by giant tube worms, heat-tolerant shrimpies, vast bioluminescent networks, shipwrecks, and…beer bottles? The ocean makes up 90% of the living space on the planet, and we're not the only weirdos down there.

Erika is a mechanic, tech enthusiast, and explorer for National Geographic. She founded theGEECs.com, whose first program is Girls Underwater Robot Camps, and hopes to hire all the little girls who don't yet realize they are destined to be engineers and explorers.

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"Microwaving Proteins with X-Ray Lasers and Galloping Horses" by James Fraser

In 1872, Leland Stanford gave photographer Eadweard Muybridge the task of proving that all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground at the same time during a gallop. Little did he know he'd be setting in motion (ha!) early cinema, with the concomitant improvements in camera shutters and film emulsions. Fast-forward to today and discover the surprising geographic and scientific parallels between the first "movie" and current efforts to make molecular movies of proteins using the world's first X-Ray Free Electron Laser.

James is a professor at UCSF–where his lab studies the structure and dynamics of macromolecules–and consulting professor at SLAC National Lab, as well as an advocate for the beer-and-tacos approach to scientific publishing, wherein work is made immediately accessible to a wide audience via preprints and eventually also peer-reviewed by traditional journals.

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"Hidden Histories of Affordability in San Francisco" by Michael Epstein

Remember when a housing upgrade was as simple as physically moving your house from one part of San Francisco to another? Or when you could just plop a house on a barge and pay a modest slip fee? Or when foraging tribes would spend their winters in the hills and summers by the Bay creating huge shell mounds from the remainders of seafood feasts? Affordable living has a rich history in San Francisco, and, if you know where to look, some vestiges still remain. This presentation will reveal several hidden landmarks of SF affordable housing and speculate on how they may inform current efforts to keep the city economically diverse.

Michael teaches location-based media courses at the California College of Art and produces apps for urban exploration with Walking Cinema.