The Evolution of the Reflector Telescope, Part 2With the success of George Ellery Hale and George Willis Ritchey in building large reflecting telescopes at Mt. Wilson in the early 20th Century, this type of instrument became the dominant type of telescope of professional astronomy. New innovations were developed in mirror making, mounting machinery, and detector technology. Reflecting ...
Sunset/Full Moon Walk to the Point Bonita LighthouseJoin park staff and docents for a tour down the Point Bonita Trail, through the hand carved tunnel and out to the Lighthouse. We will walk along a half-mile trail which is steep in places. Arrive early as parking is limited. Meet at the Point Bonita Lighthouse trailhead. Dress warmly ...
Where: SausalitoCost: Free
After Dark: Extended CinemasImmerse yourself in visual storytelling that extends the possibilities of cinema. See aspects of film rarely displayed: unusual film formats with Dino Everett and an insider view into projectionists' techniques with Paul Clipson. Enter worlds created by Elise Baldwin-investigating collective memory-and by Wet Gate, a 16mm projector–playing ensemble. Experience Thad Povey and Mark Taylor's multiturntable record player, ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15 General; $10 Members; Free for Lab Members
Cafe InquiryMeet up with rationalists, skeptics, and freethinkers south of San FranciscoCafe Inquiry is a social event hosted by the Center for Inquiry|San Francisco. We'll meet at Café Borrone http://www.cafeborrone.com/ next to Kepler's Books. Look for CFI t-shirts.For more information or if you have questions please email sf@centerforinquiry.net ...
Where: Menlo ParkCost: Free
Osteopathic Medicine: Myths and RealitiesGet an in-depth look into the field of osteopathic medicine from Gina Moses, M.Ed. She addresses the nuances of osteopathic medical education and how that differs from allopathic medicine. Moses also highlights the growing need for medical practitioners in the United States and how physicians trained in osteopathic medicine are ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Free
From black holes to superconductors (part 2 of 2)The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Physics announces the second mini-course by Stanford physics faculty on recent fundamental advances in theoretical physics. The winter quarter's lectures will be by Professor Sean Hartnoll.Black holes have the remarkable property of irreversibility: if you fall into a black hole you can't get out (classically). This ...
Positive PsychologyThis one hour interactive program on positive psychology will explore the causes and practices of happiness in daily life.Instructor: Frederic Luskin, PhD Director, Stanford University Forgiveness Project
Felicia Marcus will give a sense of California water's setting (basic hydrology, infrastructure, etc), discuss the drought's impacts and the state's actions to address them, and will talk about how California water management is changing (and needs to change) to cope with the impacts of climate change, population growth, and ...
Golden Gate park is a canvas on which the city's ambitions were sketched. San Francisco was the first major city on the coast. We'll discover many firsts in the Park because it was where ideas were tested. We'll see where a major railroad came right into the park, where the ...
Where: CACost: Pay what you wish!
Somatic Robots: Neural-Structural Integration - Time ChangeSomatic Robotics approaches the design of physical structure and control intelligence as a single integrated task. The Mind / Body duality of western thought, and the associated separation of control theory from mechanical engineering, are inadequate at providing insight to biology or future robotic systems. To understand how we control ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Do Energy Efficiency Investments Deliver? Evidence from the Weatherization Assistance ProgramConventional wisdom suggests that individuals and firms often fail to undertake energy efficiency investments that are predicted by engineering models to have private returns greatly in excess of their costs. Policymakers have seized on this so-called energy efficiency gap with a wide variety of interventions that promise both private benefits ...
As part of the 2015 Faculty Arist Recital Series at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, neuroscientist and soprano (and Inquiring Minds podcast host) Indre Viskontas is joined by Grammy-nominated pianist Keisuke Nakagoshi in an exploration of the mind through music. Why does one piece 'go viral' while another languishes in obscurity, ...
We are quite literally not who we were years, weeks, or even days before. The stuff that makes our body is being replaced all the time, from the chemicals in our cells to the very cells themselves. What lasts is not our literal substance but rather a pattern that is ...
Where: San MateoCost: Free
Saturday, 03/07/15
Botany Series: Basic BotanyHow do plants work? If it's been way too long since that high school biology class, come take a step back with Ely Huerta-Ortiz (Nurseries Education Manager) and Annette Russell (Marin Headlands Nursery Manager). We will learn the basic processes that plants go through in life, how they have adapted ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Donation encouraged
5th Annual STEM Career Fair & ExhibitionEngineering and Mathematics Link Inc. (SEM Link) will host its5th Annual San Francisco Bay Area Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Career Fair and Exhibition. This event will provide K-12 students with an opportunity to explore careers and meet and interact with professionals in these fields. Pre-registration is strongly suggested ...
All Bay Area Middle and High School Studentsare invited to: The Third Annual Bay Area Teen Science (B.A.T.S.) STEM College and Career Fair REGISTER NOW at the "Click to Visit" weblinkThis event is for all Bay Area middle and high school students to experience and learn cool information about college and ...
Deep within the city of San Francisco a forest grows. It's a complex one, overrun with invasive vines and other political drama. It's incredible to hike through now that the Sutro Stewards have (recently) provided a working trail network. We'll see hidden stairways, mysterious artifacts and even freshwater springs as ...
We love our Members and appreciate the support you provide to the Hall's mission for science education. Celebrate with us, at our Olympics-inspired Member appreciation event. Join our Member Meetup Group to be the first to receive insider news and announcements for upcoming Member events. www.meetup.com/LHSfamilies
Where: BerkeleyCost: Member Event
Trekking the ModelJoin a Ranger guided tour of the Bay Model, a 1.5-acre hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay and Delta. Discover the stories of the two major operations that took place at this location between 1942–2000.
Experience winter bird watching in the Marin Headlands. Join volunteer Jane Haley on an easy walk along Rodeo Lagoon to discover our summer birds. Bring binoculars and field guides. Meet at the Marin Headlands Visitor Center. Bring field guides and binoculars.For ages 8 and up.Reservations required; please call (415) 331-1540.
The Park was nothing but blowing sand until the manure arrived. Today's Golden Gate Park is a lush, sculpted garden. What a feat! For 6,000 years it was open dunes. There is one small woodland that's been there for centuries, if you stretch the definition of "be." We'll explore how ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: Pay what you wish
Solar Astronomy at the Lindsay Wildlife MuseumPlease join Mt. Diablo Astronomical Society for a public Astronomy program to learn about the Sun.Society members will provide safe close-up views of our Sun using Solar-filtered telescopes (weather permitting). Activities for young and old will demonstrate how our nearest star works, and how our Solar System developed.
Join us for Global Speaker Series event with Regina E. Dugan, vice president for engineering at Google. In this student-led interview, Dugan will discuss her insights on today's business environment within a global context. Regina Dugan has been widely recognized for her leadership in innovation and technology. She currently leads Google's Advanced ...
Prosocial Primates: Empathy in Animals and HumansThe GGSC is pleased to present this talk by Greater Good editorial board member Frans de Waal--world-renowned primatologist, one of Discover magazine's "47 Great Minds of Science," and a pioneer in the study of the evolutionary basis of empathy and kindness. Dr. de Waal's research is not only foundational to ...
Where: BerkeleyCost: Free
THE UC DAVIS D-LAB: INTERDISCIPLINARY PROJECT-BASED LEARNINGDr. Kurt Kornbluth discuss examples of critical thinking, design, and innovation from the UC Davis D-Lab. He will highlight projects in developed and developing countries focused on Sustainable Energy and Agriculture, promoting Human Animal, and Environmental Health.
Where: Rohnert ParkCost: Free
Imaging Life at High Spatiotemporal ResolutionAs our understanding of biological systems has increased, so has the complexity of our questions and the need for more advanced optical tools to answer them. For example, there is a hundred-fold gap between the resolution of conventional optical microscopy and the scale at which molecules self-assemble to form sub-cellular ...
7:00-7:25: Indrani Baruah(Architect and Visual Artist) on "Cultural Re-Imaginations : Experiments in Creative Placemaking"Cultural Re-imaginations challenges the traditional boundaries between art/architecture, artist/artisan, crafts/arts, public/private and inside/outside...Read more7:25-7:50: Stephen Bailey(Lawrence Berkeley Labs) on "How to Make a 3D Map of the Universe (and Why?)"5000 little robots will help position ...
Dan Barber is the Chef of Blue Hill, a restaurant in Manhattan, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns, a nonprofit farm and education center. Barber has received multiple James Beard awards and was named one of Time's 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. He writes about food ...
Where: Mountain ViewCost: $22
Tuesday, 03/10/15
Lichen: A Closer LookTake a 1.5-mile nature walk along trails from the lower to upper waterfalls to discover the incredible beauty and diversity of lichen that thrive in the park's riparian forests. Learn ways these organisms benefit both wildlife and the environment. Meet at the main day use parking lot near the restrooms. ...
Where: Morgan HillCost: Free
Free Community Day at CuriOdysseyExplore science and meet native California animals! CuriOdyssey's free Community Days take place on varying days, both during the week and on the weekend, so that more visitors have the opportunity to experience CuriOdyssey.Please be aware that Community Days are typically crowded in the morning and early afternoon. If you'd ...
Where: San MateoCost: Free
Going to the Ends of the Earth to Glimpse the Beginnings of Time - CANCELEDCosmic Microwave Background (CMB) photons are actually sensitive gravimeters. Using the intensity and polarization properties of these primeval photons, we can measure the gravitational field of the last scattering surface, the fictitious shell formed by the universe's first hydrogen atoms.The last scattering surface is also a gravitational wave detector; a ...
The Social and Economic Impact of Climate ChangeClimate change represents a major global environmental challenge, but we are only beginning to understand how changes in climate might affect social and economic outcomes. In this talk, Dr. Marshall Burke summarizes a new body of evidence describing how a range of social and economic outcomes are shaped by changes ...
Carl Djerassi, a teenage refugee from Nazism and a prodigiously gifted chemist, along with Gregory Pincus and John Rock, fathered the birth control pill. Djerassi, now in his 90s, has published short stories, poetry, an autobiography, seven plays, and Four Jews on Parnassus – A Conversation, a dramatized discussion between ...
Where: San FranciscoCost: $15
Bay Currents talk: What Your Bird Guide Tells You About EvolutionWhat ever happened to clapper rails, brown towhees, and marsh hawks? Modern genetic testing is not only making you learn new names for familiar creatures. It's unveiling unexpected family trees, and revealing fascinating adaptations on the long evolutionary road from dinosaurs to today's feathered wonders. Bring a bird guide! (We'll have ...
A long dune field blew across the city. The ice age was over. Alamo Square Park is an outcrop of rock (one of many) jutting up through the vast dune field. Like all of our bedrock, water springs up through the fissures, even at hilltops. We'll explore places that were ...
Online civic engagement has the potential to dramatically improve a government's interactions with its community, and thereby increase public trust – but only if the online engagement augments participation, increases insights and avoids challenges related to the issues of undue influence, transparency, open data, privacy, responsiveness, civility and free speech.The ...
Personality traits form a key driver behind people's behavior, cognitions, motivations and emotions; and thus assessing others' personality is a basic social skill and a crucial element of successful social interactions. However, based on a sample of over a million participants, I show that personality judgments made by computers and ...
Machine learning and natural language processing provide a framework for extracting meaning from text, and have given us great advances over the past fifty years in areas as diverse as machine translation, question answering, and information retrieval. Many of the written texts that we apply these techniques to â news ...
Rust is a new systems language, initially developed at Mozilla, and rapidly approaching its 1.0 release. The goal of the language is to combine safety and control. In particular, Rust guarantees memory and type safety, but does not require a garbage collector, and provides for the kind of zero cost ...
Where: StanfordCost: Free
Cli-Fi 2015The notion that humans can fundamentally alter the biochemistry of something as big as the Earth's atmosphere seems like science fiction to some. While politicians debate whether or not climate change is real, authors and filmmakers are tackling the far-out implications in a new genre called Climate Fiction or Cli-Fi. ...
Where: LafayetteCost: $22 General, $12 Members, $7 Student
Climate Disruption - Vulnerable MarinJust how vulnerable is Marin to climate change? Marin communities are already being impacted by effects of climate change, as witnessed in December with over $13 million in damages due to storms. How are we going to gauge our preparedness for this increasing stressor (not to mention wildfires and drought), ...
Where: San RafaelCost: $10 Advance/$15 at Door General, Free for members
Planck: Echoes from the Big BangProf. Francois R. Bouchet of the Institut d' Astrophysique in Paris, France will give the 32nd annual Bunyan Lecture.
