We Moved to Santa Barbara!
Tuesday nights, 7 pm, at Santa Barbara’s Brass Bear Brewing
november 19, 7:00 pm
Join us for an evening of good people, good food, and quantum physics
Past Events
Since 2023: Tuesday nights, 7 pm, at Santa Barbara’s Brass Bear Brewing
previously EVERY Tuesday Night, 8 pm, At San Francisco’s REd Victorian
October 17. 6:30 pm: Leveraging Neuroscience for Women’s Health
Elle Murata and Hannah Grotzinger, ucsb psychological & brain SCIENCES
How pregnancy and menopause impact women’s brain health and function.
May 2nd, 7 pm: quantum gravity
Molly Kaplan, UCSB Physics
A Tour through Recent Developments and Open Questions
April 11th, 7 pm: Unlocking Mysteries of The Female Brain
Adele Myers, UCSB Women Brain Health INitiative
50% of the world's population experiences menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and menopause. 85% of females aged 18-64 have used contraceptives. Yet, only a small fraction of research has been dedicated to understanding how these processes impact the female brain.
This lack of attention to female health is surprising, especially considering the increased risk of neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's, migraines, and multiple sclerosis in women.
Join Adele Myers as she delves into the understudied field of female reproductive health and its effects on the brain. In this talk, she will show how cutting-edge AI can help understand shape changes in the female brain during hormonal fluctuations associated with the menstrual cycle.
In partnership with UCSB BioShape Lab and Jacobs Lab.
July 30: Automating the Automator (MICHAEL FISCHER)
Note: This talk will start at 9 pm!
In the future, AI will change how software is created. Such AI systems would allow end-users to create customized software for their specific tasks. Michael will describe his research on using AI to build software and graphical user interfaces. First, he will describe a system that converts natural language commands into runnable programs using a translation model. He will then describe a second AI system that uses AI to create well-designed graphical user interfaces.
July 23: Vision without sight (SANTANI TENG)
Vision dominates sensory processing, taking up almost half the human neocortex. But the visual cortex does not fall silent in blindness: it is recruited for a wide variety of nonvisual perception and cognition — including braille reading, echolocation, language, memory, and math — a phenomenon called crossmodal plasticity.
What good does it do? What kinds of computations does it support? Is it available to both blind and sighted people? Does it shed any light, so to speak, on common misconceptions about blindness? In this talk we will examine some adaptations to blindness, using sensory loss as a framework to guide fundamental questions about neural processing, human perception, and what it means to see.
July 16: P5, A video game approach to change a corrupt Japanese society
Video games are fun, entertaining and creative but, as any art form, they can also be used to send a powerful message. Persona 5 is a good example of that. Taking place in modern Tokyo, it sharply presents all the defects of the Japanese society and a fantasist solution to it: Change hearts of the corrupted to bring justice.
Learn more about how video games can send a powerful message by making players think about the world they live on and the world their character is living on!
July 9: Excrementory Design in the Smallest Room
Arguably the most important room in a building, little attention has been paid to social, ergonomic, or sanitary improvements of bathrooms in the past 200 years. The modern bathroom has obvious shortcomings in serving people with disabilities. Additionally, most bathrooms present serious daily challenges to trans and gender non-confroming people, Robb Godshaw argues that the current system is, in fact, highly unsuitable for everyone. In his talk, Robb will explore the generally unspoken, unnoticed, and variously unfortunate features of the typical North American bathroom design and will do his best to offer cleaner social solutions to all that shit.
July 2: Power, Patriarchy and Consent
Even the “wokest” straight men in 2019 still tend to believe that women want sex less than them, that women want them to intuit MORE than they want them to communicate, and that they have “failed” if they don’t “get laid.” Yet NONE of this is true.
“Rolling out the Red Carpet for the No” offers a solution to the essential quandary of 21st century seduction. It combines elements of chivalry, consent, trauma awareness, and masculine confidence, and, critically, sidesteps the moral callousness of “Pickup Artist” philosophy.
June 18: Buddhist Psychology: A Science of Personal Freedom
Buddhist Psychology is not a doctrine to be believed, but rather a series of experiments to run in your own life. This talk will present the framework of these experiments, so you can experience them for yourself. Buddhist Psychology lives at the intersection of ancient Buddhist wisdom and modern psychological science. We will look at some of the most interesting Buddhist teachings through a psychological lens.
June 11: The Failed Attempt to Denuclearize by the Men Who Made the Bomb
Towards the end of World War II, many of the scientists who had helped create the atomic bomb tried to prevent nuclear proliferation by bringing about an international system of control. Though they reached the highest levels of government with their message, they ultimately failed. Their example has important lessons for those who want to ensure that powerful technologies of the future are developed safely.
June 25: Outlaws, Outliers & the Convict Code
The explosion in American incarceration rates has reached epic proportions in recent years. The US is home to only 5% of the world’s population yet we cage 25% of the world’s prisoners. This trend is both alarming and ongoing. From 1776 to 1976 the US incarceration rate hovered around 100 per 100,000 people or roughly .1%. In the last forty years, that number has skyrocketed by 700%. One might think this huge increase is a symptom of a massive crime wave, yet this is not the case. Crime rates have remained relatively stable throughout this period. This begs the question, why so many prisoners?
June 4: The Implanted Brain (SPECIAL EDITION)
Since the 60's and the impressive experiments of Delgado, the interest for the potential of brain implants has grown steadily. The implanted brain is fascinating by many aspects. A tiny implant has the miraculous capability to restore abilities such as sight, hearing or speech. It can also cure or mitigate psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders as well as enabling the implanted brain to control robotic limbs with the mind. Last, but not least, brain implants fascinate by their potential for thought and emotion control and personality alteration. Join us a for a conversation with experts on this topic!
May 28: EINSTEIN, GENIUS? HOW ALBERT BECAME a SUPERSTAR
Ask a random person on the street to name a scientist, and they’ll probably say “Einstein.”* Not Maxwell or Bohr. Not even Newton or Darwin. How exactly did this babe magnet patent clerk become the most famous nerd of all time: THE GENIUS? The answer – an amazing story with a cast that includes Russian soldiers, British conscious objectors, extraterrestrial enthusiasts, and an eclipse that took place 100 years ago this month – might surprise you.
May 21: Tissue Engineering for Intestinal Regeneration
Our body is constantly replacing cells to allow organ growth and tissue repair. Every second 2million red blood cells are created, and every 10 years our skeleton is fully remodeled. The impressive regeneration ability of our organs could be used to develop novel therapies for patients. In this Red Victorian talk we will focus on engineering techniques used for intestinal regeneration, as thousands of patients suffer from intestinal diseases in the USA each year costing billions of dollars for health care. During this talk a surgical device used in vivo to generate new intestine will be presented to you.
May 14: DO NO Harm: An ER doctor's view on the price of medical care
Federal law requires that emergency rooms provide care to all patients regardless of their ability to pay. It makes no restrictions on what hospitals may bill for this care. The cost can be devastating, especially for those without insurance; overall, medical bills are thought to be a factor in almost half of all personal bankruptcies in the United States. This talk will explore an emergency physician's experiences and ideas about communicating with patients, the prices of emergency care, and the challenges of practicing safe and high-quality medicine in an environment that is not free.
APRIL 30: Is the Bible a source for good in democratic discourse?
Have you ever said to someone, "the bible can be used to say anything" and felt like that was the end of the conversation? To a philosopher, such a statement is just the beginning. What does it mean to use a text? Do we really think the Bible is used to shape social and political policy? Who or what is talking with or through the Bible? Is this helping or hurting democracy?
APRIL 23: IMPACT OF LANGUAGE ON HUMAN BEHAVIOR AND MODERN NEW SPEAK
Impact of the language on human behaviors, the voluntary erasure of words and the modern newspeak. The first human language emerged between 50 000 and 100 000 years ago. Since then we have develop thousands of different languages across the globe. Each of them with their uniqueness. In “1984" George Orwell imagined a new language called the newspeak, a simplified version of english created to limit and control thoughts that people can have. During this talk we will explore different languages, the impact that they can have on people whom speak them. How important are the words that we use in our daily life?
APRIL 16: Mixed Reality in Medicine
Mixed reality is an interesting new technology that merges reality and virtual reality to create a new environment where physical and digital objects co-exist and interact in real time. The combination of computer processing, human input, and environmental input creates a unique reality experience with a variety of potential applications. We will discuss the use of mixed reality for medical purposes, using the newly developed Microsoft HoloLens.
APRIL 9: INSTITUTIONAL HEALTH
Some institutions are regularly capable of great and novel feats of coordination; they build large infrastructure projects, rapidly mobilize resources, and organize to meet new challenges. Others struggle with much smaller problems; their efforts get strangled by bureaucracy, or expended in unresolvable infighting, or whittled away by corruption. In everything from small companies to large social movements to entire societies, we see massive differences in how well institutions function. This talk is about institutional health, a measure of the internal functioning of organizations large and small.
APRIL 2: BLOCKCHAIN and GDPR - An impossible conciliation?
Blockchain technology promises to shift control of all types of activities from central parties to their users. Such a promise seems to echo the spirit of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which hopes to give EU citizens control of their own personal data. Yet the GDPR was conceived before Blockchain was widely known and was fashioned for an era where data are processed centrally. As a result, many of the GDPR’s stipulations clash with Blockchain’s decentralized approach. Come and explore the way in which the GDPR and Blockchain can be reconciled to empower users over their data and realize data privacy
MARCH 19: Silicon Valley's Original Accelerator
Silicon Valley's Original Accelerator: The 'ultrafast' revolution takes the reins from a half-century of frontier scientific discovery at the Bay Area's smallest National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, nestled in the foothills above Stanford University in Menlo Park, is the site where the largest science project of its kind at its time was constructed in the early 1960s. Seemingly unflinching in the face of Silicon Valley's booms and busts, SLAC has been cultivated into a multi-purpose lab with world-leading capabilities in ultrafast X-ray science. This talk reaches from the history of SLAC from its inception as "Project M" to its position today as, "science facility most often confused for a chat application."
MARCH 12: Nuclear Disruption
UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that there are no solutions to the climate changes without scaling nuclear power. Meanwhile, nuclear power is in decline as a power source. But, why do we need it? Why isn’t it happening? And what can we do? The Molten Salt Reactor is a reactor type that is not plagued by the issues typically associated with existing nuclear power. It can deliver scalable, cheaper-than-coal, dispatchable power source by the mid-/late-2020s, enabling the free market to fight the runaway GHG-emission and eliminate energy poverty. Are you ready to rethink nuclear?
MARCH 5: Cause or Effect? Looking beyond correlations
Often, scientific questions deal with problems of cause and effect. Does consumption of red meat cause cancer? Is too much screen time harmful for children? In today’s world, vast amounts of data are collected under the principle “collect data now, ask questions later”. Tapping such sources to answer “why”-questions has immense opportunities for many scientific disciplines, ranging from biology to public policy. However, such data often does not fit into the classical framework of randomized experiments and pitfalls are abound. We will discuss several ideas and approaches that allow to answer “why”-questions in such settings.
FeBruary 26: Reducing carbon emissions with AI: Photovoltaic Forecasting
Photovoltaic (PV) power generation has emerged as one of the lead renewable energy sources. Yet, its production is characterized by high uncertainty, being dependent on weather conditions like solar irradiance and temperature. Predicting PV production, even in the 24-hour forecast, remains a challenge and leads energy providers to keep idle - often carbon-emitting - plants. In this talk, we will present what are the various ways to predict a photovoltaic forecast, using numerous scientific and engineering tools available - from weather forecasting to satellite imaging. Finally, we will explore active areas of research and how AI and deep learning can help us do a better job at renewable energy forecasting. The future looks bright!
February 19: Are we alone in the universe? Unlocking secrets of exoplanets
Today, we are closer than ever to find an answer to the question “Are we alone in the universe?” The NASA Kepler Space Telescope showed that planets are abundant throughout our Galaxy, but most of the Kepler planets orbit stars too distant to further study. The NASA Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Mission will find exoplanets transiting nearby, bright stars: the best targets for follow-up characterization with large ground telescopes, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope. This talk will show how these ambitious Space Telescopes are changing our view of the cosmos.
February 12: Pen Play: Art, Improvisation and neuroscience
We are hosting a participatory event on Partner Pen Play in Parallel (PPPiP), or simultaneous improvisational drawing on paper.. There will be two parts to this event. First we will have a short lecture on art therapy, sexology, affective neuroscience, and aesthetics. Then for the second part of the event, we will provide Paper and Pens and do some drawing together.
February 5: Digital tools for menstrual health
Half of humanity is, has, or will be menstruating. Yet, the impact of this fundamental biological rhythm on women’s health and quality of life has been little studied or addressed beyond their reproductive aspect. Many women however suffer from various physical and psychological symptoms and diseases associated with the menstrual cycle. Together, we will explore how millions of self-tracked data points collected via phone apps can support inclusive research on menstrual health.
JANUARY 4: Counterculture Materialised; Work and the Outlaw Builder
The lazy hippie, one of the most durable counterculture stereotypes, misrepresents the movement’s energetic subversion of the modern construct of work. Hippies redefined the practice of self-building as a transformative experience open to anyone: the unskilled, the cash-strapped, women and children, lesbians and gay men. Outlaw builders devised a work culture that fostered collective identity and individual self-confidence in the process of constructing their back-to-the-land shelters across a rural archipelago of “liberated territories.