Wed, June 24

Nerd Nite SF #162: Photographing the Whole Web, "Curing" Hysteria, and Who Speaks for Earth?

7pm doors

$10 adv / $15 doors

All Ages

Presentations:

“Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Web Yet?“: Toward a Portrait of Our Collective Internet

By: Sophia Liu

In 1966, Stewart Brand, looking out at the skyline from his SF apartment rooftop, wondered why no one had ever taken a photograph of the Earth to prove its curvature: if we could see a photograph of the whole Earth, we, a people then threatened by nuclear eradication, would understand our collective responsibility toward the promise of a shared and bright future. Sixty years later, with the internet, Facebook, and ChatGPT, his vision rings truer than ever, but now concerning a new world: our digital and virtual sphere is threatened by visions of AGI superweapons that make critical thought, creativity, and pro-social online interaction seem unnecessary. In this talk, I make a call to action from the same city about a new planet, introduce some of our ambitious research visions from the field of Human-Computer Interaction, and (hopefully) bring a functioning demo.

Born in SF and raised in the South Bay, Sophia Liu is a new grad from UC Berkeley who had the wise premonition four years ago to major in computer science. She is simultaneously shackled to and freed from the traditional Silicon Valley corporate ladder now that her original dreams of becoming a product manager at Google have been crushed by Anthropic’s newest frontier model release. She also moonlights as a Human-Computer Interaction researcher and incoming master’s student at UC Berkeley, and works toward new ways to be built different and to build differently in the shadow of the AI mushroom cloud.

Messaging ET: Who Speaks for Earth?

By: Julia DeMarines

Did you know that humans have sent over a dozen high powered messages to space to intentionally get a response from potential ET onlookers? While most people aren't aware of these activities, these messages speak on behalf of humanity and all beings on our planet who have no say in the matter! This raises ethical questions: Should we be messaging at all? What should these messages say? And most importantly, who speaks for Earth? In this talk I will discuss the Dear ET project - an international effort that bridges active philosophy and STEAM education to raise awareness of these messaging efforts, support legitimate global representation, and hopefully enact messaging policy in the future. 

"Curing" Hysteria: Strange Remedies and Women's Resistance in the 19th-Century U.S.

By: Vivian Wolf

In the nineteenth-century United States, women diagnosed with hysteria and other nervous disorders were prescribed treatments including prolonged bed rest, all-milk diets, hydrotherapy, and electrical stimulation. This talk examines the cultural and economic forces behind these so-called cures while exploring how writers challenged prevailing ideas about health.

Vivian Delchamps Wolf (PhD, UCLA English, 2022) is an Assistant Professor of English at Dominican University of California. Her research and teaching focus upon 19th-century American literature and feminist disability studies. Her book in progress, Resisting Diagnosis: Women’s Disability Literature of the 19th-Century U.S., analyzes the ways women writers use literature to challenge harmful issues within medical systems and beyond.

Featuring Friends of the Show:

The SF Public Library

DJ & Jelly