 Okay everybody, welcome to Nerd Nights. We have a bunch of excellent speakers tonight for you here on a Monday night in Oakland. So how do we pay for this venue? So we actually pay for this venue by selling you alcohol, which you would have bought anyway. So the best thing you can do for us is try to buy as much beer as much mixed drinks as you possibly can while also getting home safely. That's important to us too. But one of the ways we can run this show and break even every year is by you guys buying drinks, please do buy beer at the bar. More beer, yeah, buy more beer is even better actually. Grilled cheese guys here tonight. Big fans of grilled cheese in the front. So you can also support us and him by buying lots of good grilled cheese food, which we like. Oakland Library's here. So Oakland Library has both a reading list. A lot of big library fans in the audience as well. So you can get a library card tonight. You can also get an information list of other references that involve this talk. And so if you're more interested in some of these topics, they actually have a great list for you. Wolfman Books is here tonight, selling books. Wolfman Books, little local Oakland bookstore. So Wolfman has been fantastic to work with. They're selling books tonight sort of. So there's bad weather like everywhere in the country right now. And so the shipment which they ordered a long time ago for this book didn't make it here. So we want them to be successful. We want to incentivize you guys to still buy the book. So here's what we and they are going to do. So if you buy the book tonight, you can choose. They can give you 10% off and you can come pick it up at their lovely bookstore on 13th. Or they will, you can pay full price and they will ship it to you for free. Either way, if you buy the book here tonight and give them your name, we will give you a free ticket to next month's nerd night. So we really want you guys to take advantage of that. They're an awesome bookstore who is fantastic to work with. So please, Rick says, show the book for the fourth time. The only copy in all of California. We killed 14 people. There's nothing better than being called the liar on stage in front of you. Who did you kill for your book? Because we had to kill a guy. It was great. So we actually run this event every single month. So we don't want to spam you guys, but we also don't want to be part of the Facebook cartel quite as much as we are now. And so yeah, you should totally add our Facebook page. We do post our events up there. If you text Oakland to 345-345, that'll put you automatically on our email list. We will send you two and just two emails a month announcing our events. They'll help you get in early on tickets. It's a really good way to help us sort of get out of the tech conglomerate and also know what we're going to do for the next month. So let's talk about our talk. So Christy is going to talk tonight about recovery from injuries. And so that's part of athleticism, like figuring out you exercise, you do something, and how are you going to recover and make yourself less sore. But part of exercise and part of athletic events is actually prepping yourself for those events. And so I thought I'd go through some of the ways that professional athletes prep themselves for athletic competition. So I'm a big baseball fan. This is probably the most superstitious baseball player of the last 50 years. His name is Turk Wendell. Turk Wendell thought that foul lines were bad luck. And so for his entire career, which lasted nine seasons, he literally jumped over every foul line during plays, after plays, between innings, would not touch foul lines. That's kind of weird. It gets weirder. So he thought it was good luck to eat four, in exactly four pieces of licorice between every inning of games he was pitching. Exactly four. There was a problem. He also hated the flavor of licorice. So every inning of every game he pitched, he also brushed his teeth after eating four pieces of licorice. That's his actual baseball card. He's not throwing a ball. He's not hitting. He's brushing his teeth on his first official baseball card. This is Justin Verlander. So you've probably heard the idea that if you don't have sex before an athletic event, like it'll give you more attention and you'll be better at that athletic event. So Justin Verlander famously does not have sex before games he pitches and doesn't have sex after games he pitches. So he just doesn't have sex on those days. And so, I don't know, he is 204 and 123. He's led the league in starts and innings pitched three times. That's stamina, people. He's won the Sayang. He was the first pitcher to win the MVP in 27 years. He's a 7-time All-Star. So, like, this idea of not having sex, I mean, the guy is going to freaking Hall of Fame. So maybe not having sex was a good idea. Also, Justin Verlander is married to Kate Upton. So it wasn't worth it. So I totally blanked on this guy's name because I don't really watch that much soccer. But in 1998, the French team won the World Cup. So their runs started in their very first game. This guy kissed his goalie's bald head for good luck. And it was a cute thing. And then they won. So we had to do it again. And they won the entire World Cup. So romantic. Finally, yeah, this will work. So, this one's weird. So this is Les Miles. He's the football coach for LSU. So Les Miles, when he gets nervous at games, eats the grass off the field. Despite the fact he's been told repeatedly that that grass has been covered with like pesticides and football players. But he's like the cat you can't train to not eat grass, right? So the best part is he like actually developed a taste for his home stadium LSU grass and decided that grass was better than anyone else's grass when they went on the road. So when he was on the road, he would literally take a baggie of LSU grass with him so he could chew on it and eat it during the game. I want to repeat that. When he traveled, he took a baggie of grass in his pocket and it was a baggie of grass. Talk about things that are much more delicious. Oh, hold on. Coming back. Coming back. Come on back. Wrong way. Thank you. Coming back. Coming back. Great segue, Scott. Way to be professional. Talk about things that are much more tasty for athletic performance. Please welcome Christy to the stage. Can y'all hear me? Alright, I've got my beer here. It's kind of a prop. I am going to talk about where did it go? My new book is called Good to Go. I'm going to walk you through. It's almost like the live kindle single, kindle preview. We're going to talk about chapter one, which is about beer and running. There we go. The book actually starts here at Mount Garfield in western Colorado. This is the Mount Garfield grumble, which is the stupidest running race I've ever done six times. It starts off, it climbs two miles and ascends 2,000 feet in those two miles. It's the kind of race where you're using your hands. Is this working? This is right after the start there. Oh, this is not working. There we go. This is the start. So it's quite steep. And then you climb up to the top and you come down. This is the last descent into the finish. The finish line is fire pit. So you have to jump over the fire pit. And once you do that, you finish and then you get some beer. Nice, good, healthy beer. Very delicious taste. Covery drink. So it's one of the mornings after this race that happens every spring. I'm standing around and I'll just say the first time that I did the Garfield grumble, the next day I literally could not walk. I could barely get out of bed. The researchers are trying to study soreness, muscle soreness in the lab. They make people run downhill. So the Garfield grumble is sort of like a perfect test case for soreness and recovery. And so I'm standing around the finish line at the Garfield grumble thinking this beer tastes so refreshing. This is so nice. It's relaxing. But is it really good for me? And so this question occurred to me. Alcohol and beer in particular is a little bit like coffee. It's mind-altering and pleasant. And we sort of suspect that it must be bad for us even as we secretly hope that it's good for us. We all enjoy a nice cold beer after a run. Me and my running buddies. But I started to think, could it be that those beers that I'm drinking after the race are part of the reason I'm so damn sore? Isn't that funny though? I'm not thinking like it's because that hill's so damn steep. I'm like, oh it must be the beer. So anyway my friend at the time, my friend Gig Ledbetter was a researcher at the local university. They have a fantastic exercise lab there. And so I was talking to him and I said, hey, we should study this. I had gone into the scientific literature to look for answers. And what I found is there are a lot of studies on alcohol that were done in rugby players. And the scenario would be they would have them do some really hard exercise and then give them like five or six or eight beers. I thought, I'm a runner. That is not the scenario I'm looking for. I want to know what one or maybe maximum two beers are going to do. But I wasn't finding answers. So my solution was to do my own study. So we did. And so here is our study design. We had ten volunteers, five men and five women, and the study had two parts. The first part was what we called the beer run. And this was, we had come into the lab. We did some pre-testing that was done ahead of time. Everyone had to do these crappy tests where they tried to see how fast you can go and how hard. And based on that they are calculating what 75% of our VO2 Max was. And I should add here, so I was in on all of the planning of the study, but I was also a participant. So I sort of got the full experience. So part one is the beer run. So 45 minutes at about 75% of Max. So this is the kind of pace where it's hard but not all out. You can have a conversation, but it's probably in phrases, not complete sentences. After the beer run everyone got a nice pasta dinner. And then of course the beers. So there were two choices. This was a placebo controlled double blind study. So no one knew what was happening. Our two beers were Fat Tire Amber Ale, which is a very nice Colorado beer. Delicious beer. Our placebo beer was Odull's Amber, which only redeeming quality is that it looks remarkably similar to Fat Tire in a plastic cup. And so the goal here was to get to just under .08% blood alcohol. That is the limit for driving in Colorado. So this is having a little bit of beer, but where you're still just able to drive. So the next morning we came back to the lab and did what was called a run to exhaustion. So here the pace was turned up just a little bit from the night before. And all of a sudden you're on this treadmill. It's set to this pace that's pretty damn hard, but not all out. And you just have to go until you can't go any longer. And so the goal is to just keep going and keep going until you're going to conk out. So those are the two parts. Everyone did the whole protocol twice. So the next day we all came back and did it again. So whatever beer you got the first time, the second time you got the other beer, did another you got some beer, did another run to exhaustion. And so here was our hypothesis. This was sort of what we were looking at in the study. We thought beer might alter three different things during the run to exhaustion. One would be the rating of perceived exertion. So this is sort of like how are you feeling. And this is the thing that we really care about. Are you going to feel crappy the next day if you drink beer? The second thing was something called respiratory exchange ratios. This is something that sort of gets at fuel usage, the proportion that's fat versus carbohydrates that you're burning. And then the third thing that we measured of course was the time to reach the exhaustion point. So this is how long you were able to go at this level of exertion. So we crunched all the results, looked at all the data, and it turned out that we found absolutely no difference in the first two measures. But we did find a statistically significant difference in the third measure. And what was really interesting is that the difference, we found a gender difference as well. Women, it turns out, beer is great for women. Can we just do like a big cheers for that? So us women, the morning after the beer, we performed 22% better on that run to exhaustion. So that means that we were able to take that run to exhaustion. Okay, that was weird. 22% longer. Men, on the other hand, had essentially the same sort of result but in the other direction. So if you are like me and you are a woman married to a man, this is fantastic news because it means, sorry honey, this is science. You are the designated driver. I am the drinker. The other thing that was great, we had a p-value of .03. It's below the magical .05 under which the angels sing. You are able to publish in a big journal. You have license to say this is statistically significant which is often erroneously conflated with this is real. But it was great. And at the time I had convinced Runners World magazine to bankroll the study. This could have been on the cover like beer is great for women. Great thing. The only problem was I did not believe the result. I know, right? And I am just going to walk you through what I learned from this study. And the first lesson is that it's a lot easier to get a result than it is to get an answer. And what I mean by this is I wanted to know, I wanted to answer the simple question which is after I do the Garfield Grumble am I going to be worse off if I have the beer? And this study just didn't really answer that for me. Let me explain why. The first problem that I had is that this run to exhaustion was our major way of measuring recovery. And this is something that you run into in any scientific study. The very first problem that you have or the first issue that you have is a measurement problem. Whatever the question is, how are you going to measure it? How are you going to answer that question? And in this case we had decided on, sorry, I'm getting a lot of feedback, we had decided on this run to exhaustion because it is a very standard test. It's used throughout sports science. I mean, honestly, we never questioned it. It's just so standard. It's what people use. So it never occurred to us that it wasn't the right measure. And I think that had I only been one of the organizers of the study, I would still think it was a pretty good test. But I can tell you that as a participant of the study, I realize that this was a really shitty way to measure recovery. And let me tell you why. So this is Larry. He's here with us as a daughter. And you know, so after all of the results were in and we had crunched the numbers and everything, I sort of did a debriefing with all of the participants in the study and we all got to really know each other during the study as well because we went through this somewhat miserable experience together, which of course is always bonding, right? But all of us had sort of felt like this run to exhaustion wasn't so much a measure of our performance or even how we're feeling, but it almost became at some point a measure of how committed are you to this study. You get to this point where it's just kind of unpleasant, but it's not really like all out. I can go, can I go a little longer? Maybe I can. And it kind of comes down to like, no one's getting paid for this. You're doing it for the good of science. And Larry on this particular day had his daughter with him in the lab and she was getting cranky. And he told me afterwards, he said, yeah, I probably could have gone longer that day, but my daughter was there and she was kind of cranky, so I gave up. And everyone, too, a one, after talking to them after the study, said some version of the same thing. You know, at some point you're sort of asking yourself, how committed am I to this? So it felt more like a psychological test than a physical one. Another lesson here is that study design is really important. This may seem pretty obvious, but let me explain here. This is Marty who's a very accomplished ultra runner and he got the placebo beer the first day. And so he went and he ran for like an hour and a half, an hour, 40 minutes, something like that on this first run to exhaustion, which is a really long, really long time. And so our study design was such that people came back the next day for the second part of, you know, to basically repeat the study again. And we did this for very good reasons. You know, it's hard to get the lab time. People are volunteering their time. It's easier to get them to dedicate one weekend instead of coming back on alternate weekends, things like this. But what it meant is that the things that were convenient to us as researchers sort of may have disrupted the results. So in this case Marty went so long the first time that you have to imagine that he was tired the next day. So was his poor performance after the actual beer, the fat tire because of the beer? Or was it because he went so long the first time? It's really hard to say. Another important lesson that I learned is that expectations by the participants are really, really important. Before the study began we brought everyone together into the lab. We actually brought a cop in. We had used those little charts to figure out blood alcohol content, but the cop came in with a methylizer and said the first meeting everyone had to come in with a designated driver. We gave them the beer. We actually measured to make sure they were getting enough. But anyway, during this meeting someone happened to ask Gig. So this run-to exhaustion, like how long do we expect to last? How long does it usually take? And he said, well, most people last about 20 minutes. Well, guess what? Everyone in our study who was at that meeting said, oh, yeah, I knew I had to get to 20 minutes. And then that was sort of like when the test began for them. You have to make it 20 minutes and then you can decide whether to quit or not. But the thing that's really telling is that the two people who missed that meeting were briefed privately and didn't have that exchange, none of them lasted 20 minutes. I think one was 12 and the other was 18 or something or 15. So it really is showing that I like to call them inadvertent nudges can really tip the results. Another way in which this came up, and this came up again and again while I was researching the book, looking at studies of different recovery modalities, things like icing and massage and cryotherapy, is that it's really hard to have a placebo control. So in our case, no one, absolutely no one was fooled by the placebo beer. We all knew which one we were getting. And in fact, Larry, the guy with the daughter, he knew exactly what brand even. It turned out one year when he was trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon, he decided to give up beer, which he did and his performance didn't get better. So he gave up the, during that time he had tried all the non-alcoholic beer and didn't work. He went back to real beer and then finally qualified. So there's a lesson for you. Another important lesson here is that averages don't tell the complete story. Our study was really small and that's problematic because you have a sampling error. You have to assume that this group that you are measuring here is representative of everyone. So it's not just that it's these 10 runners on these two days under these circumstances with this beer and after this run, but you want to know whether this has to do with regular circumstances. But it's really hard to know that. So here I am. I actually went 18% longer on beer of almost 5 minutes. Cynthia, on the other hand, went 17 minutes longer after the beer, so that's a pretty big difference, 44%. Here's Marty, ran 25, almost 26 minutes shorter after the beer. But then Brian actually did a little bit better off of the beer. So when you look at the results as a whole, what you see is that there's a lot of variation. And in fact, in both cases, so the top five are the female and the bottom five are males. And you can see that we actually had one person in each gender who was going in the opposite direction. So it wasn't even completely uniform there. So you have to sort of ask yourself am I Marty or am I Brian who actually did better on beer? And it's hard to really, you know, move forward from that. This is something that p-values is supposed to sort of get at. That's giving you sort of the probability that you would get a result, at least at extreme. It doesn't answer the question that we want to know, which is, is this result real? So, you know, at the end of the day, one of the most important lessons here is that you have to be really careful of motivated reasoning. So in my case, I really wanted beer to be great for me and particularly if it could only be good for women or men, I wanted it to be good for women, okay? So I was really primed to believe this result. So it would have been really, really easy to accept it even though I sort of knew in my heart of hearts that it wasn't as reliable as I wanted it to be. And so we have to be really careful about reading too much into individual studies. And I think this is true of all studies, not just this particular one. You always have to ask yourself how could this be incorrect? How could I be wrong? What are the uncertainties here? Okay, so this gets us back to the major question though, right? Which is what is the takeaway about beer? And so I want to go back and remind you of all of the things that we measured. So our big result that had the p-value of, you know, under .05 was just this one thing which was the time on the run to exhaustion. But I want to remind you that we looked at two other measures that we didn't find any differences that were consistent. And those were, you know, the first one was, was how are you feeling? And when you think about it, that's the thing that I actually care about. And so there we didn't, we didn't find a difference. And so I think the takeaway here is really that if beer makes a difference for recovery under these sorts of circumstances, it's a pretty small effect. And it's not big enough that we were able to find it in this study. And so at the end of the day, what is the takeaway? Go ahead and have the beer. Do we do questions now? Yeah, that's a great question. And we're actually, I'm talking to the researchers, we're going to redo it this summer. So we are going to try and do a larger sample size. That's really, I mean, first of all, like a sample of 10 is just not going to give you a reliable result. I mean, it's something interesting somewhere to go from and build on, but it's not enough to really know for sure. The run to exhaustion just isn't a good test for this. And looking into the literature a little bit more about some of the methodologies, there have been studies that have sort of looked at this. And so that test is highly variable. The results that it shows, but a time trial or something like that seems to be much more consistent. So I think we're still working out what the new protocol will be, but I think we're going to do some kind of time trial and where the person, you know, the runner is really like, okay, you're going to do this time and you want to try and beat it or try and perform well. And so that sort of takes away that motivation problem a little bit. But it's also something more real to life because that might be a situation where you're having a beer and then you're going to go perform the next day and you want to know what that performance would be. Yeah, so the question is, would it be better to do some kind of sport, look at something like powerlifting that doesn't have so much of a psychological component? That's an interesting question. I think it would be interesting. And it is, you know, some of these other studies that have been done have been looking at those kinds of sports, looking at weight lifters. They were looking at rugby players and football players, but doing things in the gym. Again, the amount of alcohol they were getting was so much larger that it seemed not applicable. But that's an interesting question and I think it would be worth doing that. The question is, has anyone studied the effects of drinking beer before running? That's a great question. I haven't, yeah, cheers to that. Someone appears saying, no, no, no. Don't do it. I will say that it used to be there was a time when alcohol was used during events. It was thought to be performance enhancing, which it's not. When I was going through and looking through the literature, I did find some studies where people were being given alcohol during performance. And I can tell you for sure that's not performance enhancing. But I will also say, and there's an anecdote in the book. There's this very amazing ultra runner named Camille Herron, who has now set two world records in ultra running having beer during the run. So it's not all bad. I think moderation in all things is sort of a good rule of thumb. What kind of sport did you say? Oh, team sport, yeah. So the question is, would it be good to test the team sport and look at camaraderie? That's a really good question. And it does seem like, so one of the things with these rugby stories or studies is that apparently rugby players after a game like to go out and get like really, not just like have a few beers but get really drunk and like we know that that's not good. But I think you're getting at something really important though in all seriousness. And that is, I've heard some researchers talk about this and they call it social recovery. So the idea is that that drinking the beer and pretty much like I'm thinking back now to the finish line of the Garfield grumble where we're all just like enjoying each other's company and that having the beer in some ways is just a ritual for relaxation and sort of downtime and we're relaxing and enjoying each other's company and all this. And so I do think that there's something to that. And I can imagine a situation where in team sports it can be a bonding experience and be helping those players to sort of connect and perhaps work better together. So it's not completely unreasonable to think that beer could be helpful in those scenarios. Animal experiments. You're going to waste beer on rats. Oh goats like beer, that's good. All right. What more? Okay. Yeah. The question is more of a statement is that there are better non-alcoholic beers than o' jewels. What would you recommend? Becks. Anything else? Yes. Right. Preference is always real beer. Awesome. These are my running shoes. Yeah. Thank you all. It's here for Christie. We're going to take about an 8-10 minute break. You can buy the book back there and get a free nerd night ticket. Please buy some beer. Please buy grilled cheese. We'll be back in about 8 minutes when they talk on the Albany bulb. The speaker to be announced. Your tickets early. You buy early tickets. It's cheaper. Most hidden things in the Bay area. Public art is a public right. I printed this up just before I came. Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 27. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community to enjoy the arts, to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific literary or artistic production of which he is the author. So we have a right to art and we have a right to community art. And as we have that right, remember to drink and eat. Art has been the foundation of much of our world and much of our community. It's recognized even by our presidents. If you have the chance to visit other public art, if you go outside of the Bay area, the Albany bulb isn't amazing. But East Jesus in Slab City, this is an example down south. We have also in that area Salvation Mountain, Bombay Beach, interactive community art pieces throughout our state. And of course the big one that almost everyone around here goes to Burning Man. That thing in the desert That thing where the old white people go camp. I believe that's what we were told from one of the students. But public art Public art is important and it comes to us in all these amazing big forms that people travel to. And it turns out we have it right here. So we have Susan Moffat's going to come up and talk to us about one of the best resources in our neighborhood. Something basically just around the corner that most of us probably haven't been to. So please welcome up Susan. Hello everybody, can you hear me okay? Alright. So I'm here to talk about my town dump, which is my favorite place. And people ask me, why are you so obsessed with your town dump? And it all starts with this little extremely well-behaved girl in a pinafore me. But not really because actually despite that dress, I was a kid who loved to play in the mud and run around the woods and build forts and get dirty. And that's not actually a picture of me because my parents tended to take pictures of me when I was looking like this. Obviously they had some Jackie Kennedy ambitions for me. But despite that, my childhood was spent in those, you know, fabled days of go outside and play and come inside when it gets dark. So I had that kind of strange childhood that's too rare today. Whoops. Okay. So we were talking about science a minute ago and it is scientifically proven that if you don't give kids the chance to take some risks, if kids don't have the opportunity to decide whether to jump off a roof over hard concrete into a pool, they cannot develop into well-rounded, sane human beings who have the ability to make some decisions about their own lives. And now our playgrounds, as you know, look like this. They are so boring. They are so safe. They are so liability proof that it's no wonder that, you know, our kids are completely addicted to these little screens. Whoops. I'm sorry. This clicker is a little sensitive. So some of you may know that in Berkeley there is an antidote to this boring playground syndrome which is called Adventure Playground and it's basically, whew! It is basically a vacant lot with a bunch of boards and nails and kids get to make their own fun. And so they leave out old pianos and old boats and just let kids make things with paint and old pieces of wood. And basically they give kids saws and all kinds of very sharp, dangerous objects and say, you know, knock yourself out. That's what tetanus shots are for. You'll be fine. What about grownups? We adults, we also want to play in the mud. We want to be creative. We want to make things outdoors. And where can we do that? There's almost nowhere that you can do it. And every time you go to a park there are all kinds of fences and rules that say, you cannot come here, you cannot do that. But there used to be a lot of opportunities for adults and kids to make things in public space outdoors. This was the mudflats. Some of you may remember this or have heard about it. This is right in front of Ikea now and it's much cleaner and tidier and there are no longer dragons and dinosaurs and all kinds of amazing creatures inhabiting the mudflats out there, which I think is a loss because this seems to kind of represent the old Bay Area, the creative, the loose, the not crazy expensive Bay Area when people could just go out and make things and have fun. But this is almost extinct. This kind of creature is almost extinct in the Bay Area except about five minutes from my house by bicycle if I ride under about 25 lanes of freeway I get to this amazing dump called the Albany Bulb and it's a magical island. It's about the bulbous part at the end there. Can I get this to no pointer? There is a pointer? My little screen? Thank you. Okay, magic pointer. Oh, this one. It's okay. I'll use my words. I'll use my words. So the bulbous part at the end, that's called the bulb. It's about 31 acres. It's about the same size as Alcatraz Island and it sticks out a mile into San Francisco Bay. It is all landfill. Everything west of the freeway along the whole East Bay is man-made land. I'm going to talk about the magic of the place but just a little bit of bureaucratic information which is going to be important later. The bulbous part at the end is owned by the city of Albany and the parts of the neck connecting it to the land and the beach and the plateau out there, those are variously owned by the East Shore, by the state park system and by the East Bay Regional Park District and this is important because the city of Albany has taken a pretty laissez-faire approach to managing the bulb and that's why it has remained a wild and beautiful and wonderful and that may be about to change. So the bulb was a landfill from 1963 to 1983 and what's special about it and what makes it different from other landfills around the bay is that it was a construction debris landfill that was never completely capped so there's all this rubble that is exposed and so it wasn't potato peelings and soft garbage like a lot of dumps but it was really interesting bricks and rebar and pieces of highway and chunks of houses and you can see that all, there are all these amazing materials that show that when you throw something away there is no away, it goes somewhere else and you can see the whole industrial history of the East Bay and the slag and the bricks that tell you where they came from and yet nature has pushed back and so on top of all this rubble incredible trees, some of them are 10 feet in circumference, all kinds of plants and beautiful wild flowers have covered up this magical island and that's why it's one of the most beloved places in the East Bay, it's got gorgeous views and it's a very special place to watch the sunset or anything else and it's a place where people have been coming out to play for decades and people come and build things and they build them out of materials that are pulled from the dump so this is Ocean Newman with the Visicine woman that he built out of the materials that he pulled out of the dump and this is still going on this wonderful driftwood creature is only a couple of years old so some artists are still making stuff out of the bulk and the huge pieces of flat concrete that were discarded make wonderful canvases and artists have been able to pull monsters out of the rubble and to find the humanity in the concrete and it's all extremely site specific, it's a little bit in some ways the opposite of burning that because everything here grows out of the place, it's not brought in from the outside for the most part. A lot of it is kinetic and taking advantage of the wind and it's a place where people have been able to make their own play in their own way and what's special about the bulk is it's always changing, it's so dynamic, every time you go the same place will look different and whether it's the plants or the tides or the art, change is constant and there aren't a lot of places that you go where every time you go it's different and that gives you an experience that's really special and something about the art that's also different from going to a conventional sculpture park you know if you go to a park and look at a Henry Moore or Jeff Coons or something you're not allowed to give it a hat or add wings or you know people are always adding to whatever they think should happen to the sculpture they will give it a pair of shoes or a bottle of whiskey and so all of the art is a kind of conversation both among artists to make things back and forth or between the artists and the visitors and that kind of conversation among people who have never met each other and yet have some kind of shared values or some shared humor or some shared narrative that's something really unique in the bulk and it's a very tender place despite its roughness it's a place with a lot of allusions to stories and far away places and there's a lot of humor I don't know if it's a thing but you will see things that people have left to make you smile so basically how do you solve a two ton concrete Rubik's Cube with a coat of paint right so that's how somebody solved this Rubik's Cube and somebody else left us a gift which was a remote control that was about the size of a twin bed and so there's kind of ecosystem that has evolved at the ball just as this pickle weed is pushing back and creating a salt marsh where there was none and you can see the sculptures rising up behind there's a kind of social ecosystem that is a collaborative creation of public art made by many people working together and people have built the park so all the amenities that are typically made by the authorities in this case at the bulb people made their own play their own skate park and the trails were built by people to keep their feet out of the water and the benches are beautiful and perfectly placed so these are you know user made vista points and resting places there have been weddings there have been engagements and lots of first dates at the bulb people have made at their own and of course people lived at the bulb as many of you may know there was a community of people who lived at the bulb off and on for several decades this was Stephanie's home and you can see she had a really nice garden and an outdoor kitchen and Bob had a much more ambitious kind of house and Sandy had a really nice house that was built out of a living tree so I teach at UC Berkeley at the College of Environmental Design and before this community was evicted in 2014 my students and I worked together with the people who were living at the bulb to tell their stories to do mapping of what was valuable to them we gave them disposable cameras so that they could create their own slideshows and so we made maps of many kinds this is the story of the trees and the people who belong to the trees and we presented them at the somarts gallery in San Francisco in 2015 which is a very poignant moment because a lot of the people the residents who came to that exhibition at that time were homeless again some of the people ended up finding housing others did not so there are many stories that grow out of that experience and it's something that at this park I think should not be forgotten that parks often not just this park but central park if somebody anywhere you go parks do result often in the displacement of people and that's something that the place should not erase so what's happening at the bulb now and part of why the people were asked to leave was the bulb is scheduled to become part of the McLaughlin East Shore State Park which as you can see in this sign is managed by the East Bay Regional Park District and the park district the East Bay Regional Park District does a great job of managing their parks who loves the East Bay Regional parks right they do a wonderful job managing their parks maintaining trails you know providing bathrooms and they are very competent and they manage they manage the parks and that's the challenge for the Albany bulb is that what's been beautiful about it is that it's not managed so all you need to know about all these park rules and all this small print that is there on that sign is that everything you've been talking about everything that's wonderful about user design amenities about art about all the wildness and free range nature of the bulb all these rules are basically saying no you can't do any of that and that's kind of the nature of parks is it's a place with a line around it and rules and regulations about what you can and can't do so what's happening now at the state park so this is immediately adjacent to the this is looks like any other you know nice piece of East Bay Regional Park District grass and trees in the background but this is actually an art graveyard because when the park district did renovation of the shoreline which was nice because it made a more accessible path there was a lot of rubble there that they took the art out and the rubble on the art got crunched up and it got buried under this grass and you'd never know it was there so this is the kind of erasure that I and artists and residents are trying to prevent because although this kind of park is lovely and the many parks along the shoreline that are grass and paths and open views it's lovely but not every place has to be like this so my friends and I and artists and local residents got together and formed in 2016 an organization called Love the Bulb and we are dedicated to preserving the wild spirit of the Albany Bulb and the first thing we did was we got ourselves a hat and we also got a fiscal sponsor we're sponsored by Earth Island Institute and we're part of Malcolm Markle and the California Institute for Community Art and Nature so we got all official I started giving talks like this and this is at SF moment so if anybody says but is it art well it's official it was at SF moment so now it's art and what do we do we give tours we bring people to see and appreciate and learn the history of the place we have participatory art events art and nature to bring generations together to play outdoors to play with sticks to make things to alter the environment in gentle ways we have music and theater this is actually before the start of Love the Bulb a group called we players has anybody seen any we players they do amazing work they did Hamlet and Alcatraz the Odyssey all over Angel Island and this was the tempest the tempest with the shipwreck scene on the beach and all over the Bulb and we brought them out to do Mother Lear and I'm going to really hurry through the rest of this because I'm being told we're out of time but there is lots of dance that we've been doing we've worked with Richmond Rich City Rides to bring kids from Richmond by bike because it's so close to the Bulb and we've been doing art happenings where people gather materials and tell stories about them and we do things like make books out of everything from garbage to shards of pottery that tell the story of the Bulb because the Bulb is an encyclopedia and we brought an amazing ink maker who helped us make ink not out of just leaves and berries but out of rusty nails and cigarette butts and we were able to bottle the essence of the Bulb and so the joy of doing this together in community is what we want to keep going but we want to have more of and I'm just going to skip all these wonderful examples of user made parks in Berlin where they turned an old airport a Temple Hall field into an amazing park by its users Socrates Sculpture Park in New York where they have converted a vacant lot into a place where emerging artists make all kinds of sculptures that include participation by folks in the neighborhood jump ahead from Andy Goldsworthy to our own Andy Goldsworthy we want to get everybody to be getting on their own Andy Goldsworthy land art you know Robert Smithson wanted to make his mark on the landscape but we all want to do this right so this is part of what we're trying to give people an opportunity to do so I want to invite everybody to our May 5th Bulb Fest this is from last September we're going to do this again we're going to bring all kinds of dancers out to the Bulb tap dance classical Indian dance contemporary and it's going to be a way of looking at the Bulb through new eyes new questions that dance can ask of a place in a really open ended way and what I'd like to ask of you if you love the Bulb or if you want to come out and check out the Bulb I'm trying to raise an army a community of people who are ready to go out and march to the Bulb and defend it and to protect it and to make sure that the Wildness and the free range nature of the place keeps going for future generations so we're working this we're whining and dining local elected officials Bulb style tell your East Bay Regional Park District folks tell your City of Albany City Council to keep the Bulb wild and of course we're raising money to do this I would love if any of you would like to contribute to support both our Bulb Fest and our ongoing efforts to protect the Bulb and feel like a kid again that's the greatest thing about the Bulb I'm going to show just a 45 second video after telling you about some upcoming events the Art and History Tour on March 16th Bulb Fest on May 5th and here's a little video and after the video if you want to get our URL and so on it's going to be on the screen so that's the end thank you and I'd be happy to take any questions if the question is what is the tension between the interests of nature and the interests of humans at the Bulb I mean the Bulb is the most interesting example I can think of a novel ecosystem that comes about from the interaction of nature and human intervention and so yeah it's not pristine and a lot of our park design and our concepts of nature focus on wilderness and non-pristine places and that's the struggle but I think that we all need a place where you can touch nature where it's already been very disturbed and so that's why I think it's okay to play in the mud and make things out of the Bulb there are places that need to be protected and not touched but I think the Bulb is really valuable because it's a place that's already been pretty beat up and touched and nature is pushing back and it's where we can kind of think about that and consider that tension it's not particularly toxic there have been a lot of studies done on it they're trying to prevent the inside of landfill from getting too wet but it's basically it's not a big concern so the question is it really a human nature hybrid if people are not living there so there's lots of interaction with the people who are visiting and with the dogs and so there are still lots of human impacts and there are also lots of opportunities to see the traces of the humans who lived at the Bulb there are foundations there are beautifully laid brick patios there are the remains of gardens so it's a different kind of interaction but still there's no where on earth that's not touched by human intervention was that your question? that's a really interesting question the question was were the people who lived at the Bulb good maintainers of the Bulb and did the Bulb gain or lose when the residents left I think it's like anywhere some people were really good stewards and did their best to take care of things and were incredibly knowledgeable about the birds out there and then other people just made a mess so it's kind of like anywhere so you can't generalize and say that it was one way or another but one thing that there was was there was a lot of knowledge there was a lot of deep local knowledge that you get from living out of place and I think that that's valuable and something that I respect okay one more question the question is has the Eshore Bay Regional Park system shown any sympathy to the art the official master plan for the state park which was approved in 2002 says that the art has to be removed and also that hazards like the rebar and the rubble are supposed to be removed there's a newer plan that suggests that maybe the art has some value but really the official plan still says that the art has to go and the regional park district it sees itself as a manager of open space it's not like some urban park districts that have an art plan that really value art or even places like the Presidio and places that have staff who are dedicated to art it's just it hasn't been that kind of park district it has a different mandate we've asked it to be something different from that so if it were going to manage this with more sympathy to the art and to the free willing nature of the place it would require a cultural change and I think that maybe that's something we can ask because we elect the board it is our park district but we also have to respect that when we've asked a park district to do one thing we have to consider is that the right entity to manage this kind of place and I don't know the answer to that actually okay thank you these were discovered a few years ago we don't know what causes them they're incredibly powerful radio flashes this flash lasts a thousand of a second a millisecond and they come from far away the radio signals travel a billion years before they hit the earth and they are this we don't understand how you get that much energy in a millisecond it's the energy that comes out of the sun for a hundred years and it hits the telescope in a thousand of a second and there are lots of ideas of how you might get this in a lot of energy and we don't really know how to do it and we don't know what causes it but one of the interesting things is that you can actually use these things even though we don't know what caused them you can do cosmology with them you can actually weigh the universe and the reason that you can weigh the universe with these things is because it turns out that the signals that come from fast radio bursts they don't go through a perfect vacuum on the way to our telescope it's not a perfect vacuum out there and the speed of light changes depending on whether it's a perfect vacuum or how much stuff is between us and the fast radio bursts and when the signal gets to us it's not a click it's a chirp and the reason that that happens is because the low frequencies take longer to get to us than the high frequencies a perfect vacuum everything would come at once but it turns out because it's not a perfect vacuum the low frequencies take longer and the more junk there is between us and the fast radio burst the longer it takes so if there's a lot of stuff between us and the burst you get this if it's not very much stuff you get this and you can actually if you know the distance you can get the density you can measure how much stuff is out there and we can weigh the universe with fast radio bursts we're just learning about these things and what might cause them there are about 50 of them that have been discovered so far some people think that extraterrestrial civilizations might be causing them I don't think so but there is a very famous guy at Harvard he's the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University Avi Loeb and he says that maybe these things are caused by extraterrestrial civilizations trying to signal us it turns out the same guy Avi Loeb also thinks that this thing might be an extraterrestrial spacecraft I don't think it is I think it's a rock it's called it was discovered last year by a thing called man stars it's a new telescope in Hawaii and at first people thought it was a comet and then they looked at it a little more closely and decided it was probably an asteroid that's a rock going around our sun and then when they looked at the orbit really closely they realized that this was the first rock or the first object that was coming from a distant solar system it's not going around our sun it's on this hyperbolic orbit and it came from another star and we've been predicting this thing for a long time we know that when the planets form a lot of stuff gets kicked out so there are probably hundreds of planets when 5 billion years ago when the planets were forming and they were spinning around and a lot of them spun up and got thrown out of the solar system and a lot of planets are not going around stars but are floating around in the universe and rocks get kicked out and we knew that eventually one would come into the solar system this is the first one that we've found in another solar system and some people that actually think it's a spacecraft there's a lot of weird things about Uumuamua one is that it's fluctuating in brightness and we think that's because it's a long gated object we don't actually have a picture of Uumuamua all we see is a little speck of light if you take a picture of it it's just a little dot this is an artist drawing but we think that it might be elongated because it's fluctuating in brightness and we think that might be caused by a kind of tumbling and when it's pointed toward you you don't see much light not reflecting a lot of light but when it's oblong you see a lot of light or maybe it's a flat sheet or something like that the other weird thing about this thing is that if you look at the orbit carefully it's deviating from what you'd expect from gravity from the sun it's actually tilt it's going off not just from the gravitational hyper hyperbole you'd expect but it's veering a little bit outside of that orbit and some people think that might be because it's outgassing maybe it's like a comet it's got some ice and the sun is heating it up and those fumes work like a rocket and kind of push it out of the orbit but we don't see any fumes there's no like tail like you'd see in a comet so we don't understand why it's deviating from an orbit that's why this guy thinks it might be a spacecraft probably it is outgassing a little bit some people think it might be the light pressure from the sun kind of pushing the photon pressure pushing it like a sail anyway it's a weird object we don't understand it luckily pan stars are going to find more of these things and we'll know more about whether this is a weird thing why it's fluctuating and why it's in an unusual orbit okay I want to get back to this setting so this is the theoretical approach to calculating the number of civilizations in our Milky Way galaxy and on the left is the number of civilizations in our galaxy that we can communicate with and all you have to do is multiply all these numbers together and the problem with this equation is that we have no idea what any of these numbers are so it's a way to break a big problem are we alone into lots of little problems that we don't know the solution to it's a it's a whittling down process the way it works is you start with the number of stars in the galaxy and then peace for planets how many of those stars have planets and then ease for environment how many of those planets have the right environment they have the right temperatures the right chemicals for life and then as you go further down it's a once you have the right environment do you get life if you have a good planet do you get life get started and then if you get life you get intelligence eyes for intelligence how often does that happen and then if you get intelligence to get communication do they develop radio or lasers or some way that we can communicate and the last thing is how long do they live as soon as they develop communication technologies do they also develop nuclear weapons biological chemical weapons and blow themselves up so as you go to the right of the equation it gets more and more unknown we actually do know a little bit about how many planets there are going around and we even know a little bit about how many planets have the right environment they're called Goldilocks planets we just recently astronomers discovered planets going around other stars they turns out that was a really hard thing to do to find out if there are planets going around those stars could planets are little deaky things a million Earths could fit inside the Sun but they they're so they were hard to find the first ones were found because when the planet goes around the star the star dims a little bit and if you see a wiggling star that betrays the planet that was done largely at Berkeley the next way they were found is if the planet happens to get right in front of the star between you and the star the star will dim down a little bit that's called the occultation method but you have to do it from space because the stars dim because of the atmosphere the atmosphere makes stars twinkle but if you go in space and you see a star dimming down that's probably because a planet went in front anyway now we know that there are about a trillion planets more planets than there are stars in the galaxy and there's about a trillion galaxies so there are a trillion trillion planets and a lot of them are in this Goldilocks zone not too hot not too cold and we know that a lot of them are little rocky planets like the Earth so there are a lot of places for life so the next thing in the equation is if you if you have a good planet a Goldilocks planet do you get life we think life gets started in something like this the primordial soup and people have done these simulations where they we know the chemicals that were around when the Earth was forming methane, ammonia, water, hydrogen and people put that in a flask and they put in sparks because we knew there was lightning and you don't get gorillas crawling out of this thing but you do get the basic building blocks of life, amino acids the kind of the stuff fairly complicated proteins that you and I are made of so we're beginning to understand how life gets started but it's there may even be life in our own solar system in our backyard this is a moon going around Jupiter called Europa and it is covered with liquid with liquid water but we'd like to find out if there's something swimming in this ocean but it's hard to find out because this white stuff in this cutaway view is ice about 20 miles of ice is covering the ocean we'd like to see if there's how to get through the ice and I go to elementary schools and I ask the kids how to get through the ice and the boys answer differently than the girls the boys want to go they're kind of Donald Trump they'd like machine guns bombs stuff like that and then the girls are usually a little more clever they want to melt their way through with like lenses or mirrors to focus the sun's rays and melt their way through last year I was at Martin Luther King Junior middle school and this I think she was a 12 years old girl said could you build a little submarine and make it out of radioactive make the hole out of radioactive material with a short half life that would warm get warm as the radioactive material decays and it would melt its way through the ice and by the way could use thermopiles thermocouples to generate electricity between the they take advantage of the temperature difference between the hole of the submarine and the ice to generate electricity for the submarine I thought that was pretty clever but it turns out you don't need to know to do with this 12 year old girl told us how to do because there's another moon going around in Saladis going around Saturn called in Saladis and it's got the same liquid ocean and the same ice but there are cracks Fisher and Fishers there's water squirting out and so we could maybe fly through the plume of this stuff and see if there are little bacteria or something alive there and NASA and ESA the European Space Agency are now planning a thing that will fly through and sample the plume and see if there's something in our own solar system if we find life in our own solar system in our own backyard that means life is everywhere in the galaxy okay I want to talk a little bit about the early ideas in SETI the search for extraterrestrial intelligence so 200 years ago Gauss said that the way to get in touch with ET was to make a large geometric structure on the planet maybe a right triangle of pine trees 3, 4, 5 miles on a side, big square of dirt, big square of water, big square of wheat ET would look and see that we knew about the Pythagorean theorem and it was a good idea it was unfortunately not funded Von Littron suggested that we get in touch with ET by digging a circular ditch 20 miles across and filling the ditch with kerosene these are my sketches by the way and using this match not to scale make a bright circle of light and a ring of fire ET would see this bright circle and get in touch it met with a similar fate Charles Crow suggested we get in touch with the Martians by several large mirrors to reflect the sunlight to the Martians one where he lived and the other mirrors to outline the shape of the big dipper I think you can guess what happened with that the first funded project was to send pornography into space this was a plaque on the Pioneer 10 spacecraft these were very controversial originally they were holding hands and NASA said they'll think it's one creature then it was designed by Linda Sagan Carl Sagan's wife her son Mercury Venus Earth is the spacecraft leaving the Earth these are directions so that ET can come and eat us that was the first funded project one of the things that we've been thinking about in SETI is that Earth would send off a lot of radio and television out into space we've been sending TV signals out for about 70 years and this is a plot of television signals leaving the Earth as a function of time and you can see we're getting very bright this is a log scale exponential increase and the Earth is brighter than the Sun now at television frequencies the early shows like I Love Lucy have gone past 10,000 stars the nearby stars have seen the Simpsons we've even sent messages intentionally this was sent in 1973 we think pictures are a good way to communicate these are the solar system with the Sun tip toward this person this is the population of the planet this is the telescope, the diameter, the DNA molecules, amino acids everybody see all that this is very controversial by the way some people think it's a good idea to send signals deliberately out to ET I actually don't think that's a good idea most people don't think it's a good idea that we're an emerging civilization we're just learning how to do this we don't know if civilizations are going to come and eat us or are they going to welcome us into the galactic community so we think right now because we're kind of a primitive civilization we should be listening at first and just learning a little bit more about our universe and not deliberately transmitting anyway so one of the possibilities is we could look for these artifacts of a civilization maybe a navigational beacon or a radar signal or something that we might be able to detect that wasn't really intended for us for interstellar communication or maybe deliberate signal if they send something deliberate then they'll probably make it easy to understand anti-cryptographic with a lot of pictures and language lessons maybe tell us how to get on the galactic internet. SETI might be called the archaeology of the future it's likely if we ever contact a civilization there'll be a billion or two billion years ahead of us and maybe tell us about all the civilizations they've been in contact with and we can learn about our future at Berkeley there are a couple of dozen people that work on SETI and we have funding from government agencies and this new thing from the Earth Through Foundation and we have companies that help us out and we have different telescopes that we use at different infrared visible radio parts of the spectrum because we're funded by NASA, NASA requires acronyms. Serendip is the search for extraterrestrial radio emission from nearby developed intelligent populations. We use radio dishes. This was the first one we used. This is what happened to it so we moved to something and then we used that for a while. This is what happened to that telescope and you might ask why does this happen and according to Word Weekly News, AET did not want to be discovered and so they zapped the telescope anyway we're trying to protect the telescope this is the world's largest telescope at the Erocebo, Puerto Rico it's a thousand feet across it holds ten billion bolts of cornflakes we look for different kinds of signals this is a signal at a strong frequency, these are different frequencies, this is a strong kind of thing. We look for these drifting signals these are the signals that are changing in frequency and we look for pulsing signals kind of a bit, it turns out it takes a lot of computing power to do this. So a colleague of mine David Anderson developed this project called SETI at home and this was 20 years ago. Dave is in the audience I think. Dave, are you around here somewhere? Can you raise your hand? So Dave was the founder of SETI at home and he developed this screensaver program which a lot of you I think are familiar with and the idea is we take the data from the telescope we break it up into little chunks of the sky, everybody gets a different piece to run on their home computer. Dave's got it working on cell phones now, android cell phones and everybody, it pops up just like any other screensaver but it's actually going through the data that was recorded at the telescope and on the screen it tells you what your name is and what part of the sky you're working on and then when it's done it sends the results of the analysis back to us at Berkeley this little animation of the data going out to Berkeley to the people around the world analyzing the data and it's one of the biggest supercomputers on the planet so we have a lot to thank for Dave, he's around so you can talk to him afterwards about how he wrote the code for SETI at home, a lot of people a lot of nerds that are building these computer clusters Dave also wrote some software where you can participate in lots of different projects not just SETI but climate protection and looking for gravity waves, looking for planets doing protein folding, you can participate in hundreds of different projects we haven't found ET but we found a lot of fast radio bursts, a lot of pulsars, we found a planet made out of solid diamond we made the first maps of the center of the galaxy and we're working on some new projects, this is a new telescope in China this is an array in South Africa I think in the long run, I think we'd be lucky to find them now but the telescopes are getting better the instruments are getting better, the computers are now as smart as a guppy or a lizard but eventually they'll be as smart as humans, that could be good for SETI, bad for us I mentioned that SETI is the archaeology of the future Carl Sagan said it's profound either way, what he meant by that was that if we do find ET and get on the galactic internet we could learn a lot, but also it's profound if we search through the galaxy and other galaxies and we don't find it, that means that maybe we are alone, that life is incredibly precious and we better take really good care of life on this planet. If you think that SETI is crazy, this is another project called Starshot the people that are funding us are also trying to get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri in 20 years and the way to do that, you got to go at the speed of light or near the speed of light, this thing goes at 20% of the speed of light it's a sail that weighs 1 gram, it's 4 meters across, you blast it with these laser beams, it accelerates at 50,000 G's for about 2 minutes and then it's outside of the solar system pretty quickly and that's on its way to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star that's called Breakthrough Starshot it's funded in a preliminary way to do design studies anyway if you've been asleep, this is kind of a summary NOET so far, I wanted to end with a couple of haikus the people that are running SETI at home help us in a lot of ways, they send money, they help us write the code, they send in literature and music and they send in haikus and Paula Cook searching for life answers are revealed about ourselves and this is the last slide, last haiku, Dancider, 1 million earthlings bounded by optimism, leave their PCs on thank you very much questions, comments, yeah, I didn't quite get to the last party question stars have a limit of life, I did get that part yeah, oh I see, yeah so it's about the lifetime of stars and the lifetime of civilizations a very interesting observation, so our sun is kind of middle age it's about 5 billion years old, some stars are 10 billion years old so there could be very advanced civilizations that are billions of years ahead of us so it took intelligence here on this planet it took a long time to get to where we are, 4.5 billion years or so and our civilization may not last very long it could last another few billion years if we get through the Trump years so I think that if we're probably not going to talk to the ones that go extinct quickly the ones that we're going to talk to are the ones that last for billions of years that get through their bottleneck of the Trump years oh yeah, about many, yeah so I mentioned that this is very controversial, there are people that want to deliberately transmit to nearby stars I don't think it's a good idea because I I think that they're likely to be friendly and not going to do anything bad but I really don't know that for sure and I think that when you transmit stuff like that you're putting 7 billion people in danger and even if you think the risks are tiny maybe you think the risks are 1 in a million or something like that it's still killing 7,000 people on average if you think the risks are 1 in a thousand that's killing 7 million people every time you do the experiment so the risks are probably small but there are a lot of people on the planet yeah, on the back, what said his protocol if we find life so the first thing we agreed to do is that before we make a big announcement we're going to make pretty sure that we've got something interesting and the idea is to get another group with a different telescope and different software and different equipment and different people because it might be a graduate student playing a prank on us and see if they can see it and also if you have two telescopes you can kind of triangulate on measure its distance and make sure it's not interference, a satellite or something that earthlings or sometimes we get these signals but it turns out they're not from extraterrestrials they're from terrestrials, it's satellites or planes and so anyway we want to make sure that we've got something interesting and then we'll probably then everything has to go public at that point and we're not allowed to keep anything secret and we'll probably say we found something really interesting we don't know what it is, there's a radio signal, here's all the information here are the frequencies, here's everything we know about it and we'll say hey it might be a new civilization it might be a new astrophysical phenomenon a lot of people start looking at it and try to figure out what it is where do we point our telescopes and we do a couple of different things so the thing that we're doing mostly with SETI at home are sky surveys you just do a big raster scan of the sky we don't really know where to look, where E.T. is lurking but some people think that we should point to nearby stars so we do that and solar type stars that are a few billion years old so there's a chance for life to get to be there some people think it might be on M stars but we also look at whole galaxies because when you look at a galaxy even though it's really far away you get to look at a few hundred billion stars all at once so we try different things but we do a little bit of this targeted work like you were asking about and a little bit of sky survey let's thank Dan one more time so I think Dan's going to be around to answer any lingering questions somewhere at the foot of the stage let's keep it going for all three of our speakers Christy and Susan as well as DJ rubber van girl in the back Books, Oakland public library, girl cheese guy and of course Club of 21 we always end on a calendar of upcoming events My birthday city arts and lectures has Rebecca Solnit I think this talk is going to be pretty awesome I know that some of you here also like psychedelic plants just based on all of the feedback we had on the last survey that we had about what talks we should feature rather than waiting for us just go up to the UC Botanical Garden learn about basically all of them TEDx is coming up learn about neutrinos apparently they're in a pissing contest against the Higgs Boson who knew Nurnight in Silicon Valley tomorrow and in San Francisco March 20th finally join us next month our tickets are only $5 until we announce the third talk the talk on Rotten City by the Emery Bill Mayor is going to be amazing we have a few posters if you really liked it you could take one home volunteer to give a talk sign up for our email list and if your name is John Won I have your credit card and if I go home God knows what's going to happen thanks and see you next month