Images from Scott Beale
Scott's blog of dorkbot
time:
7:30pm Wednesday
25 January 2006
place:
rxGallery
132 Eddy
San Francisco, CA
FREE ADMISSION but donations most welcome to help out our generous hosts!
Feel free to bring food to share
CASH BAR | 21 + only
rxGallery
Jennifer Granick - Securing Civil Liberties, or Why Geeks and Hackers Should Run the Government
Our country is in the midst of an eavesdropping scandal, in which the Bush Administration has admitted conducting thousands of warrantless wiretaps and email interceptions without seeking court approval. This is just one of many technologies of control implemented following September 11th. Lawyers, pundits and other talking heads debate whether the wiretaps violate United States law (short answer: they do), and whether mass surveillance is necessary for national security. The debate suffers from a failure of imagination; about the ways technology interoperates, about what living in a surveillance state would be like, and about how terrorists will plan and execute an attack. The debate also suffers from a fundamental lack of information about how to design security systems . It is possible to design an interoperating technological and legal system that is both secure and free. Geeks and hackers have imagination to spare. They know how to ask dangerous questions and think about "what would happen if". Geeks and hackers understand technology. They know the principles of designing secure systems, principles remarkably like the ones constitutionally implemented by our founding fathers. In this talk, I'll argue that geeks and hackers are the best people to design and advocate a system in which national security and civil liberties coexist.
Jennifer Stisa Granick is a Lecturer in Law and Executive Director of
the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford Law School. She
teaches, speaks, writes and litigates on the full spectrum of
Internet law issues including computer crime and security, national
security, constitutional rights, and electronic surveillance, areas
in which her expertise is recognized nationally.
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http://www.granick.com/blog/
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 Discuss Jennifer Granick - Securing Civil Liberties, or Why Geeks and Hackers Should Run |
Marc Powell - Food Hacker's Guide to Molecular Gastronomy
What happens when the world's leading hacker chefs skill up on organic chemistry and buy centrifuges for their kitchens? Is your palate ready for "meat glue", "cooking" with liquid nitrogen, and "liquid noodles"? This talk looks at the growing role of science in fine dining kitchens with examples from the restaurants that are inventing the exciting field of molecular gastronomy. Chefs are a lot like hardware hackers. Both geek out, absorbing the specs of (vegetables|technology) for the purpose of creating something that nobody else has: (innovative food|new machines). So what happens when the kitchen becomes a hack lab? Something delicious. Something geeky. Molecular gastronomy is a culinary aesthetic of a growing number of chefs worldwide who wish to cross-pollinate their culinary skills with the trade secrets of chemists, physicists, researchers, perfumers and industrial food manufacturers. Typically, only the most high end restaurants have the budgets to stock their kitchens with steam baths, centrifuges, and microscopes. Spurred on by the friendly competition rife in the food industry, these restaurants work to develop new culinary techniques, improve (and disprove) accepted kitchen wisdom, and deploy their food to the customer in crazy new futuristic ways. This talk looks at the growing role of science in fine dining kitchens. Examining the history of molecular gastronomy, we will visit some of the latest techniques and predict where the cutting edges might lead. Can we bring food into the future without seriously freaking out the fickle palate of the public? Are you ready for liquid nitrogen-cooled food, steak-flavored cellophane and bacon & egg ice cream?
Marc Powell is a hacker chef based out of San Francisco's only hacker
bed and breakfast, Unicorn Precinct XIII (www.up13.org). He apprenticed in the research kitchen of Heston Blumenthal's Michelin starred restaurant The Fat Duck (fatduck.co.uk), aka the bleeding edge of the molecular gastronomy movement. Marc is a Cancer and enjoys long meals prepared in a kitchen with friends, cycling, and edible solder.
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http://up13.org
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Discuss Marc Powell - Food Hacker's Guide to Molecular Gastronomy |
open dork
TBD - Mail Karen Marcelo if you want to dork openly (5-10 min)
Many thanks to rxGallery for hosting this month's dorkbot.