Along with superhero law professor Jennifer Granick, I run a semi-monthly event for geeks and their pals called Nerd Salon. Basically it’s a chance to socialize, drink (it’s at 111 Minna, a great bar/art gallery in downtown San Francisco), and do nerdy things. We always have a puzzle to solve, and some sort of interesting demo.

Next week, May 9 from 8-10 PM, we are honored to have Phil Torrone (of MAKE blog fame) reprising his infamous Roomba cockfight. That’s right, those saucer-shaped vacuum cleaner robots will be getting into dustups — with each other! You’ve never seen true robot action until you’ve seen what happens when somebody takes control of these little guys’ interfaces and turns them into bumper cars! And yes, everybody will have a chance to play with the Roombas. If you really want to get into it, you can bring your Roomba if you have one, or bring your bluetooth-enabled XP laptop to use as a controller for one of the Roombas provided for us by the kindly folks at iRobot.

Come to watch the robots! Or just hang out and drink with nerds!

This week, I use my column to describe an excellent walk I took down Broadway St. in Manhattan, from 80th St. on the Upper West Side (where I fortified myself with a lox bagel and knish at Zabar’s) to the Staten Island ferry. It was the day after Jane Jacobs died, and I wanted to honor her memory by thinking about how the most famous city in the U.S. is put together. What’s great about Jacobs, aside from the fact that she wrote about the social power of cities — a favorite topic of mine — was that she wasn’t some kind of academically-trained “expert.” She was a smart person with great ideas who didn’t need no stinkin’ credentials to profoundly influence urban designers for years to come.