Today, taking a break from the credit crunch madness, we paid a visit to the newly opened California Academy of Sciences. The admission is free every third Wednesday of the month and since we are starving entrepreneurs, we jumped at the opportunity.
When we finally arrived at Golden Gate Park we were greeted by a huge mass of people. The new Academy building is next to the De Young Museum and the line snaked all the way to its neighbor. We got lucky as some of our friends were already in line. So we cut in line. Fortunately, the people around us were rather gracious.
The museum was quite crowded and the tickets to the planetarium were already exhausted. So we spent most of our time in the aquarium in the lower level. We saw a few very cool things.
First, there was this albino alligator. I have never seen an albino alligator before, didn’t even know they existed. I guess they must live in very clean swamps, otherwise he would stick out like a thorn. He (I’m guessing it’s a male) lives in the swamp pit with a regular looking alligator and two giant turtles. I guess he was really tired today, he didn’t move very much.
Then there’s this giant sea bass. You can’t tell from the photograph but its head was about the size of mine. Now this fish isn’t exactly pretty, but I think I got the optimum angle for the portrait. It was swimming around pretty fast in the tank. I think it was looking for something.
Next to the sea bass, was a very dark tank. At first, I didn’t see anything. Then I saw it in the very bottom corner. A huge octopus! Yep and it was moving along the glass portion of the tank so we all got a good view of the suction cups on its tentacles. I was afraid the picture wouldn’t turn out, but I was pleasantly surprised.
At the same time there was this show where a scuba diver in the tank was talking with the audience. The lecture was on biodiversity in the ocean. I couldn’t get very close as you can see, the place was pretty packed.
After lunch at the museum cafe, which was surprisingly good (probably because we were starving at this point), we visited the Living Roof of the building. This building has the largest living roof in the world. The roof is completely covered in vegetation and they act to cool the building. Also the roof contains enough solar panels to provide up to 10% of the building’s energy needs.
All together, we had a lot of fun. It’s been awhile since all of CLZ went out and did an activity together, and since the October weather in San Francisco is absolutely gorgeous, it was a trip well worth the time.
On Friday, I went to see Eddie Izzard perform at the Orpheum Theater. For those of you not familiar, Izzard is a comedic genius who usually does his stand-up routine in drag. His jokes are extremely sophisticated and usually draws a very intelligent crowd.
This time, however, he did not appear in drag and was immediately heckled by the audience. Yes, San Francisco is full of demanding assholes. But like a true professional, he handled it very well and made jokes on the hecklers. Then he launched into his routines. It actually took me awhile to get up to speed to what he was saying because he was talking extremely fast and in his British accent (and my seat also was far away in the Mezzanine). In the show he basically ran through natural history from the beginning of the earth to the Romans. He did running jokes on the Bible and religion and it was unbelievably sophisticated and hilarious.
The funniest routine, in my opinion, is when he made fun of the Latin language and its complex syntax. He pretended to be a messenger bringing the news of Hannibal coming around the mountains with elephants. At various points he was speaking in German, Italian, French, and probably some other language I didn’t catch. It’s just too funny. You had to be there.
Here’s a little sample of Eddie Izzard’s humor. It is funny and the funniness increases exponentially the more you know what he’s talking about. In this case, French.
Last night I went to Cobb’s Comedy Club in San Francisco’s North Beach to see my favorite comedian Russell Peters perform. This was my first time at Cobb’s, it was a lot bigger than I imagined. Since I got there late, I had to settle for a seat at a table way in the back.
Russell Peters did not disappoint. I was also surprised that it was all new material, all of it stuff I haven’t seen or heard before. The man is a comic genius. Most of his material consists of ethnic jokes, and he makes fun of everyone. Chinese, Indian, Jews, Latinos, and Blacks: no one is safe, not even white people. But he did say some stuff that also made me pause and think. One such example is when he said, “I’ve always told people that I’m Indian. It’s really easy to define ourselves ethnically, but no one knows what they are culturely… I look Indian, but I never realized how not Indian I am until I went to India.” For the most part however, I was ROTFLMAO.
The audience was mostly Indian and Asians with a smattering of other ethnic groups thrown in. I found it really funny because we really responded well to the self deprecating ethnic jokes. There were two warm up acts for Russell Peters and it was a study in contrast. The first, a Filipino guy was hilarious and set the atmospheres. But the second, a white guy, told mostly really hardcore sexual jokes. That totally didn’t hook with the crowd. Most people were like “huh?” which was funnier than the jokes. I felt sorry for the guy.
But… then Russell Peters set everything right. He’s still here for the rest of the weekend. So if you’re lucky, you can still scalp some tickets (they’re officially sold out). In case you don’t, here’s a sample of his old material:
OK - so I have to admit. I like wine. But something hit me over the weekend: how come we haven’t really improved the process of opening wine bottles?
I mean - we have such intricate systems for making wine - involving large amounts of chemical testing, big vats, and wine ‘scientists’ going in there to make sure everything is just right. But - I guess opening the bottle is just something that we omitted.
A year prior, after I landed a gig at IBM Research, I took my parents to The First Cabin at Balboa Bay Club. Really awesome views, really awesome food. We got a bottle for like $100 and while the waitress was poping the cork “CRACK” she cracked the bottle. Now c’mon, there got to be room for improvement there.
Let’s take a look at some of the old fashion openers:
So these openers go from pure stupid to a little more sophisticated. Take the one on the left, you have to PULL the cork out with all your might. Can you imagine doing that while hammered? You’d probably drop the bottle while pulling or spill half of it.
Now, the second one is the what the waitress used to crack our bottle at First Cabin. It uses the bottle top as a hinge - GLASS as a hinge??? That’s got to be bad. The last one is the one I currently have in our apartment. But just too big to carry around.
I FOUND something this weekend that’s REALLY Cool! It’s called a Cork Pop. Here you go:
This thing is awesome. First thing you notice is that there is no cork screw, just a needle. The idea is that instead of ‘pulling’ the cork of of the bottle, you ‘push’ it out with air.
There a small canister of air on the top - you simple jab that needle-like thing into the cork and then push the button on the top. Air gets pumped into the bottle and pushes the cork out with a POP.
That thing was amazing. Definitely going to buy one for mom for Mother’s Day in 2 weeks!
For those of you who don’t know Buzz Aldrin - he’s the 2nd man on the moon!
I became a space fanatic when I was 12 years old - okay, I admit, the coolness wore off when I realized that my bad vision would prevent me from being an astronaut. (tear) But nevertheless, I pretended to be an astronaut by looking at a bunch of pictures and watching NASA WebCast (this was ‘98 mind you and webcasts were ‘rare’ and ‘difficult’ to get working).
Oh - and the most important part of the entire space excursion was playing Buzz Aldrin’s Race into Space. This was by far the most difficult game I have ever played. The goal is to do a moon landing and make it back alive while racing against the USSR. There were a great many quirks about the game - if your rocket blew up, you to start R&D on rockets from the beginning. You train your crew, and then have to keep them motivated by putting them on missions. I’m not a gamer at all, and this was one of the only games I really liked.
So - Saturday we went to Yuri’s night Celebration at Nasa where we actually got to meet Buzz Aldrin. That was awesome. I asked him what he thought of the space program - interestingly, he said “We should stop putting out the fires of today, and instead take a longer term look into the future” Wow - digging a little deeper, I found that from Buzz’s point of view, NASA can do a lot better than it has in the last 2 decades.
Delivering on visions such as going to Mars - I asked Buzz what he thought. His response was “We have to think about today - not how to get to Mars, but once we get there, what we are going to do and plan R&D accordingly” One example is rapid deployment of teams - it takes 6 months to get to Mars with a crew of 6. We are definitely going to need to think about how we can do ANYTHING with 6 people. That’s so little!
