For years, I said I wanted to receive a painting done by Cheetah, but now he’s dead. Instead, I will settle for a 5 minute phone call from The Nature Boy™ Rick Flair, for the low low price of $100 per minute.
Get your parents permission, and call now!
FLG fundraiser, art auction, and photo show.
Music by Ambient Mafia and Space Cowboys
Saturday December 3rd
SomArts, 934 Brannan Street, SF
6.00PM – 2.00AM
Free*
The Computer History Museum is hosting an evening with with our trivia overlord IBM Watson, and chief scientist David Ferrucci, Tuesday, Nov 15 at 6pm. Admission is free.
IBM Watson really is an amazing piece of software, much more interesting than Deep Blue. Chess, like all board games, is very artificial. While there’s no doubt a technical achievement in being able to search a large number of well defined states in parallel, but it is a bit abstracted from real problems. Watson on the other hand deals with natural language. You ask it random lookup questions, and it answers. It’s a technology – along with Siri – that is futuristic.
Danny Boyle has decided that Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller will share the roles of Dr. Frankenstein and the monster, switching roles every night of the his stage production of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Blind Date Swingers Club is a rotating club event in Berlin, that sounds very cool, and very reproducible. Everyone brings a mix tape (well, CD) of music, along with a note and contact information inside the jewel case. The music is left with the DJ. At the end of the night, everyone takes a CD that someone else made.
I love how this is a really simple idea that encourages the discovery of new people and new music. I’d love for a Bay Area version of this.
Local killbot proprietors, Survival Research Labs is having a show! It’s this Saturday (July 24, 2010) in Petaluma, at the Petaluma River Heritage Center (260 Water St, Petaluma). Admission is free, and is part of the Friends of the Petaluma River‘s Rivertown Revival.
It is going to be fun on the bun.
I managed to make my way up to San Francisco and see both the USS Bunker Hill and the Varyag. Unfortunately, there was a mixup about how long Russians were giving tours of the ship. Instead of going to 3 pm, they stopped at 1 pm. However, I did get some decent photos of the ship from the pier. For more detailed shots, I suggest you view the Chronicle’s pictures of ship. I did manage to take a tour of the Bunker Hill. We mainly stayed on the outside of ship, seeing the fore and aft vertical launch systems, the helicopter hanger, and also the bridge. About 350 crew members are on board, and about 40% of those are female. In 2008, the ship was the first Ticonderoga class cruiser to underwent an upgrade to its fire control systems, that allowed (in addition to other things) the ability of both the fore and aft 5 inch guns to be targeted independently. On of the new roles for the Bunker Hill is ballistic missile defense, and the ship is of the same type that recently shot down a satellite.
It was very cool tour, and look forward to the next San Francisco Fleet Week (October 7 – 12).
UPDATE Fri Jun 25 12:23:50 PDT 2010
Flickr user Kyle Mizokami has some great shots from tours of both the Varyag and Japanese ships that were in town.
Today, five warships from three countries arrived in San Francisco. The Ticonderoga class guided missile cruiser, CG-52 USS Bunker Hill Three Japanese training ships, lead by the Kashima class, TV-3508 JDS Kashima, and the Russian Slava class guided missile cruiser Varyag (formerly the Chervona Ukraina) will be there.
Why mention this? Well you can get photos and tours of all these ships, except the American Bunker Hill.
Updated: Thu Jun 24 09:26:24 PDT 2010: Thanks to some mysterious stranger in the comments, the Bunker Hill is conducting tours. Table updated.
| Bunker Hill | Pier 17 | Thursday, 1 pm – 4 pm |
| Kashima | Pier 27 | Monday 9 am – 11 am and 2 pm – 4 pm |
| Varyag | Pier 30-32 | Thursday, 10 am – 3 pm |
The SF Fine Art Fair is this weekend at Fort Mason in SF. Tickets are $15. In all honesty, I don’t know much about this. Zer01, presenters of the 01SJ Biennial are sponsoring an entrance, so there should be something there beyond what you’d normally expect at a “fine art fair.”
UPDATE: Thu May 27 18:04:25 PDT 2010
Photos. I call special attention to Popperceptual by Patrick Hughes.
Just a reminder, Maker Faire is this weekend at the San Mateo Fairgrounds. 10 am to 8 pm, Saturday. 10 am to 6 pm Sunday. $20 adult, $10 student (with valid id), $5 kids.
Schedule is packed. I’d recommend Trisian Shone, and the Raygun Gothic Spaceship, which just looks amazing.
I doubt I’m going to make it this year. Instead, I’ll be attending the SF Fine Art Fair.