Sam (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
l33tminion) wrote2010-02-15 11:58 pm
l33tminion) wrote2010-02-15 11:58 pm
Entry tags:
Contemplating the Future
Today, ate breakfast at the Taylor Street Coffee Shop. A bit of a wait for a table, since the place is good but tiny. I noticed that a large table was clearing when I was next in line, and that the cafe was seating in first come first served order instead of tweaking the queue for better packing efficiency, so I asked the couple directly behind if they cared to join me. I was stung a bit when they declined, though I really shouldn't have cared. The food was fantastic, and reasonably priced.
After breakfast, I was going to take the cable car up to the North Beach, but the line for the cable car was super long and I didn't feel like waiting in the sun. So I gave my five bucks to a tap-dancing street performer and hoofed it.
After a long walk with a stop to acquire a suitable bar mitzvah gift for my cousin, I reached the waterfront. Wandered for a while, then decided to have lunch at Joe's Crab Shack. That wasn't so much a "seemed like a good idea at the time" as a "seemed like an acceptably bad idea at the time", but it wasn't that, either. Food was awful, though my choice of beverage was all right. Fortunately, I didn't suffer from the usual post-bad-idea indigestion, my stomach settled as soon as I walked a bit among the odd-smelling crowd.
Next, I proceeded to the Long Now Foundation museum. Very small, but still an interesting showcase of some of the Foundation's projects. There's a room to sit and listen to a bit of Longplayer (a thousand-year musical composition that has now been playing for over a decade), prototypes for various 10,000 year clock components (including a chime mechanism designed to produce a chime when the clock is wound (a unique combination of chimes every day for 10,000 years), various correction mechanisms to keep the clock synchronized to solar time, and an orrery (unlike the Antikythera mechanism, this one uses mechanical binary adders to do its calculations), and some of the work that's being done on the Rosetta disk. It's interesting how the Foundation's projects often reflect both the continuous and discontinuous approaches to long-term archival: Plan to create something that can be maintained indefinitely, but also plan to create something such that knowledge can be recovered from the artifacts long after some unforeseen cataclysm nixes plan A.
Took a long and winding route back. Took in the view from the top of the twisty part of Lombard, ate an excellent dinner at the Nob Hill Grille, sat on a stoop and talked/listened to a young woman with close cropped hair and rabbit ears and a bad case of drug-induced aphasia (hence why I don't say "conversed"; don't know what the drug in question was, something inhaled, as far as I could gather).
Tomorrow: Head south down Market Street.
After breakfast, I was going to take the cable car up to the North Beach, but the line for the cable car was super long and I didn't feel like waiting in the sun. So I gave my five bucks to a tap-dancing street performer and hoofed it.
After a long walk with a stop to acquire a suitable bar mitzvah gift for my cousin, I reached the waterfront. Wandered for a while, then decided to have lunch at Joe's Crab Shack. That wasn't so much a "seemed like a good idea at the time" as a "seemed like an acceptably bad idea at the time", but it wasn't that, either. Food was awful, though my choice of beverage was all right. Fortunately, I didn't suffer from the usual post-bad-idea indigestion, my stomach settled as soon as I walked a bit among the odd-smelling crowd.
Next, I proceeded to the Long Now Foundation museum. Very small, but still an interesting showcase of some of the Foundation's projects. There's a room to sit and listen to a bit of Longplayer (a thousand-year musical composition that has now been playing for over a decade), prototypes for various 10,000 year clock components (including a chime mechanism designed to produce a chime when the clock is wound (a unique combination of chimes every day for 10,000 years), various correction mechanisms to keep the clock synchronized to solar time, and an orrery (unlike the Antikythera mechanism, this one uses mechanical binary adders to do its calculations), and some of the work that's being done on the Rosetta disk. It's interesting how the Foundation's projects often reflect both the continuous and discontinuous approaches to long-term archival: Plan to create something that can be maintained indefinitely, but also plan to create something such that knowledge can be recovered from the artifacts long after some unforeseen cataclysm nixes plan A.
Took a long and winding route back. Took in the view from the top of the twisty part of Lombard, ate an excellent dinner at the Nob Hill Grille, sat on a stoop and talked/listened to a young woman with close cropped hair and rabbit ears and a bad case of drug-induced aphasia (hence why I don't say "conversed"; don't know what the drug in question was, something inhaled, as far as I could gather).
Tomorrow: Head south down Market Street.