InBerkeley

You’ve heard of desktop PCs, which stole the thunder from massive mainframe computers 30 years ago.  Now, scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory are racing to build desktop particle accelerators to rival the big ones at CERN, Stanford and elsewhere, as detailed in this Popular Science article:

The BELLA accelerator uses synchronized lasers to speed up electrons over very short distances. But whereas the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLA) is 2 miles long, BELLA fits in a single room.

Of course, large accelerators like the SLA or CERN’s famous LHC are far more powerful than BELLA, and thus able to investigate much smaller particles. However, BELLA scientists believe that they can daisy-chain together a number of lasers to create an accelerator as powerful as the big boys, in a fraction of the space.

General

The fire danger level for the Berkeley-Oakland hills has been upgraded (or should that be downgraded?) from Low to Moderate.

Emergencies, Environment Emergencies, Environment, Fire danger

Julie D provides an excellent guide to thrift stores on University Avenue on TownMe:

So you think you found some sweet deals at Buffalo Exchange and Crossroads? Well, I don’t want to say you’re wrong or anything, or that these buy-sell-trade stores might not be worth the pretty penny you’ve been spending. I’ll just say that I much prefer the unexpected capture of a hidden treasure from a thrift store.

Luckily enough, a majority of the thrift stores in Berkeley are located around the same place. An epic day of thrift shopping begins and ends simply on University Avenue. The most important thing to remember is that this outing quickly morphs into a hunt, so a thrift-shopper must be ready to stalk in tall blades of grass for a good amount of time otherwise the venture will be fruitless.

General, Retail

If you were near the campus today and wondered about the sirens, it was the university’s annual emergency preparedness exercise. It makes sense when you straddle the Hayward fault.

General

Bakesale Betty's fried chicken sandwich

This month’s Sunset magazine (an unhelpful website doesn’t include all the content) has a paean to Oakland’s Temescal neighborhood. I’m a particular fan of both Bakesale Betty’s and Pizzaiolo, but I’m not sure I agree with this:

Why go now: Restaurant openings keep building the buzz in the East Bay’s other Gourmet Ghetto (Berkeley’s is so last decade).

Photo by Karmacamilleeon from Flickr

Food

As reported in BroadwayWorld.com, the Berkeley Repertory Theatre has elected influential local leaders to guide its 42nd season:

This month, at the annual meeting for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, influential leaders from the Bay Area’s top firms signed on to guide the Tony Award-winning nonprofit through its 42nd season. The board of trustees elected new members and a slate of officers to steer the Theatre during a year of daring shows, which includes the latest work from the nation’s top artists.

General

The Daily Californian has two reports about new schools in Berkeley.

A group is seeking approval from the Berkeley Unified School District to open the city’s first public charter high school. The Daily Californian reports:

The charter school, Revolutionary Education and Learning Movement, could open in fall 2010 with 260 ninth through 11th grade students from South and West Berkeley.

A proposal for implementing the charter school will go before the Berkeley Unified School District Board of Education for a vote as soon as mid-August.

The charter school would be an alternative to Berkeley High School and Berkeley Technology Academy, a continuation high school for students with academic and behavioral difficulties, said academy Principal Victor Diaz.

“As an educational institution, we want to create people who are committed to think about how the world works with 21st century skills,” said Diaz, a founding director of the charter school. “We’re creating better people, better humanity.”

In a separate article, The Daily Californian reports that Zaytuna College is investigating whether to open the first accredited Islamic college in the US in Berkeley:

Advisors for the project have scheduled a June vote to decide whether Zaytuna College could open as an officially accredited institution as early as fall 2010, according to the Associated Press.

“I think it would be wonderful to have,” said Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates. “It would be a nice addition to our academic and religious community.”

Two prominent American Muslim scholars, Imam Zaid Shakir and Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, are behind the project, having spent years developing a curriculum that incorporates a liberal arts education and training in Islamic scholarship, according to the AP.

Earlier this month, the London-based Guardian newspaper reported that Zaytuna had ambitions to become a “Muslim Georgetown”.

Education

A taste of Italy? Beer, more beer and a decent pizza at Jupiter's in downtown Berkeley.

Wilco was playing at the Greek so Jupiter was thronging, but it was a revelation. If you could snag a table, then got doubly lucky and landed Sarah as your waiter, she would ensure you got a bite to eat and a glass of ice-cold brew before the opening credits at the Landmark Shattuck across the street.

Having never been to Jupiter before, the real surprise was the setting. A two-story building in central Berkeley hiding an enormous sheltered courtyard out back — hundreds of tables, trellises, fire pits, parasols and potted geraniums: a pretty much perfect spot for the end of a hot summer’s day in the city.

They were calling an hour’s wait for the wood-fire oven pizzas by the time we were seated. But we plucked at a red and gold beet salad and the Galileo arrived in time: artichoke hearts, spinach, aged Asagio and garlic, on a proper blistered thin crust.

Crowds notwithstanding, this is one to keep in mind when racking your brains for somewhere dependable to eat downtown.

[Photo: Melissa Rapp.]

Food, restaurants Food, restaurants

Sailing is one of the great pleasures to be enjoyed in the Bay Area, which has some of the finest sailing conditions in the world. And it’s a day like this when all the work and effort, not to mention the money, that goes into properly maintaining a sailboat pays off.

Sailing on San Francisco Bay off the Berkeley Marina.

General

Nature

Michael Judge, a contributing editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review, sits down at Yoshi’s for dinner with Robert Hass, and learns that semantics may, indeed, be everything. He recounts this adventure with the Berkeley professor and former poet laureate, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece:

I mention how his first book and his most recent were both written when America was at war and, in a way, deal with similar subjects. “The Vietnam War and the Iraq war, in different ways, both made me feel like I could not not address them. I’m very doubtful about the usefulness of poetry to do that,” he says. And yet, “In this really violent, imperfect world where you’re not just a writer but you’re a writer writing in one of the languages of the rich and developed world . . . [you have] some responsibility for the world . . . [because] the way the world is seen gets framed in those languages.”

He pauses, takes a drink of wine, then continues: “I have a Libyan poet friend who thinks that part of the big problem with the Arabic world is Arabic poetry, that . . . there’s a certain level of elevation of the language that doesn’t make a description of reality possible. Not to make too much of a claim for poetry, but this is a question that goes to the moral heart of the business of any art: How do you see the world and what right do you have to see the world in the way that you do?

Arts, Education

…you might want to read this press release from the Berkeley Police Department:

The City of Berkeley Police Department (BPD) will be conducting a Driving Under the Influence/Drivers License checkpoint on Friday, June 26, 2009.  The checkpoint will occur during the evening hours on Telegraph Avenue at Stuart Street in Southeast Berkeley.  This effort will be part of the Alameda countywide program: Avoid the 21.

I’ve seen one of these checkpoints in Berkeley before, and I was stopped by one last year in Truckee. I know some people think it raises civil rights issues, but I think it’s a fantastic way to crack down on drinking and driving.

I wonder, however, why the department announces where the checkpoint will be. That must reduce the effectiveness. When I first encountered checkpoints for drink driving, I was in Australia many years ago. All the side roads were blocked off so that by the time you saw there was a checkpoint, you had to go through it. Very tough and effective, particularly in Australia where going out for an evening and getting hammered is still a big part of the culture.

Update Mark Haas points out in the comments that the announcement and allowing ways to bypass the checkpoint were required in the legislation that made the checkpoints legal.

General, Issues

That’s my cup of plum sorbet with candied almonds pictured above, perched on Sketch’s retro ice-cream cart on Fourth Street. After its moment of fame, I savored its creamy deliciousness. Sketch only serves soft serve  now — it’s all the rage, you know.

While there, we ran into friends who had crossed the bridge from San Francisco to witness the annual blooming of the rare Corpse Flower at UC Berkeley’s Botanical Gardens. They were pondering trying the apricot and thyme combo.

A rare natural phenomenon and scrumptious ice cream? Just two Berkeley delights.

Food

While folks in Hawaii watch for North Korea to send a missile their way, in Berkeley we can relax and enjoy the annual 4th of July fireworks event at the Berkeley Marina. And it’s not just fireworks, it’s a whole day of family activities. As the event producer describes it:

The 4th of July is a great day to have a lot of fun. The biggest party is on the South Shore of the Berkeley Marina from noon-10PM. There’s music, dancers, jugglers all for free! Adventure Playground, always a favorite, is open 11am-8pm. Sign up for an old-fashioned sack race, create a nature sculpture with environmental artist Zach Pine, or get your face painted. Try the giant slide or splash in the water at the beach!

There’s live entertainment from noon until 9PM on the main stage including MotorDude Zydeco, Suhaila Bellydance Company, Mo’Fone, and guitarist Steven Gary. Other entertainers around the marina include Tropical Sounds Steel Drums, UCA Capoeira, Failure to Disperse, Afro Cuban Rumba Drumming, Fred Anderson Comedy Explosion, and Coventry & Kaluza Clowns. There’s art & craft booths, massages, free sailboat rides from 1-4pm, dragon boat rides from 2-6pm, and muchmore including the grand fireworks off the end of the Berkeley Pier at 9:30pm.

General

Spotted along the Amtrak tracks in Berkeley.

General

Responding to Microsoft’s Bing travel site, Google today rolled out its experimental City Tours service designed to help travelers plan their sightseeing activities.

To test it out, I tried entering a starting address of Berkeley, CA, and City Tours returned only 13 “sights” for the entire city, all of them museums. Not taking anything away from the sights listed, I think anyone who has visited Berkeley can come up with a more comprehensive list of things to see and do.

City Tours is still a project in Google Labs, so I hope it will improve with time.

General

If Warren Hewerdine has his way, the next hot item on children’s wish list for Santa won’t be a PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo, nor will it be an iPod, iMac or iPhone. Hewerdine, who is the senior director of marketing for Berkeley-based Apisphere, is co-inventor of the Geomate.jr, a $70, first-of-its-kind GPS device that is shaking up the world of geocaching.

Geo-what? Geocaching is a high-tech version of treasure hunting. Geocaching relies on the same network of GPS satellites used to guide ships to their ports and cruise missiles to their targets to enable these treasure hunters, called geocachers, to find containers of varying sizes that have been hidden by others and recorded in an online database by their latitudes and longitudes. Armed with this lat-lon data, geocachers head out with their handheld GPS devices to find the hidden treasures, which usually consists of nothing more valuable than a few trinkets, if that much. But for geocachers, it’s all about the hunt.

Designed to make geocaching fun for kids.

And so today I went hunting with Heweredine. Armed with our Geomate.jrs, we headed off from the Apishpere headquarters near downtown Berkeley to the wilds of Cesar Chavez Park and the Berkeley Marina to track down the geocaches others have hidden there.

Before we left, because this was my first experience with geocaching, Hewerdine gave me a quick introduction to the sport, and showed me how much easier it is to do with the Geomate.jr instead of using a general purpose GPS device. Without going into details, suffice it to say it is like the difference between driving stick and an automatic.

Heweredine fired up his Geomate.jr as we were driving down University Avenue, and before I knew it, the thing started displaying distances to all the nearby geocaches stored in its internal database. To me, it was like looking through a magic portal into a parallel universe. I had passed by here so many times, completely unaware that these things even existed, yet here was this gadget telling me the closest geocache at the moment was just 90 feet away.

We had decided to start at Cesar Chavez Park, which contains several geocaches of varying difficulty to find, but because I was a novice at this, the first one we sought was a relatively large geocache that was not particularly hard to find. We entered the park, and my Geomate.jr indicated the target was about 1732 feet away in a northwest direction from where we were standing. As we walked, the distance displayed decreased, and the arrow started pointing in a more westerly direction, so we turned left at the next trail and headed down towards the bay.

Successful capture of my first geocache.

Like most GPS devices, the Geomate.jr’s accuracy is good to a radius of about 30 feet, and so when the display showed we were about 50 feet away, it became obvious we were going to have to head off the trail into the brush and then start searching the old fashioned way. The people who hide these geocaches can be quite tricky in their choice of containers and hiding spots, but in this first simple example, the much more experienced Hewerdine quickly found the old Army ammo box we were looking for hiding under a nearby bush. Inside were several trinkets, some log notebooks, a pen and a few other items. Fortunately, there weren’t any muggles – nosey, uninitiated spectators – around to bother us, so I simply signed and dated the log book, closed up the box and placed it back into its hiding spot for the next geocacher to find.

By its nature, geocaching is something best done unobserved by others. As geocaching has grown in popularity, however, there have been several unfortunate incidents of muggles calling the police after observing geocachers uncovering their hidden treasures and then placing them back. In many of these cases, the bomb squad is quickly called to the scene, and they subsequently blow up the geocache, even though most of them are clearly marked at such. Hopefully, as this sport becomes better known, people won’t find this kind of activity so unusual, or suspicious.

Nope, not under there. Sometimes a geocache can't be found, or is no longer there.

Our next attempt was not as successful as our first, and after checking the Internet with Hewerdine’s iPhone – cheating, really  – we determined the geocache was probably missing, possibly stolen by a muggle. And so we next decided to try something a bit more challenging, and set out to find a micro-geocache, the smallest of the breed, and one that had been designated as difficult to find. Pushing the button on the Geomate.jr a couple of times brought up this entry in the built-in database, and the display quickly told us to turn around and head off in another direction.

And more difficult it was. After zeroing in on the approximate location with the Geomate.jr, we both spent the next 15 minutes looking under bushes, into trees, behind rocks, around discarded beer bottles and in other potential hiding spots with no luck. Hewerdine cheated again and checked the geocaching.com web site with his iPhone for clues, and found two hints associated with this particular geocache. We learned that whoever hid the geocache “would be nuts to give a hint,” and that it was in plain sight, but hidden. Nuts? What could that mean? Looking around, we decided that meant a pine cone. After another 10 minutes, Hewerdine, again, found the geocache,  this time hidden inside a pine cone lying on the ground in plain sight next to a tree. In retrospect it should have been obvious, as this kind of pine cone could not have come from the kinds of pine trees in the area, and this is precisely the kind of experience that makes you a better geocacher.

Sneaky geocache hidden inside a pine cone.

Heading back toward the civilization of the Berkeley Marina, we decided to hunt for one more geocache hidden nearby. This one turned out to be the easiest to find, but it also showed how you have to really pay attention while hunting instead of just burying your head in the display and following the arrow. This geocache turned out to be at the very end of a pier jutting out into the bay. The pier is only about 50 feet long, but the Geomate.jr was telling me the geocache was about 60 feet away. You do the math.

When geocaching, be careful of long walks on short piers.

Geocaches can be hidden almost anywhere, and probably are.

Hewerdine is quite active in the geocaching community, recently attending the Geo-Woodstock VII gathering in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, where he mingled with some of the truly hardcore geocachers, and he has lead numerous local school outings to introduce the students (and most of the teachers) to the sport. Beyond the obvious goal of selling more Geomate.jrs, Hewerdine feels strongly that geocaching is an ideal venue for getting children off their behinds and into an outdoor activity that is much healthier for them. Families who have purchased the Geomate.jr are starting to “complain” they can’t drive anywhere without the kids screaming to stop the car so they can run out and find the geocache the display is telling them is nearby. And with 250,000 geocache locations stored in the Geomate.jr out of the box, the kids will be screaming for a long time to come.

General Berkeley, geocaching, Geomate.jr, GPS