π
2025-04-11 01:01
in Japan, Japan2025, Outings, Public
Of course Japan is known for cat cafés, but it has even more than that: plenty of other animal cafés. Takeshita street in Harajuku has so many, went to see a few. Micropig café was fun of course :)
Back to see Neil deGrasse Tyson for a 3rd time, this time for part 2 of "An Astrophysicist Goes To The Movies". It ws a fun evening as any evening would him, would be, although I found this specific talk a little weaker than the first one, probably because he had to find other material that he hand't already used in the first talk, but that said there were still plenty of fun bits, and as I said, any time with him is a fun time :)
he still has a few books I should read :)
the list of movies for his 2nd talk
those doors were indeed portals to a 4th dimension we can't see as 3 dimensional beings
wizard of oz was wrong all along!
I never caught that one either
parsecs are a unit of distance, they can't be used for speed or time (BTW a parsec is 3.6 light years as I found out)
Gravity: haha, that's an easy one. It had lots of good physics, but also some glaring holes
Oh no, don't let him go! :)
As a bonus, he gave he attendees a hall pass for the next day if they were late :)
And I had no idea he was on zoolander 2 :)
It was another very fun night, very quick video summary:
Maker Faire came back but it's not really in the bay area anymore, Mare Island is honestly closer to Sacramento than it is from the South Bay. It's a bad location in my opinion, and I hope they come back to something more central to the bay, but we'll see.
That said I was driving back from Tahoe, so that remote location was on the way home and stopping there wasn't terrible. We arrived almost at opening time, but with offsite parking and bussing in, it did burn about 30mn. not ideal but we arrived in eventually:
Finally at the entrance:
It was nice to be in time for Adam Savage from mythbusters:
still has the passion
Fun to see coke and mentos again too:
The dark room was a fun time:
The LED Piano was great to see again:
I also loved the cuttlefish art car from burning man:
Plenty of other expos:
cool hat
electromage
oh my, I had one of those when I grew up
oh, I need one of those
how does it even? :)
cool idea :)
For some reason they also had cars:
This was fun enough, but the new location is not great, I hope they change it back to the middle of the bay area, I don't care if it has to cost more as a result.
I hadn't been able to go in a few years, glad to be back and find other electronics, batteries and other stuff I might or might not need, but looked enticing :) (I ended up finding a bunch of lithium battery packs for a good price, that will work for my burning man bike, and maybe LED outfit as a backup source of power, I may even be able to use them to power my laptop)
The Texas Eclipse Festival did not end as planned, organizers cancelled
the event for weather risk reasons, although in the end the weather was
so much better than forecast (forecast said we'd never see the sun at
all and it would rain).
When I heard about the cancellation on a thread fo bar one of my 2 cell
phones,while barely awake, I managed to tear up camp and start driving
out in just 15mn and got out of the festival in just over 45mn, before
traffic got really bad. I then realized I had just enough time to drive
my friend Marc Antoine's ranch 50mn away, and the fact that 2 lane roads
in TX have 70mph speed limits, sure helped. I got to his place 30mn
before totality.
It did not rain, and the sun came out just at the right time for the
eclipse and went hiding in the clouds soon after. Timing was perfect.
And I happened to capture some solar flares and mercury with my not so
great handheld camera, so I'm happy :)
When I got out of the festival, partial eclipse hadn't started yet, but the sun was barely visible
Marc sent me the GPS location of his ranch, and GPS said I could barely make it and thankfully the roads were near empty
I pulled over a few times when the sun was visible for barely a minute
Most of the time, it was fully overcast, as per the forecast
but the sun came back out a few times
And in barely 50mn I made it to Marc's ranch and got to meet his family. We had just seen one another 2 weeks prior at beyond wonderland
all ready
fun thing is you can see a partial eclipse without glasses
getting there, so close
and yes!
even a decent shot frmo my cell
it got dark :)
I caught some sun flares on this one
on lower right, I think I you can see mercury. Einstein used it the lensing effect of gravity in his theory of general relativity
my best lucky shot!
and way too soon, it was over already :)
and the sun soon went to hide under clouds again, perfect timing!
The eclipse festival didn't end well, but the eclipse itself went way beyond expectations!
Video:
