While in Paris, le Jardin des Plantes had beautiful illuminations. It reminded me of Dubai Glow Park. It being France, they actually put work into the science part, showing interesting insects and even microbes:
It was a pleasure to have Neil deGrasse Tyson at the San Jose Center for Performing Arts for "An Astrophysicist Goes To The Movies", taken from his selection of many talks. I'd actually love to see all of them :)
Like last times, he had lots of fun slides, it was a great evening (a bit over 2H):
his last book, that I should get
He then talked about a lot of movies, which was the point of course :)
the odds of asteroids hitting major monuments, is of course just about 0
oh no, contact messed up the Drake equation
doh
cute to have a lit runway to allow a floating spaceship to land
lots of fun can be had arguing on twitter
nature making fractals is of coure hella cool
we have plenty of space debris
space movies don't show how hair really works in 0g
The martian got the award of best science movie
Very good point about the 2nd law of thermodynamics, humans don't create more energy than the energy to feed them
and the sad truth that war of the world removed evolution to add god back in :(
oh, and this was the coolest part of back to the future I never even noticed (you need to see the talk)
And we ended with the starry sky controversy in Titanic:
It was another very fun night, very quick video summary:
Since I had already done most of the main things in Amsterdam, and I had an extra monday where most museums are closed, so it was a good time to check out the Botanical Garden and the Zoo.
The botanical garden was quite nice and had a fun butterfly nursery:
they had interesting butterflies I had never seen before
this transparent one is also quite interesting
this one was still blood in its wings after being born
Next door was the artis zoo complex, which included 2 museums, Micropia, was quite cool:
Watching the leaf cutter ant display was mesmerizing, you could spend a while staring at it:
The other small museum nextdoor also had interesting displays:
Then, I went to see the actual zoo. I should have done this first because rain was scheduled and I ended up only seeing about half because pouring rain made it no fun, and many animals also went to hide:
The highlight was seeing two boobies doing a mating dance, watch the video:
It had been 3 years since I last saw Brian Cox give a live talk in the Bay Area, and this one was similar in format to the talk he gave in 2019.
Just like last time, his talk was a bit more technical than Neil deGrasse Tyson at San Jose Center for Performing Arts, and this time touched about an interesting point where time slows down as you approach a black hole, but once you go to a critical point, time actually stops, and then equations actually predict that time runs backwards. This is where it gets complex and the equations predict that time and space actually reverse. That was cool indeed.
That said, just like last time, he came with his sidekick Robin Ince, who isn't exactly the funiest comedian I've seen and honestly detracts more than he adds to the evening. Oh well, it was still nice to see his version of the talk. I have a pretty bad partial recording here:
I spent a short time at Megamart with Alvin last year, it was fun to go back during EDC while being more awake and being able to enjoy it the way it was meant to:
After finishing Megamart, there was a bit of time left to check out some of Area15:
There is more to check out, will have to go back :)
It had been a while since I had gone to the Cupertino Cherry Blossom Festival, especially since it was cancelled the last two years. Very happy to go again this year.
so cute
I didn't even know Jyorei existed, very cool
kois are serious business in japan :)
Ikebana, flower arrangement, is always enjoyable:
The performances have always been good and enjoyable:
This was lots of fun, looking forward to the next time.
