I love any excuse to go to the Palace of Fine Arts and visit The Exploratorium — two of my favorite places in San Francisco.
On the first Thursday of every month The Exploratorium hosts its “After Dark Presents” series of unique events. This month the theme was gastronomy and several thousand people turned up for lectures, tastings, demonstrations, and to play around with The Exploratorium’s marvelous, hands-on science exhibits.
The invention of cooking must rank as one the most powerful technologies ever developed by our species and its ancestors. We essentially found a way to outsource much of the work of our stomachs to the cooking pot.
This led to a massive change in our evolution — our stomachs shrank and our body changed, it helped us walk upright, and we grew giant brains because now we were able to support their prodigious energy needs — more than 25% of our calories feed our grey matter.
If we didn’t have the cooking pot we would not be able to digest the large amount of raw food we’d need — we would have to spend all day gathering, chomping, and chewing.
It’s not easy extracting calories from raw food. An experiment at Bristol zoo in the UK, with human volunteers fenced into a pastoral paradise, and fed their daily calorie requirements in raw foods, such as berries, vegetables, meat, had to be shut down after a couple of weeks because the people were losing so much weight they were becoming malnourished and could have died. They physically could not eat enough raw food to meet their daily needs.
Without the outsourcing of much of the work of our stomachs to the cooking pot there’d be little time time for society, and no time for developing civilizations. There’d be no science, literature, or the arts, there’d be no computer technologies.
(Today we are in the midst of the next step in our evolution — outsourcing much of the work of our brains to computing machines. This will have a similarly large effect on our development as did the invention of cooking and it will completely change how we look and behave. We’ll have smaller brains but we’ll be a whole lot smarter, healthier, and better looking :)
The development of gastronomy must easily rank as our oldest and most important technology — it’s a perfect subject for The Exploratorium. Quynth Tran, a former newspaper reporter now working on the PR team at The Exploratorium showed me around the event.
She says that the “After Dark Series” has been very successful and the concept has been followed by other museums. The California Academy of Sciences set up a competing Thursday night event called “Nightlife.” (My favorite evening museum event is the superb “Friday Nights” series at the de Young Museum.)
I’m not a fan of “Nightlife” but I did enjoy this “After Dark” event, it attracted a lively, curious, and great looking crowd. Ms Tran says that it will become a weekly event when The Exploratorium moves to its new location.
Another enjoyable feature was that it was largely free of the tech industry people I see all the time, my “Highlight” app barely blipped all night.
If you want to leave the echo chamber for some very enjoyable hours, this is a great place to come on the first Thursday of the month.
Next month the theme is “The World of Your Senses.”
The US premiere of a special exhibition of Tibetan thangka style paintings and engage with Tibetan monks from India to explore sensory perception through Buddhist and scientific perspectives.
Here are some photos from the Gastronomy evening:
(Photos by Tom Foremski.)
A long line for one of the lectures.
A demonstration on the main stage is about to begin.
A rapt audience.
There’s lots to explore.
The sand isn’t edible but there were a lot of other things to taste.
An exploration of our taste for sweet foods.
Comparing notes…
Hodo Soy from above.
The Hodo Soy tasting was very popular, unfortunately I missed out :(
The Exploratorium is a giant playground: blowing giant bubbles.
This is how tornadoes get their twist.
Heading home…
I’ll miss the incredible setting of The Exploratorium when it moves to its new location at the Embarcadero. I’ve been coming here more than 25 years, and I used to bring my kids here constantly.
I hope the new Exploratorium building won’t be the dud that the California Academy of Sciences ended up with. It spent $500 million to replace a building of great character, and one that housed far more exhibits than it’s ghastly replacement.
It now costs a fortune to get in, $30, while providing far less content. It’s a disaster. I don’t care that it’s a platinum rated “green” building. There is nothing Green about spending half-a-billion dollars, sugar coated with a “living roof” — featuring local species. I have plenty of local species living under my fridge.
It’s built as a citadel with no public spaces, unlike the de Young across the concourse in Golden Gate Park, which has one-third of its exhibit space in public areas! You can see experience great art, sit in its sculpture parks, without paying a cent.
The California Academy of Sciences has a six-foot high metal fence and no public spaces! The huge cost of its building means it must charge members to attend its Thursday night ‘Nightlife’ events, while the de Young ‘Friday Night’ events are free to everyone. (The Exploratorium events are free to members.)
The contrast between the two institutions, as they face each other in Golden Gate Park, is striking: one is exclusive and the other is inclusive.
It’s bad design and it’s a bad message for today’s world. We all agree that science education is incredibly important but here, the California Academy of Sciences, has become far less accessible. It’s walled off its incredible treasure trove of collections and muted a great story of more than 100 years of important scientific research and discovery. Hopefully, this can be fixed in some way.
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When the de Young reopened in October 2005, it was open for the whole weekend – 48 hours. The line to get in stretched for miles. I joined the line late on Saturday and I was half-a-mile away from the entrance. I had so much fun in the line, the people, the conversations, the surroundings, all made for a great time.
I have a dream of an annual event where the California Academy of Sciences and the de Young Museum stay open for 48 hours straight — starting Friday evening to Sunday evening. There would be tons of events, lectures, music, lots of things happening in the concourse between the two buildings…
There would be streams of people coming and going between events, it would be a heady mix for the senses and the mind. It would be a unique city festival — a celebration of the arts and natural sciences — an island of reason and logic in an increasingly fragile world, threatened by rising levels of ignorance and superstition.
It would be a great event.
Tom Foremski is the Editor and Founder of the popular and top-ranked news site Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on business and culture of innovation. He is a former journalist at the Financial Times and in 2004, became the first journalist from a leading newspaper to resign and become a full-time journalist blogger.
Tom has been reporting on Silicon Valley and the US tech industry since 1984 and has been named as one of the top 50 (#28) most influential bloggers in Silicon Valley. His current focus is on the convergence of media and technology — the making of a new era for Silicon Valley. He also writes a column at ZDNET.
