MUGA Day #37: My Day in San Francisco

Forty eight hours ago, my only full day in Denver, the temperature rose to 81 F.  Today, up to 12 inches of snow and a high of 32 F.   See that one white spot at 32?  That's Denver:

At the other extreme, temperatures here and in the Napa area are expected to hit all time highs, with Santa Rosa expected to go up to 91 F, when its all-time high for May 1 is 83F.  I've never heard of an 8 F degree record breaking difference for anywhere ever.  The Napa region also has four wildfires largely out of control and winds exceeding 30 MPH are expected today.  Worse, tomorrow, three digit temperatures could be reached in certain areas of the valley.  Kenji's Golf Safari begins with arrival at the San Francisco Airport tomorrow.  We will be in smoke and heat for a week, unless it rains early next week, which is expected.

What I never envisioned in My Ultimate Global Adventure was an exciting room.  I happen to  be on the second floor in the extreme corner near the freeway from SFO to the City, and cars are whizzing past.  A slight deviation and they're into my room.  The exit is also right in my view, and if a driver gets a heart attack, the vehicle could slam into me:

I've told this story before, but as first-time visitors are half the readers every day, let me explain why this a second home for me.  I went to school down the road at Stanford, a decade later spent a summer working on a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program at the NASA Ames Research Center, and in the 70's did research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for Edward Teller a couple of times on laser fusion.  I recommended to NASA forty years ago a direct technique to not only detect extrasolar planets, but also thusly determine the atmospheric composition.  Virtually all of those planets thus far found (a number now nearing 1000--until 1992 the total was zero) used indirect wobbling of the close-by star, not a seeing of the planet itself.

While at Livermore in 1979, I was asked to become a staff member of the U.S. Senate, where one satisfying victory was helping Carl Sagan (who wrote the book, Contact) gain initial funding for the SETI program.   Read about our encounter with Senator William Proxmire.  I had met Sagan while at Ames when we saw the first Mars photo being beamed in from Viking (that's him standing next to a model of this spacecraft).  Ironically, Jill Tarter, chair of the SETI Institute (which is located just off the Stanford Campus), is in Hawaii this weekend for a series of events.  She is the model for Jodie Foster's role in the 1997 film, CONTACT.  This is what I did for NASA forty years ago.

I took BART into Frisco and meet Sharon and David Block for lunch at Tadich Grill:

Not exactly an adventurous day, but we then walked up and down Market Street.  I took this photo:

We then went to the Ferry Building Marketplace and had some champagne and white wine. I followed by scouring the foodstands for the ideal cheese, foie gras, bread and wine, and could not find anything worthy.  However, just as I was about to catch the elevator down to the Bart Embarcadero Station, I saw a Subway, bought a 6-inch Italian, then a large bottle of Corona beer, plus American potato chips, and had my international dinner in my room at the Four Points Sheraton.  Tomorrow, the first day of Kenji's Golf Safari in Napa.

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