My local July adventures weren’t confined to mummies, baseball and food. I also attended a few shows a lectures.
On July 14th I met up with a friend to see a Kevin Kelly speak on The Next 30 Digital Years, put on by The Long Now Foundation. This lecture covered a series of trends (not specific technologies) that Kelly felt would drive the future. This included proliferation of “screens” on a variety of surfaces to meet our ever-increasing desire to be connected to media we now depend on in our work and lives. He also talked about the rise of augmented reality, increased tracking for increased personalization of services (with a sidebar about privacy) and increasing sharing economy, where access continues to replace ownership.
What I enjoyed most about this talk was how optimistic he was. Even while tackling difficult topics like privacy in a very connected world, he was incredibly positive about what our future holds in store for us. This held true even when questions from the audience expressed more pessimistic views.
In a weekend that revolved around events near City Hall, the very next evening I went to the San Francisco Symphony for the first time. As SciFi fan who has a sidebar love for movie scores, my introduction to the symphony here was appropriately Star Trek: The Ultimate Voyage — A 50th Anniversary Celebration (article). The event featured the full symphony, with a screen above them that showed clips and a narrated exploration through the Star Trek universe as they played scores from movies and selections from each series. They definitely focused on TOS and TNG, but there was decent representation of the rest. I also learned that SF trekkies really like Janeway. Me too. It was a really fun night.
We also went to an event put on by the Western Neighborhoods Project (WNP), Streetcar San Francisco: Transit Tales of the City in Motion at Balboa Theatre.
The event featured short films and clips of historic streetcars and expertise from folks over at Market Street Railway (which may have been how I heard about it). The clips covered the whole city, including a lot of downtown as they walked us through some the milestones and transit campaigns in the history of the city. It was particularly interesting to learn about the street cars in the west side of the city, where they used to have have a line that ran up around Land’s End, and some neat (or tacky) hanging “sky-trams” which took you from Cliff House to Point Lobos, an article about them here: A Brief History of San Francisco’s Long-Lost Sky Tram, which also references the WNP page about them.
This event also clued me in to the existence of OpenSF History by WNP. They’re going through a collection of historic San Francisco photos that have been donated and are now being digitized, indexed and shared online. Very fun to browse through, and there are great pictures of historic streetcars and other transit.
