Seth Shostak…you are my new hero. What an event on Monday night! There was an incredible blend of science and humanity represented, as we continue to search for an answer to the question: “Are We Alone?”

40 years of the scientific search has been fruitless so far, but that does not daunt the hopes of our crowd last night. Almost everyone believed life exists out there, though not everyone was convinced we’ll find something considering we’ve only been broadcasting for 200 years. In either case, the search remains important as this seems to poke at a fundamental curiosity most of us share.
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Local food has long ruled the roost here in the Bay Area. Slow Food Nation was started here, The Omnivore’s Dilemma was first posed here, and the farm to table dinners reign supreme. But the next evolution in local food is foraged food.

The idea of hunting for wild food of the land is crazy for someone like myself…I haven’t even adjusted to the farmers markets at this point. But when I ask Iso Rabins, founder of ForageSF, why eat wild…his first answer isn’t about climate change or connection to the land…it’s taste.
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You know the deal with Down to a Science, the cafes are meant to serve as a launching point for a conversation…at home, at work, on the MUNI….wherever.

SETI@Home is the posterchild for getting peeps involved in scientific research, at least while your screen saver is active. The project started back in 1999 to help explore the huge amount of data (requires teraflop/s of processing power)….the solution posed was a distributed computing concept. After a few attempts, SETI decided upon a background processing client that could be installed on a home computer.
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