__ DEDUCTIBLE JUNKETS __
__ The Silicon Circuit __
If you want the dish on Palo Alto from the Dish in the foothills to the hot and spicy chicken at Jing Jing get out your Wired 4.06 and turn to page 80, where you'll find a guide to the city. Consider this column your escape route.
To the north lies San Francisco, the cosmopolitan tip of the peninsula. You can get there on Caltrain, which drops you at the corner of Fourth and Townsend Streets, an area of ugly industrial buildings and loft spaces known as Multimedia Gulch. This is San Francisco's Silicon Valley. Walk up Third Street to the ultraslick, new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The collection is second-rate, but the building is a masterpiece although the translucent bridge on the fifth floor is not for the acrophobic.
Walk over to nearby Lulu for some iron-skillet-roasted mussels from the wood-burning oven. Or try a fantastical meal at Flying Saucer in the funky Mission District; the chocolate praline mousse will blow your mind (while the bill will blow your budget!). Or just grab a few franks at a Giants game at Candlestick Park before heading back to the peninsula. And the woods.
Drive northwest from Palo Alto up Page Mill Road to Skyline Boulevard, then veer north to its intersection with Highway 84, where you will find vittles and ambience at Alice's Restaurant, a friendly biker bar that's jumping on weekend afternoons. Alternately, you can head west on Highway 84 into La Honda to Apple Jack's, a Hell's Angels hangout with loud tunes and lots of local color.
Continue west down Highway 84, winding through the hills of the coastal range all the way to the Pacific. Pack a picnic from the abundant Whole Foods Market deli in Palo Alto and lunch on San Gregorio Beach. Or travel south down Highway 1 to Pescadero, a rural town with infinite atmosphere and one stop sign, for a meal of artichoke soup and crab sandwiches at Duarte's.
Due south of Palo Alto, inland from Santa Cruz, cruise the cities and suburbs of Siliconia. In San Jose, tour the hokey Winchester Mystery House. Built by the paranoid rifle heiress Sarah Winchester, it's a bizarre labyrinth of 160 hidden rooms, stairs leading nowhere, and eavesdropping ducts (a 19th-century wiretapping technique).
More advanced technologies are on view at The Tech Museum of Innovation. Marvel at the 16-foot by 12-foot Imaginative Chip sculpture, a billiard ball model of the movement of information through an integrated circuit. And test your knowledge at the Bits & Pieces: Inside the Computer exhibit. If you score well, treat yourself to the Grand Marnier soufflé at the elegant Emile's. Or try one of the 3,000 eateries across the Valley listed on the Web at www.w3.com /bayfood/ba_rest_guide.html.
You don't want to miss the WeirdStuff Warehouse, a diehard collector's bargain basement of hardware, software, and other computer miscellany. This is an integral stop on the southern circuit.
Escape to the east and, well, you'll quickly bump into the bay. Then again, you don't have to escape from Palo Alto at all. From The Scientific Revolution to the Rodin Sculpture Garden, there is more than enough to do.
Jessie Scanlon
__ The Current Roundup (see Wired 4.06) __
July 14-18 FutureVision: Ideas, Insights, and Strategies; Washington, DC.July 26-28 DEF CON IV; Las Vegas. € July 28-30 Spotlight; Laguna Niguel, California. € July 28-31 Genetic Programming 1996 Conference; Stanford, California. € August 4-9 Siggraph 96; New Orleans.€ August 8 10 ONE ISPCON; San Francisco.
__August 18-20 __ Hot Chips; Stanford, California The silicon will still be hot on the circuits presented at this IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Chip Architectures. See the graphics chips that will bring the Net into 3 D, high-performance memory chips, logic chips, DSP chips, and more. Registration: US$240 through July 21, $290 after. Contact: +1 (415) 941 6699, on the Web at www.hot.org/hotchips/.
__August 19-21 __ Surveillance Expo '96; McLean, Virginia Highlights of this NCSA-sponsored expo on surveillance and countersurveillance include the eye-opening early-bird panels (firsthand reports on countering corporate espionage) and the continuing debate on the death of Vincent Foster. The latest spook toys will be on exhibit. Registration: US$295, half-day seminars $100 each, open admission to exhibits. Contact: +1 (703) 450 2200, on the Web at www.rosseng.com/ .
__September 2-7 __ Ars Electronica Festival; Linz, Austria This year's event coincides with the opening of the Ars Electronica Center a museum of the future. This premier European festival will focus on the culture of memes and the development of digital tools, as well as the dazzling art created by them. Registration: S1,200 (around US$120). Contact: +43 (732) 712121 0, email info@aec.at, on the Web at www.aec.at/fest/fest.html.
__September 5-6 __ InfoWarCon '96; Arlington, Virginia Words may never hurt you, but an electromagnetic pulse generator that erases your hard disk will do some damage. Industry suits and rumpled academics, not to mention the brass, will attend this fifth annual forum to discuss personal privacy, industrial security, and international information warfare and terrorism. Registration: US$545 through July 31, $595 after. Contact: +1 (717) 258 1816, email infowar96@ncsa.com, on the Web at www.ncsa.com/.
__September 9-13 __ From Animals to Animats The Fourth International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior; North Falmouth, Massachusetts Researchers in artificial intelligence, robotics, psychology, and ecology will flock to this forum-by-the-sea (Turing towels in hand) to discuss theoretical models, present computer simulations, and demo robots. Consciousness guru Daniel Dennett is one just one of the conference highlights. Registration: Price unavailable at press time. Contact: email sab96 @cs.brandeis.edu, on the Web at www.cs.brandeis.edu/conferences/sab96/.
September 11-14 International Workshop on Computational Humor; Enschede, The Netherlands This fairly academic workshop focuses on humor and its relation to human and artificial intelligence. Douglas Hofstadter, Marvin Minsky, and other speakers will present theories of irony and discuss humorous aspects of human-machine interaction. Registration: Dfl300 (around US$200). Contact: +31 (53) 4893740, email hoogvlie@cs.utwente.nl, on the Web at wwwseti.cs.utwente.nl/~joris/IWCH/.
__Out on the Range:
September 17 Advanced Surveillance Technologies II; Ottawa, Canada. Contact: email pi@privacy.org. € September 16-20 __ISEA96; Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Contact: telephone/fax +31 (10) 4778605, email isea96@hro.nl. __September 18-20 __Online Developers III; San Francisco. Contact: (800) 481 1212, on the Web at www.jup.com/html/conf/upc/index.html.
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