Bryan – Page 22 – overt.org

berkeley food #17: chez panisse

1517 Shattuck Avenue
Berkeley, California 94709
(510) 548-5049

I’ve been to Chez Panisse four times now spread out over the last year and a half. Every time has been a blast, and delicious, and (believe it or not) not terrifyingly expensive (though I’ve yet to foot the bill). The restaurant is split into upstairs (the cafe) and downstairs (the restaurant). In the restaurant, there is just one menu that everyone gets, which changes daily. In the cafe, the menu also changes each day but you can choose between several options for starters, entrees, and desserts. All of the times I’ve been there have been in the cafe because (1) it’s more fun to get a bunch of stuff and share and (2) it’s actually possible to get reservations upstairs with only a couple of weeks of notice (or less, if you’re willing to eat at 5pm on a Wednesday).

The restaurant has a lot of history behind it. It was opened by Alice Waters in 1971. The website sums up the philosophy:

Alice and Chez Panisse have become convinced that the best-tasting food is organically grown and harvested in ways that are ecologically sound, by people who are taking care of the land for future generations. The quest for such ingredients has largely determined the restaurant’s cuisine. Chez Panisse has tried for years to make diners here partake of the immediacy and excitement of vegetables just out of the garden, fruit right off the branch, and fish straight out of the sea. In doing so, Chez Panisse has stitched together a patchwork of over sixty nearby suppliers, whose concerns, like the restaurant’s, are environmental harmony and optimal flavor.

I guess these aren’t uncommon ideas these days, but probably they were in 1971. It’s a French restaurant, but the food (I think) is really Californian–mostly familiar and with amazingly fresh and well-matched ingredients. Some claim the restaurant was actually the birthplace of California cuisine, but since I’ve been here just three years I won’t try to pass judgement on that.

All of my experiences at this place have been wonderful. The atmosphere is very casual, with lots of dark wood and natural light coming in. Butcher paper on the tables invites you to make a bit of a mess passing food around–which is really the only way to experience the variety of the daily menu–but the attitude, knowledgability, and attentiveness of the waitstaff let you know you’re in a “fancy” restaurant from the start.

We usually start with things like fresh salads, baked goat cheese, toasted breads, and so forth. The entrees range from pizza and pasta to duck to awesomely rare cuts of beef–my last trip (with my parents) I had the best flank steak of my life. Every thing is swimming in butter, of course, but it never feels like a mask for flavor–maybe something more like a foundation. The desserts are probably the most unique, with lots of fresh fruit incorporated into tarts, sorbets, and cakes. One dessert we had in prime citrus season was two unpeeled oranges and three figs–and it was such a perfect match of flavors.

I guess at some point if I really knew what I was talking about I would comment on the wine list, but we all know that would be absurd. They have… lots of wine! Of all sorts and colors. Usually we get a red one. I do like the local beer they keep on tap, which I can attest is always seasonal and yummy even if the selection is fairly narrow.

Prices are of course on the steep side, with entrees from $15-35 and a complete dinner for four hovering around $300 with all the accoutrements. But honestly the food is so great that it doesn’t seem unreasonable, and I’m sure they could keep the place full at twice the price. For a special event or just a reunion with good friends or family this place is awesome. Just be sure to call exactly a month ahead (that’s as far out as they take reservations) if you want that Saturday night spot.

The greatest song ever?

This weekend I set my self the task of finally, conclusively merging my music collection with Leslie’s. All told we’ve got about 11,500 tracks unique tracks, though it did take me most of the day to determine what parts of collections overlapped and which didn’t.

The ways we have come by our music differ drastically. I actually started with my collection of CDs (remember them?). I owned about 250 of them when I got to college and heard about MP3s. I spent my first winter break carefully ripping them all, with nice, uniform tags and metadata. I started to accumulate more music through swapping, mostly with people as careful as myself. Years went by, and I had my beautifully cared for collection, complete to a fault (why not have the complete Scorpions discography? I liked “Rock You Like a Hurricane”).

Then there was Leslie. In the free music orgy that was the honors dorm, she cherry picked the very best songs her friends and napster (and, later, limewire) had to offer. Unfortunately these little orphans didn’t come meticulously packaged like my music–sometimes the tracks weren’t tagged at all! So, I’m currently going through the merged collection, trying to repair all the songs with partial information. This must be done, for archival purposes, you see. Never let us forget that Sir Mix-a-lot’s classic “Baby Got Back” was issued on his 1992 masterpieceMac Daddy.

I have to share with you one song I found. The file name of the song is (all spelling lovingly preserved):

Dave Mathews Band, Phish, Guster, John Popper, Bela Fleck, Vic Wooten, Santana, Peter Greisar, Butch Taylor, Rusted Root, and Ben Harper – Two Step (live, rare).mp3

Sounds pretty amazing, huh? The song, when played, is the original version of the “Who’s the Boss?” theme.

the rigors of academic life

The fall semester is now in full swing. I’ve managed to stick with two of three of my intended academic classes (Machine Learning! Computational Geometry!). Problem sets have not hit yet; I predict they will begin to deal their damage in the middle of next week.

I upgraded my self one level of hardcore-ness in swimming to a class that is also earlier in the morning. The dull ache throughout my upper body serves as a reminder of labors past. The setting for the class really couldn’t be better, though: it’s at Hearst pool, an open air, second-story pool with a solid marble deck that looks out directly over rolling green hills of campus toward the bell tower. This has the pleasant effect of making me feel like I’m in some movie from the 1950s about social challenges facing kids today set against the backdrop of the swimming team that brings them all together. Come on, you can hear the voiceover.

Yesterday Les and I went for some retail therapy at IKEA. Our main intent was to replace the rug in our living room which, while rug-like and on the floor, satisfied virtually no other requirements as far as cleanliness, tastefulness, etc. We failed mostly in this endeavor, mostly because of our stinginess, but generated many incidental purchases that brought them that classic American feeling of comfort that can only come from consumer goods. I got a little shaving mirror attached to one of those scissor-arms, and we got several random things for around the kitchen that we simply can’t wait for our wedding guests to buy for us.

goodbye io

Today I sold my shiny new MacBook Pro, so recently acquired. Why? Our research group had two of them donated very soon after I got mine, and one came my way. Luckily craigslist made short work of it so now it’s like i’ve got the same laptop except I didn’t have to pay for it.

Classes kicked off this week. I’m taking swimming, which looks like it will be a great way to get some more cardio, plus the pool it’s located at has a beautiful solid marble deck and a great view of campus. I’m also in a couple of hard-core CS grad courses that should be fine and move me that much closer to my Ph.D.

Today I gave the lecture in James’ graphics class–it was basically just a show-and-tell of recent graphics research–and I really enjoyed it. The pressure level was so much lower than the talks I’ve given recently, and I didn’t even have to rehearse. It was nice to remind myself what that kind of presentation can be like.

A couple of weeks ago my parents came up to Leslie’s parents ranch and had a great time eating and drinking and occasionally planning wedding stuff. They seemed to hit it off, which bodes well for the rest of forever our families will spend fused by “holy” matrimony.

Otherwise, things are just rolling along. We’re cooking and eating lots of good food, enjoying the dregs of summer weather before the rain comes. Leslie pointed out to me today that some of the trees here in Berkeley have started to change already, as we careen down into this second year of our Berkeley life.

school’s a comin’

I love that I may actually make it to my 10-year high school reunion and still be in school. I was planning to discuss my possible classes for the fall (Computational Geometry, Machine Learning, User Interface Design) and I realized that the first time I posted my class schedule was six years ago. And that was for my sophomore year in college. I’ve got this feeling after this I’ll be done with school for good…

david hasselhoff admits he may be the antichrist

If you’re going to be a middling celebrity, at least you can have sense of humor about it

siggraph: electronic theatre and the tale of the giant head

I got back last night from Boston. A long day of travel, but not too terrible. Since I last checked in with you, the rest of SIGGRAPH managed to happen, so maybe I’ll share a bit about that. Monday night was the Electronic Theatre, a showcase of a bunch of recent cool computer animations. One neat thing they had going on was that they gave each person in the theatre (probably about 2000 people total) a little reflective stick that had green on one side and red on the other:

There were cameras mounted at the front that counted the number and location of each color. The point was that by showing red or green, you could vote to control the action of games shown on the big screen. They started with the Guinness-certified world’s largest etch-a-sketch, though the results were less than stellar:

Things heated up with pong though. It was left side of the theatre versus right, and being right in the middle I took up the role of journalist. See an entire point played by the room here.

Wednesday morning I gave the talk. Things seemed to go off without a hitch, though my phone went off in my pocket about 5 minutes in with an alarm reminding me not to miss my talk, which threw me for a loop for about 30 seconds. Because this is quite possibly the only time I’ll give a talk like this, I got one picture before the session of my view (though really I couldn’t see anything because of the lights they had on me):

And finally a shot me in the act of “talking” or whatever the right verb is. Probably the biggest version of my head that will ever exist.

So with the talk over, I had several good questions, some meeting with people after the sessionand it seemed like the general consensus was that everything went fine. I’m told that the videos elicited both “oohs” and “ahs.” I made my way from the hall to decompress by watching about 3 hours of animation theatre, which ended with our clip. It was fun to see it on the big screen in full 1080p glory.

Wednesday night most everyone was done with talks so we went out to celebrate. Luckily for us we ended up at the EA party which not only had tons of free food and bowling, but an open bar. This was a nice change from the typical $7 beers you encounter in conference land. So we all drank a bit too much and I shamed my self (and my great mentor, Marc) by bowling one of the worst games of my life. Thursday was sleeping in and flying home, and now here I am. Three SIGGRAPHs under my belt–how many more await me?

siggraph: the arrival

Well SIGGRAPH remains much as I had remembered it, in each of its previous incarnations, scattered across the US but essentially unchanged wherever it wanders. A huge conference center, brimming with people, all smiling and excited about this new-fangled computer graphics stuff. I didn’t get too much accomplished today–mostly picking up my badge sitting around, and practicing my 50 second spiel for “fast forward,” a session where all 90 papers are presented one a minute in a frenetic quest to… well I’m not actually why they do it. Although I couldn’t see from the stage because of the blinding lights they shined on me I’m told that my schtick (okay I’m out of yiddish now) went over quite well. The idea was, since we have the word “dynamic” in our paper’s title to sell it microsoft style with buzzwords and all. I even whipped up a pretend “box-shot” as they call it in the business:

fake product box shot

You’re all in stitches right? I kill me. Fast forward was held in the mighty “Hall C,” capacity >3000. This is significant because it’s also the hall where I’m giving my talk on Wednesday:

siggraph hall image

It’s my fervet hope that the hall will be mostly empty for the actual talk. The night was rounded out at a pub, of which there are many, many, many of in downtown boston. They had Hoegaarden on tap, so I was satisfied. I’m now back at the hotel, early to bed on account of the four hours of sleep I got last night. Hopefully tonight will prove more bountiful.

an explanation for leaving graphics

Apropos my bitching about academic talks is one guy’s explanation for leaving the field of graphics altogether. It would be nice to be able to explain away his complaints as the bitterness of failure, but that wouldn’t be fair–he isn’t a failure and he’s incredibly brave to post his thoughts on the field where speaking your mind on these topics is tantamount to professional suicide. I say bravo.

academic talks: don’t forget to be kind of a dick.

Most of you know that I’ve already generated enough cynicism about the high echelons of academia to last me tidily the three more years I am scheduled to remain ensconced in this ivory tower. But I’m not going to let that keep me from sharing a little bit more–this time it’s about “talks.”

I was lucky (in many ways) to end up this year with a paper in this year’s SIGGRAPH. The reward for such an achievement, besides a little ribbon that hangs from your name tag at the conference, is the chance to give a 20-minute talk presenting your paper to whomever decides to show up, possibly several hundred people. Now, everyone knows how I like to talk, and I do have a geniune affection for the act of teaching, so by all signs the talk promised to be lots of fun. I was very pumped up over the chance to share the work we did, excited about all the cute pictures I would make to explain it all. And indeed, creating the talk has been a blast. What I’m not so crazy about is the way I’ve had to change it to meet the “standards” of the academic community.

The fact of the matter is, maybe 1-5 people sitting at your talk will have already read your paper, and the majority of those people are your coauthors. The rest of the people are there because they do research in a similar field, or just want to see some pretty pictures. My thought was, “if any of these people actually want to use my stuff, they’ll go read the paper. So, let’s go heavy on the pretty pictures, and light on the ugly math.” This is, after all, what I love more than anything about graphics as opposed to other fields. The results aren’t just graphs of results or performance metrics or proofs. They’re basically shiny, pretty pictures. And pictures are something people can appreciate even if they don’t understand where they came from. So, my plan of attack was to just skip the math all together.

Wrong! You see, in academia, if you don’t confuse your audience unnecessarily, it means that you’re too stupid to manage it. The most important goal of your talk isn’t to advertise your method; it’s to advertise yourself. When some academics watch a presentation, and they follow it easily, and the don’t pull any brain muscles in the process, rather than coming to the conclusion that the presentation was a success, they think one of the following:

There was no math! That idea must be trivial. Not even a single triple integral or partial differential equation!
That presenter must be pretty dumb to not have managed to confuse me even once in his whole presentation! I mean, I’m not even one of the five people in the world working in his area. I should have been completely baffled.
I’m one of the five people in the world working in his area. I can’t believe he didn’t derive each equation in his paper! It would only have taken about 15 of the 20 minutes, and I would have understood it perfectly! He’s coddling the audience.

And universally, all of these people would walk away with the impression of the speaker that:

If he were serious about making it in this world, he should have abused his audience more. Why couldn’t he be a bit more of a dick about his intelligence?

Of course, only a handful of people in the audience come to these kind of conclusions (I hope). I like to believe that the rest of the audience might be like me and appreciate the real goals of the talk. In fact, there are many brave presenters who do just exactly what I aspire to do, and despite all the praise I have for them, bad things probably get said behind their backs. I’ve heard it done. For now though, I’m an apprentice. The masters of the academy are doing their work, imparting these nuggets of wisdom. I just thought I’d share this one with you.