To this day I have not been brave enough to attempt the Dome. I think some fears actually get stronger with age. Exhibit A: my snake phobia. However, the Exploratorium is still one of the best things about San Francisco, and it's up there with the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry and the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in my personal pantheon of kick-ass science museums. I learned how to fold an origami crane at the Exploratorium in the middle of my senior year of high school, a skill which I took back and taught to my classmates. For some reason this started a small craze for crane-folding among my friends (I suspect it was really just senioritis, Honor-Student-Style) to the point where our teachers forbade us from folding any more cranes in class. I still have a huge box of origami cranes sitting in storage somewhere.

But I digress. Saturday morning I met Mom and Dad at the Exploratorium to see Mathematica: A World of Numbers...and Beyond, Ray and Charles Eames's classic interactive exhibit. First created in 1961, the exhibit showcases the couple's incomparable design asthetic at the same time that it teaches its viewers about math.

In doing an exhibition, as in Mathematica, one deliberately tries to let the fun out of the bag. The catch is that it can't be any old fun but it must be a very special brand...The fun must follow all of the rules of the concept involved. &}151;Charles Eames

The show lived at the California Science Center (formerly the California Museum of Science and Industry) for 36 years and was recently restored so that it could travel. It covers topics that range from multiplication to minimal surfaces, from probability theory to projection geometry. I understood parts of it and enjoyed playing with the interactive bits, and I was especially tickled to find diagrams of Bucky Fuller's dymaxion structures. My Mom was happy that the exhibition included some of the Eames's furniture. My Dad was simply in mathematics heaven, just as I suspected he would be. When I complained to him that Ada Byron wasn't on the History Wall, he pointed out that at the time the exhibit was made computers were just starting to be used, so the importance of her work hadn't been realized yet. Good point, but there were still a lot of white men on that wall. Kneejerk reactions aside, I thought the exhibit was a delicious blend of art and science, and its venue was very true to its spirit.

Later that evening I made use of my PFA membership to snag tickets to see Distance, the new film by the director of After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda. It was showing at PFA as part of the 45th San Francisco International Film Festival and was a perfect example of why I love Japanese film. It is present-day in the alternate reality of the movie, and three years ago a religious cult dumped an agent into Japan's reservoirs that killed hundreds and poisoned thousands more. On the anniversary of the attack, a small group of the perpetrators's relatives make a pilgrimage to pray and try to make sense of the actions of their loved ones. Timely to the Japanese because of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks, and now timely to Americans as well, the film tells its stories simply and powerfully. Much of the dialogue was ad libbed, and the result is emotional honesty and a respect for the complexity of the subject matter. Kore-eda was at the screening and seemed almost apologetic that Distance wasn't a typical Hollywood film. I predict Hollywood is going to make their own version of this type of story within the next few years, and I also predict that it's going to suck.

The Exploratorium
Distance
San Francisco Film Society