Geodog

Berkeley serves up an embarrassment of riches

While I have my gripes about Berkeley, there are times when living in Berkeley is so pleasant, I could write an ode to it. Luckily, someone with a lot more fame and writing skill, although perhaps equally verbose, has already written and published his Ode to Berkeley, so my readers are spared. Still, this week has been one of those perfect weeks that deserves memorializing, if only so I'll reread it this winter after the fourth month of gloomy soggy rain.

School started last week in Berkeley, saddening children, but secretly gladdening as well as saddening the parents. We miss the kids, but now, after dropping them off at school and before heading off to work, people congregate in front of Peets and The Cheese Board for a little chatting and a few bites of the latest delicacy and occasionally a bit of celebrity spotting, Berkeley style. I gather that in places like LA, people get exited about seeing movie stars and such at high priced eateries. At the Cheeseboard or Peets, you are more likely to recognize people like Andreas Kluth, down the hill for his morning cup of coffee, or Joan Blades, stopping in to get a scone while walking her dog, as well as the usual contingent of Berkeley professors, activists, gadflies and madmen and madwomen. It is a very pleasant scene, accompanied by some of the best coffee and baked goods on the planet.

Everybody started to re-establish their routines last week, only to be interrupted by the three day weekend. For once the fog relented and the weather has been gorgeous and hot. Berkeley emptied out, and, as far as I can tell, everyone headed for the beach. We went out to our usual boogie boarding spot where we can usually be found hiding from the wind and the fog in the dunes, wearing wet suits, sipping hot chocolate, and trying to recover from attempting to surf and survive in 54 degree water that is sometimes warmer than the air. Not this weekend. Usually there are 5 or 10 other cars in the parking lot, most of them belonging to birders -- this time the parking lot and the road leading up to it was full, and the beach was lined with people.

U.C Berkeley has also returned from summer vacation, and I spent several hours yesterday indoors recovering from my sunburn and checking out the public offerings for this semester. Some of them are well advertised, like Richard Clark's talk tonight. Some aren't. The most surprising nugget I've found so far is a talk entitled "Does Jesus do SMS?: Religion, Technology and Ubiquitous Computing" by a researcher from Intel's Berkeley lab. I definitely will want to check that one out.

On a more serious note, I found a notice (buried so deep inside Berkeley's School of Public Health website that I can't find it again) that the new Center for Infectious Disease Preparedness associated with the School of Public Health is offering a number of classes on epidemiology to public health professionals.

As my long time readers know, learning is my favorite activity. Given my long-standing interest in public health, and my previous foray into epidemiology, I wondered if I could gain entrance into the beginning course, Essentials of Public Health Epidemiology. It would be nice to have a formal grounding in the subject that I spent so much of 2003 immersed in. I went to the class, and it turns out there is room for the serious layperson. I am now formally studying epidemiology under a Cal professor who is the former head of Community Health Epidemiology and Disease Control at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, and a full-fledged open source geek as well.

What a delight! "Only in Berkeley" is often said dismissively, or ruefully, and sometimes for good reason, but it is also true that only in a place like Berkeley does the average citizen have access to so many intellectual resources. What an embarrassment of riches.

Cross posted to the Berkeley Blog Posted by Geodog at September 7, 2004 09:24 PM | TrackBack