Gramping at Academy of Sciences Museum San Francisco

Friday morning was at the museum, a big glitzy, pricey place to visit with lots of things to keep the attention of anyone from 6 months to nearly dead.

Many of the exhibits are truly spectacular, like this replicated banyan swamp with big rays floating by.

Animals have been a big attraction since I was a little kid.  I spent a lot of time studying the dioramas at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History as a kid.  And as good as these dioramas were, I've since seen Zebras in the national parks in East Africa and these just aren't the same.  But there were lots of kids on school trips getting the magic.



A pair of oryx.

And we didn't even see this leopard until a museum volunteer waved his hand over a sensor sending a load roar down to us.

So, yeah, these animals were all stuffed.  (Though there were live penguins.)  But the fish were real.

This is looking down into a living coral reef.


I had to wonder how much harder it is for humans to recreate and maintain the conditions for reefs and keep them going, than for nature.

This one was in a large tank full of many kinds of fish and I didn't get its business card.




These anemone like critters were in the tank too.

This jelly fish was about a foot in diameter.

And I thought this was a good sign of the times as machines replace humans.  They used to publish these futuristic articles with titles like "What will people do with all their leisure time?"  They thought that when we went down to 30 hour weeks because of automation, that people would make the same money with fewer hours.  They forgot that in a capitalistic system, the owners take the savings as profits,  layoff workers they don't need, and keep the others at 40 and 50 hour jobs with no retirement and fewer and fewer benefits.