Having a read of this recent article from The Economists website will energize recent Bay Area transplants as well as reinvigorate long time Bay Area residents. It follows the writer over the course of a week as he visits area institutions and events pushing the boundaries of science.

Techs and the city

Jul 31st 2009
From Economist.com

Lab by lab in and around San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO conjures up images of hippies and of free love, the psychedelic 60s and leftist politics. A member of Jefferson Airplane, a rock band, described it as “49 square miles surrounded by reality”. It has always had that air. In a letter written in 1889, Rudyard Kipling wrote of “a mad city, inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people.”

But as someone who writes about science (and in the interests of full disclosure, practices it for a living), I see a different side of San Francisco and the broader Bay Area around it. I don’t see a region full of people looking to escape reality; I see scientists and engineers at universities, companies, and national labs probing and investigating that reality on a daily basis. Instead of mind-altering drugs, I see the world-altering technology that flows out of Silicon Valley.

Read more at http://www.economist.com