Weekend Excitement: Hollywood Sign, Beer, Quantum Mechanics

Last weekend was fun. I will start with Sunday, since it has a picture to go with it.

Hiking in Hollywood
On Sunday I went for a hike with some other people from Beach Newman. We went to Griffith Park near the Hollywood Sign. It was fun.

Below are the directions of how we hiked. Material in brackets is stuff I deduced from Google Maps after the fact or heard from people, but did not personally check out. Investigate more before you take anything in brackets seriously.

To get to the parking lot, take the Gower exit off of the 101, go north to make an immediate right on Franklin. Then make a left on Canyon Drive (a small street after a couple of lights) and follow it to the park. It looks like the address of 3200 Canyon Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90068 will get you there. Parking there was tight. It was mostly parallel parking on the street or a dirt lot. I found a spot in the lot because I was willing to dive all the way to a small space at the end. Getting out was harder. If it was not for the help of several people there directing me I would have steered my tire off the curb and had a costly and horrible day.

For the hike itself, start by continuing on the road (Canyon Dr) from where you parked. There will be a place where people skateboard on the right. Keep following the road. [Google Maps shows there are paths that go left or straight as the road bends right. These might be alternate routes.] Keep following that, and it will take up into the hills. After the road has climbed in elevation, there will be another dirt road that veers off to the right. [It looks like that will take you to Griffith Observatory.] If you want the Hollywood Sign, stay left. Since the Hollywood Sign is visible earlier in the hike, it should be easy to make this turn. A little further on, there will be a path that goes left and descends the hill. This will take you toward the horse stables. Instead of that, stay right for the Hollywood.

Eventually, the trail will dump you onto a paved road. We went left which will take you to a good, but not close view of the front of the sign. [If you take a right, the road will bring you to the back of the Hollywood Sign.] The picture below was actually taken on private property we were not supposed to be on (though many people were on it). However, we took a small shortcut and bypassed that sign completely. [It looks like the private road dead ends without a better view.]



There is space next to me so we can photoshop in the other two people who ran away before we took a picture. We went back the same way, which made for a 5.4 mile round trip. On the way back we had pizza at Fresh Brothers. We enjoyed their Hawian Style and Old School (meatballs layered with pepperoni and smothered with spicy Giardiniera) pizzas.

Quantum Mechanics
On Saturday I meet one of my friends from Beach Newman. When I last saw this friend (his name is Chris), I told him one of my goals for Christmas vacation was reading a book on quantum mechanics. He thought, it would be great if he could read it too and we could discuss it. We are reading Volume III of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. They are freely available online and designed to be easily read on any device. Chris is reading them on his phone.

We talked about the first three chapters of it on Saturday. While I took two semesters of quantum mechanics as part of my physics education, I did not understand things as well as I wanted to. I did not have a conceptual basis of what was going on that could help me figure things out. So far I am enjoying the reading a lot.

Some Beer
After that, I went to Ryan's house to celebrate his birthday. Since he is a fan of pale ales and Stone Brewing Company, I brought him some Goose Island Ten Hills Pale Ale and Stone Levitation Ale. I liked the Ten Hills, but the Levitation was not as good as I remember other Stone products being.



In case you cannot tell, we are playing Mario Kart on the Nintendo 64. Ryan got it for Christmas. I have never liked playing games on it because everyone is significantly better than me. I never had a gaming console growing up (I never wanted one), which might explain some things about me.