The Best Places In San Diego!

Walk Score has published a walkability index for every community in the country. As a whole, San Diego ranks 16th in the country for walkability. The most walkable communities in San Diego are all downtown.

Not only does Walk Score rank each neighborhood, they also provide a nice color map of the San Diego region, with the most walkable areas colored in green.

See how your neighborhood ranks for walkability. If you want to help improve the walkability of your neighborhood, learn how you can help at WalkSanDiego.com. Walk San Diego is a grassroots organization that has become very active in building more walkable neighborhoods in San Diego.

The latest ‘Best of San Diego’ has been published in the August issue of San Diego Magazine. The annual ‘Best of San Diego’ issue always open my eyes to new places worth checking out.

For instance, did you know you can ride a mechanical bull in North Park? How about working out at a gym that overlooks Petco Park? For the astronomers, did you hear about the first annual starfest coming to Julian?

Learn more about where to go and what to do in the August Issue of San Diego Magazine. You can also take a look online.

Over the past twelve Wednesdays, I have highlighted the various science institutes based in Torrey Pines. This large collection of research institutions is poised to make San Diego a leader in the 21st century. San Diego is winning “the race to generate high-paying jobs and underwrite local prosperity” by luring, “what many believe is the economic growth industry of the 21st century – biotechnology“.

These quotes are from the Milken Institute, which gives a perfect 100 score to San Diego in its Biotech Index, ranking San Diego as #1 in the country. The Milken Institute cites San Diego’s Biotech Cluster for generating nearly 60,000 jobs and $6 billion in income for the local economy. They call San Diego a model of what it takes to create and nurture a Biotech Cluster.

It was the foresight of local leaders and the overwhelming support by San Diego voters in the 1960s, who approved the granting of land to The Salk Institute and others that has put America’s Finest City in a position to be one of the leading cities in the 21st century.

If you want to learn more about the Milken Study called, America’s Biotech and Life Science Clusters: San Diego’s Position and Economic Contributions, you can order it online.

This brings an end to my weekly series about the biotech cluster that has come to life in San Diego. I will use future Wednesday posts to write about other institutes and industries that are also positioning San Diego to be an economic leader in our new millennium.

To finish off this biotech series, here are just a few of the other biotech related companies I thought you might be interested in knowing they call San Diego home.

Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceutical Research and Development is the only Johnson & Johnson Research Hub west of Philadelphia. Their Torrey Pines facility is recognized for its leading edge photovoltaic and co-generation systems, which cover most of their power needs.

Pfizer Research and Development consists of an eight building campus with over 1 million square feet of space. Its state of the art facilities also provides an incubator program supporting new San Diego start-up companies.

J. Craig Venter Institute is technically not a San Diego based company but it does have a La Jolla satellite facility. I thought it was worth noting the double degree alumnus of UCSD and namesake of the institute since he was the first human to have his full genome sequenced. He led the charge to map the human genome and was recognized for his efforts in 2000 by then President, Bill Clinton. More recently, he has been recognized by Time Magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

UCSD Science Research Park is the latest effort by UCSD to help San Diego capitalize on the wealth of biotech knowledge in San Diego and encourage the entrepreneurially minded to create the next big biotech company.

AOL has just released its City’s Best List for San Diego Restaurants. Find the top 10 San Diego restaurants in 22 categories ranging from Barbecue to Vegetarian.

Are you looking for something new in your dining routine? Freshen things up by taking a look at what AOL voters have ranked as the Best San Diego Restaurants. Do you want to reward yourself with a nice after-dinner dessert? How about finding a cheap place to eat? The AOL City’s Best List has the answers.

Check to see if your favorite San Diego restaurants made the list. A few of my favorites made #1, including Bronx Pizza, In-N-Out, Rubio’s, and Extraordinary Desserts. I had a few #2s as well, including Hash House A-Go Go and Studio Diner. How about your favorite places? Did they make the list? If not, share them below and put them on the voter’s radar screens.

Bon Appetit!

AOL City’s Best List for San Diego Restaurants.

Imagine sending your kids to have fun with the animals they love while giving yourself a well deserved break from parenting. If that sounds too good to be true, consider that it will cost you less than $500. It gets even better. There is no airfare required if you live in San Diego.

One of the luxuries of living in San Diego is having the San Diego Wild Animal Park as one of our neighbors. The Wild Animal Park has 3,500 animals spread over 1,800 acres. There’s no need to pay a high plane fare and spend the time traveling to Africa. The sister of the San Diego Zoo has brought them all here to us and cares for them in a safari-like setting.

Now that August is nearly upon us and your kids may be getting a little bored of summer vacation, don’t worry. There is still time to sign them up for a summer camp program that will make them brag to all their friends in the new school year about the cool places you sent them on their summer vacation.

The Wild Animal Park offers two and three day sleepover camps ranging from $294 to $499. Just drop them off and the Wild Animal Park will take care of the kids while educating and entertaining them with the animals. Just think of the late summer vacation you will get to enjoy too while the kids are off having fun.

If you can’t imagine parting with your kids at night, the Wild Animal Park also offers day camps. So, send them on an adventure they will be talking about for months!

Learn more about the Wild Animal Park’s summer camp programs.

When was the last time you went outside to look up at the night sky? If you haven’t looked up lately, is it because the last time you looked, there was not much to see?

Chances are you only saw a few of the major constellations, a planet or two, and the moon. That’s if you are lucky. Do you remember looking up in the night sky as a kid and seeing a lot more stars than you do today?

If you were a kid in 1970, there were only 200 million people in the U.S. and a lot less light shining up into the night sky. Today, there are 300 million people, a lot more night owls with their lights on, and Las Vegas Casinos. The light pollution is blocking out many of the distant stars we enjoyed in our younger years.

Fortunately, for those of us in San Diego, we can make a short drive over the mountains and into our desert to bring back the memories of yesteryear and share them with our kids.

If you think it is no big deal to be living in San Diego because someone in any other big city can just take the same short drive out to a rural area and see a panoply of stars, think again. Check out this Map of the Artificial Night Sky Brightness for the United States. This map was compiled from military satellite images and shows the striking brightness covering the night sky of nearly every square inch of the eastern United States. (It also makes you realize how desolately populated the western part of the United States is compared to the eastern part of the United States. Despite the large migration of population towards the West, I just looked at some U.S. Census data and found less than 1/3 of the population lives in the western half of the U.S., which includes the two most populous states, California and Texas.)

Friday’s Wall Street Journal covered this issue about the bright night sky from our own Palomar Mountain and Borrego Springs in their article, “It’s All About the Lighting“.

Despite the light intrusions from the Southern California metropolis and the Las Vegas casinos, our desert remains one of the best areas for enjoying the night sky. To keep it this way, the residents of Borrego Springs are going out of their way to preserve the night darkness by instituting night sky friendly policies. They hope to become only the second community in the country to earn recognition as a Dark Sky Community from the International Dark Sky Association.

Let’s send out our best wishes to the residents of Borrego Springs in their attempt to earn this special recognition. For those of us in the urban areas of San Diego, let’s also do our part by limiting the amount of light we have pointing towards the night sky so that we can help reduce the amount of light pollution that reaches out to the desert areas of our county. This is the one case where we can all contribute to proudly reduce the glow of San Diego.

If you want to keep up with what can be seen in the night sky, be sure to read each Thursday’s edition of the Union Tribune. Their Stargazer column in the Quest section will shine a light on what can be seen in the night skies over San Diego.

UPDATE: Fashion Week has been postponed due to an injury to the organizer. Stay up-to-date at the Fashion Week blog. A Union Tribune article notes some designers may attempt to keep the original Fashion Week dates alive by organizing it themselves.

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The world of fashion will have its eyes set on San Diego from September 28th to October 5th when we host the world’s first bi-national fashion week.

There are a limited number of tickets available to the public providing access to join the fashion elite as they walk the catwalk and entertain by day and party by night.

San Diego Fashion Week Tickets

Fashion Week Calendar

List of Designers set to showcase the latest fashions.

Stay up-to-date on the latest San Diego Fashion News from the Fashion Week Blog.

This is just another sign that San Diego is becoming a cosmopolitan city!

Over each of the past ten weeks, I have written a post about the various research facilities on the Torrey Pines mesa, which as a group have developed into one of the largest concentrations of medical research institutes in the world. I’ve done my best to write posts in chronological order of when each institute was established. Over the years, San Diego’s growing biotech cluster began to receive national and then international attention.

The international significance of this concentration, which allowed fellow researchers to easily collaborate on developing new medical breakthroughs, was solidified when the Swiss based company, Novartis, laid the groundwork to create the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation in Torrey Pines.

Novartis was established in 1996 with the merger of two smaller Swiss based companies in order to become a worldwide powerhouse in the pharmaceutical industry. Within two years, Novartis announced plans to establish the Genomics Institute. The Genomics Institute of the Novartis Foundation has gone on to employ nearly 500 scientists, engineers, and support staff.

Unlike many of the other institutes lining the Torrey Pines mesa, the Genomics Institute not only performs scientific research but also develops new technology to hasten the ability of medical researchers to perform their testing. GNF Systems consists of a team of engineers and computer scientists who develop robots and other equipment for use by the Genomics Institute scientists and by those of other research institutes. They manufacture this equipment at a facility in nearby Sorrento Valley. You can get an idea of the technology being built and manufactured by GNF Systems by watching their online videos of robotic arms in action.

This is a good point to mention that the aggregation of research institutes on Torrey Pines has attracted a large base of suppliers and other service providers. This not only creates new jobs in San Diego but also solidifies our position as a world renowned biotech cluster. In the early days of Torrey Pines, you could say it was the community support and beautiful environment that attracted the early institutes to be established in San Diego. Later on, not only could new institutes rely on community support and a great local environment but collaboration with fellow scientists as well. Now, there is a whole support industry that has developed around this biotech cluster, including the supply of equipment needed to perform testing. You may read about other cities trying to create their own biotech clusters, now that medical research is seen as the ‘next big thing’, but you can be rest assured that it will be difficult for them to ‘take away’ our institutes now that San Diego has over time built a strong biotech infrastructure that is hard to duplicate from scratch.

As for scientific research at the Genomics Institute, I had a difficult time trying to figure out how to put their work into layman’s terms. This may be the same reason I did not find any lectures available for the public or programs for students like many of the other institutes I have written about. It may also due to the funding source with the Genomics Institute being a part of Novartis Corporate Research while the other institutes I’ve written about get much of their funding from the government and private individuals.

You may find interesting their research on pain. Fortunately, there is still a lot more to be done on understanding how pain is created, sensed, and communicated through our bodies. This means there should be new cures on the way for the treatment of pain.

I also found helpful their explanation on why there is still a need to research treatments for some third world diseases, for which I thought we had already found cures that allow us to avoid those diseases in developed countries. Their infectious diseases page notes,

“While there are effective treatments for such neglected diseases, there are significant reasons for continuing to search for new therapies. First of all, microbial resistance has made some of the most effective and inexpensive drug regimes unreliable and dangerous to use on severely ill patients. Second, many existing antimicrobial drugs show toxicity or are too expensive for countries where the per capita income is on the order of hundreds of dollars per year.”

That’s it for this post. Be sure to check out the series on the Biotech Cluster on Torrey Pines mesa if you are new to this blog. Have a good day.

The LA Times brought attention this weekend to Pearson Fuels on El Cajon Boulevard. Pearson Fuels’ claim to fame comes from offering the nations first ethanol pump in 2003 along with a propane pump, two types of natural gas pumps, biodiesel, and six electric car charging bays. This one-of-a-kind alternative gas station is co-owned by Mike Lewis and Pearson Ford. Learn more about Pearson Fuels and Mike Lewis’s efforts to establish more alternative fuel stations across California from this weekend’s LA Times article.

If you own a vehicle that runs on alternative fuel, you can visit Pearson Fuels at 4067 El Cajon Blvd, just east of the I-15. Here are the directions to Pearson Fuels from Google Maps.

Downtown San Diego will be full of excitement this weekend as over 125,000 attendees from around the globe arrive for the 2008 Comic-Con Convention. In this post, I’ll describe the hoopla around Comic-Con for the locals and provide a list of resource links for Comic-Con attendees.






Comic-Con is a Huge Star-Studded Affair

The San Diego Comic-Con began at the U.S. Grant Hotel in 1970. At first, the Comic-Con convention focused on its namesake, comics. Now, it has grown to become the largest pop culture event in the world covering comics, toys, video games, and more. The Comic-Con Exhibitors page also notes this is the largest convention in the United States in terms of attendees. Exhibitors include big name companies such as BBC America, Mattel, Harper-Collins, Hasbro, and NBC.

Comic-Con is a Hollywood favorite. Major movie production companies such as Lions Gate Entertainment, New Line Cinema, Sony Pictures, Warner Bros, Walt Disney, and Lucasfilm will be on hand to build up a groundswell of support for upcoming movie releases and to spot the newest trends in pop culture. Hollywood stars expected to appear for the 2008 Comic-Con include Will Smith, Kiefer Sutherland, and Dan Aykroyd. Several other notables will be speaking at the event, including writers Ray Bradbury and Dean Koontz as well as actress Noel Neill (Lois Lane).

Comic-Con Tickets are Sold-Out

Comic-Con is so popular that all single day and four day passes are sold out. Scalpers have been earning several hundred dollars reselling tickets. However, the Variety Magazine Blog shares a word of caution on buying scalped Comic-Con tickets. It appears the automated ticket readers at Comic-Con will associate tickets with the buyer’s name in their database. Those without the proper I.D. will be turned away. The Comic-Con web site notes name changes can no longer be processed but those with complimentary badges may still register online.

Traffic & Transit

The Convention starts Thursday night and runs through Saturday. Fortunately, the Padres are out of town playing in Pittsburgh. Otherwise, the Gaslamp and East Village could have been a real mess. The Trolley is running their special event Red Line and expanded Green Line Service. Attendees can view the full trolley schedule for Comic-Con at the MTS web site.

Drivers can pull up the directions for Comic-Con from Google Maps. There is parking underneath the convention center. However, if you don’t mind walking a couple hundred yards, there is a large parking garage just southeast of the convention center where Harbor Drive meets 8th Avenue.

Another option would be to exit the I-5 at 10th Street. Drive all the way down 10th Street and park at a garage around the Padres’ Petco Park. Petco Park is across the street from the San Diego Convention Center. This option keeps you from getting caught up in the traffic in front of the Convention Center and in the Gaslamp Quarter.

The Comic-Con web site also provides a map of local parking garages.

Comic-Con 2008 Schedule

The Comic-Con web site offers a convention center map and fully searchable program schedule. There will be free wi-fi courtesy of DreamWorks. If you have any trouble accessing their site because it is too busy, let me know and I’ll try to post the map and schedule.

The Latest Information on Comic-Con

Comic-Con RSS Feed from Comic-Con

Comic-Con Blog from Variety Magazine

Comic-Con Preview from Entertainment Weekly, including 27 Sneak Peaks

Live Video & Blogging from Ugo.com gaming web site

$5,000 Sweepstakes from MashOn.com

Things to do in San Diego

Should you need a break from the Convention, here are a few things going on in San Diego during Comic-Con. All are within a 10 minute walk of the convention center unless otherwise noted.

Gaslamp Dining - Get the full list of restaurant options in the Gaslamp Quarter

Gaslamp Entertainment - Get the full list of entertainment options in the Gaslamp Quarter

Phantom of the Opera at Civic Theatre

Music of Billy Joel at the 2008 Summer Pops on the South Embarcadero

Movies, including ‘The Dark Night’ at Horton Plaza and the Pacific Gaslamp Stadium

The Dark Night on IMAX - 15 minutes drive north of downtown; just off I-15. More info on IMAX.

Dave & Busters - Directions from Google Map - 10 minute drive northeast of downtown; just off I-8 near Qualcomm Stadium.

Have a great time in San Diego!