Thursday, November 02, 2006

Exploratorium

Well Wednesday was an interesting day for sessions, I finally got my hands on the Datapower appliance, and the thing is certainly powerful. Unfortunately it may not be the device for the job I had in mind, but I think I may yet make use of it.

I don't have any bizarre dinner images today because we went to the Exploratorium for finger food, and while it was pretty good, it wasn't plentiful, nor photogenic. Actually in general I had some serious camera failure, most of my images came out blurry (blurrier then even I am willing to post :) ) So here is one or two from the Exploratorium that are barely presentable.


The first one is a large scale version of the old women/young girl shadow and shape illusion, of course in this case it is pillar/man but still neat.


This was a cool model of everyones favorite nucleic acid.


The last I snapped because the statement seemed rather flippant, "If something isn't made of cells, it's not alive." Well first of bacteria, and other single cell organisms are not made of cells, they are made of a cell. That may be seen as semantic, but what about virus's? I realize they are often a hotly discussed in the alive/not-alive scientist wars, but to dismiss the whole issue with a sub-title just made me go grrrrrr.


Otherwise the place was a lot like our science center, but built in an old hanger. Lots of cool hands on explorations of optics, acoustics and waves, electricity, biology (including about a half a dozen microscopes with live cell cultures like beating embryonic(not human) heart cells,) perception and all the other cool physics like demonstrations.

I got back to my room fairly early (for this week) and crashed with my book. Any ways here are the images, and maybe I will dig up some more interesting stuff today. Tomorrow I will go to Alcatraz for real!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

clearly images are broken ):