Entries this day: boston_natural_science

boston natural science

7:55pm Saturday 27 February 1999

I'm in Boston at Marje's house, where she and Jen are playing a "sexy flute duet" for me. Jen and I went to the museum of natural science today and looked at lots of cool stuff including a big billiard ball track including a random splitter (the ball would fall onto a spinning plate and be randomly sent in one of four directions.

There was a rad display on the wall, like a huge collage but it was all white unless viewed through polarized filters. So they had a slowly spinning filter some 50 feet away that made the collage seem to slowly oscillate through colors and stuff, making some portions visible, some blacked-out, some whited-out.. it was crazy cool and I wish I had taken some pics! (Maybe I'll surf and find some.. okay, here is a link to what they call the Polage (polarized collage). This was linked without permission from the Boston Museum of Science.)
That image gives a hint of what it is like. To the bottom right of the picture in the foreground are the slowly spinning filters I described above.

We saw a SETI movie in the planetarium, which was fun and mildly educational for me. I learned the location of the constellation Taurus, and something else I forgot.

We saw the movie "Thrill Ride" in their huge Omnimax 1/4 sphere huge domed screen.. It featured some roller coasters and general thrill ride technology. Embarassingly enough (considering I had laughed at the idea of queasiness), I felt a bit nauseous after the show, but I think that feeling was enhanced by me having only eaten a single blueberry muffin and orange juice that day some hours earlier.

Saw a super duper way way cool electricity show, featuring 4 tesla coils, and two HUGE enormous van de graff generators - the largest in the world (?) that produce 2.5 million volts together. I took several pics of that show; we'll see how they come out.

Road the "T" (their mass transit train) to and from the museum and ate pizza at some pizza place. I ordered it and had a vague thought of, "hmmm $9 is kinda expensive for a personal pizza" but it turns out it was a huge full sized pizza and I only ate 1 slice and carried the rest back in a big full sized pizza box... So I had a big pizza on the train and I felt a bit conspicuous. I appear to have survived the ordeal. ;-) permalink