In the spirit of Iron Chef, the eliminator on American Gladiators, ultimate showdown, and the winter Olympics ice skating competition, Marcus and I decided to finally settle question of which one of us owns the anti-gravity mirror exhibit now and forever. With all due respect to the dude with the stache and the mini-fro in the “Palace of Delights” documentary (considered to be the Dr. J of mirror battles), a new generation of performers has entered the Exploratorium explainer program. So continuing the analogy and channeling the spirit of Micheal Jordan vs. Dominique Wilkins, we present the video of this epic battle.
The only question is after the dust has settled, who takes home the coveted trophy and bragging rights for eternity? Some questions have answers and others simply exist to be debated by philosophers throughout the annals of time.
So Lianna and Anne R. gave me the idea this morning that we should study the movement (or lack thereof) of the stools in the museum. After checking with Sylvia, Anne, and Eric R. I present you with the Super Stool Stalking Scheme!
Over the next couple of days, I’ll be putting colored sticker-dots on as many stools as possible. The dots are going to be on the legs of the stools, so you can see the dots as you walk by them. They’re covered with a piece of scotch tape so hopefully they won’t fall off easily and the tentative color-key is below.
I have three goals for this project: 1.) The novelty of knowing where the stools go when we’re not around. 2.) Seeing how long it take before people start asking questions about the dots on the stools. 3.) Finding out how long until the dots stay before they get taken off.
I’m starting stalking the stools from where they are now and seeing where they go from here. I’m not planning on taking the dots off anytime soon, so let’s see where the stools go over the next few months.
Because I love to hydrate, and because San Francisco has awesome water quality, I take many daily trips to the tap. Just lately I’ve noticed that our cold water has been coming out of the tap quite cloudy in appearance. The cloudiness looked to me like it was just coming from the tiny bubbles that would rise to the surface and dissipate after a few minutes, leaving “normal”-looking clear water. I assumed these air bubbles were caused by a change in pressure in the pipes, but wondered what had caused the change. Luckily, we live in San Francisco and our city has the amazing website sfwater.org which I highly recommend perusing for all of your water inquiries.
According to sfwater.org,
“A scheduled shutdown of the pipes that deliver water to the Bay Area from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in Yosemite National Park has begun. The shutdown will allow work to be undertaken on the $4.6 billion, 12-year Water System Improvement Program, which aims to upgrade and maintain the water delivery and storage system and protect it from earthquakes.
The cloudiness is due to tiny air bubbles in the water, produced by an increased rate of flow at the SFPUC’s Sunol Valley Water Treatment Plant in the East Bay while we perform winter maintenance on the Hetch Hetchy Water System and provide water exclusively from our local reservoirs.”
So we’re currently getting water from the much more local Sunol Valley, and it flows to us faster, causing bubbles that make our water cloudy. Water mystery solved! And if all goes according to schedule, we’ll be back to Hetch Hetchy water around the end of February!
So we spent some time tonight exploring the science of cocktails. I got to work with Don from the Teacher Institute and learned a lot about density and alcohols from him. I also got to practice my pousse-cafe making skills. (Pousse-cafe turns out to be French for “pushes coffee”… basically it’s equivalent to our term “chaser”) Above is a picture of some Pousse-cafes, which have dense, sugary grenadine as the bottom layer, followed by creme de menthe, island punch pucker, midori melon, orange curacao, and sloe gin, and topped off with tequila (which is even less dense than water!).
Don’t get too excited though, this density drink of death looks way better than it tastes. But I’m confident that with enough experimentation the Explainers can construct a delicious and eye-appealing recipe.
We’ve been working on videos to give different people (students, teachers, ex-net folk, et cetera) a taste of how Explainers think about and interact with exhibits here at the explo. I started mine over the summer when i was going through a phase of overthinking the necessity of death for life as we know it to exist, so naturally i chose Chick Embryos. Here’s a rough draft of my vid for your viewing entertainment-
There’s actually quite a lot written about these chicks already on the blog, but i couldn’t post this video as a reply, so I started a new posting. If you’re interested in reading further, i recommend checking out what Luigi and others had to say about these doomed chickies in the old post Save the chickens!
The other day Paul showed us a pixelated artwork of Jacques Cousteau made out of different sized seashells. After learning about the process, I remembered a piece of art that we saw a few months ago at the graffiti competition in Oakland. It was a representation of Barack Obama made up of hundreds of folded paper cranes. For those of you who missed it, here are some photos I found on twitter. Let’s just say making a version of this of my face is my new new years resolution.
I was an explainer once, but now I spend my time at the Exploratorium following them around with a video camera, begging them for footage and ideas, and writing people letters about all the amazing things they do. I feel like I’m starting an explainer fan club. Why all the attention?
Well, while it’s easy to think that the Exploratorium is the center of the universe, it turns out there are tons of little Exploratoriums all over the country, and even the world. Some of them aren’t even very little. Some of them are much bigger than the Exploratorium! Tons of our exhibits have dozens of doppelgangers, out there bringing joy to children the world over.
However, the Exploratorium explainers have a couple real advantages over the floor staff of most of these museums. First of all, they have Anne and Sylvia. No, seriously, Exploratorium explainers spend up to 25% of their time training at the exhibits, learning new concepts, and bonding with each other. Very few companies anywhere invest that much time in making their staff comfortable and expert at what they do. Few companies also give their staff the kind of freedom to mess about that Exploratorium explainers enjoy. The other advantage our Explainers have is that they get to spend years with our exhibits. I can think of tons of things I didn’t learn about my favorite exhibits until the second year I was explaining.
Now think of those explainers out there at our partner museums. They get a new exhibit set and it’s exciting and new and they might not be entirely sure about how to understand the phenomena. They might even be scared about the possibility of breaking an exhibit (most of our traveling sets are much slicker than our originals here in SF). Also, they are our friends and we want to support them, so I’ve been sending them Explainer boxes with props inside, activity binders and sweet encouraging notes. This month I also want to start sending them videos of Explainers showing off exhibit quirks. Once we have a small quirk library I will start pestering them for their own videos, and the Exploratorium explainers can all meet their long lost explainer cousins. Hurray!
This is a long way of saying thanks for all the inspiration and good work, and “please, please, can I have your autograph.”
And, lastly, here for your entertainment pleasure are the prototype quirky videos that the upper ups liked so much they approved 12 more of.
Rick posted this aptly named video of the Explo floor. I see a couple of familiar vested folks lurking around the scenes. Watch for your 20 secs of youtube fame. Nice job Rick!
During our nature walk on Thursday I was listening to Ryan J. and Alicia discuss grouping names. Now, I refused to believe that there are such terms as “a unkindess of ravens” or “an ugly of walruses”. But thanks to Google I discovered that not only are those the proper terms, but that they are properly called “venereal terms”. Yes, venereal terms. Those are the collective nouns, words used in the English language to describe groups of things.
Some terms are common place: a round of drinks, a pack of wolves, a school of fish, a heard of cattle. Some more obscure: a ohmn of electricians, a gang of elk, a troop of baboons. And some just horrible puns: a heard of audiologists, a audit of accountants, an archive of programmers, a debauchery of bachelors.
Some of my favorite venereal terms: a sneak of weasels, a rascal of boys, a giggle of girls, a congress of baboons, a flight of bees, an atlas of maps, a column of accountants, a glacier of freezers, a groan of puns, a stripe of zebras.
So, now the question is: what do you call a group of Explainers? An empery of Explainers? An enigma of Explainers? A museum of Explainers?
An armada of Explainers?
