Crosswords and More Hybrid Fruit

by Ann Bartkowski

Lately, in the Explainer Lounge, it seems there is at least one crossword puzzle in progress at any given time. Yesterday when I got home from work, I tried to complete one of the puzzles we had started. When I got stuck on a 4-letter word for ‘wrinkly fruit’, I resorted to Google and discovered this website:

Rex Parker Does the NYTimes Crossword Puzzle might be the perfect solution for those of us who don’t want to be kept up at night pondering a 6-letter solution for ‘milk snakes’, yet don’t want to give our credit card numbers to 1-900-289-CLUE. Rex Parker, the self-proclaimed “166th Greatest Crossword Puzzle Solver In The Universe”, not only posts the solutions to the puzzles daily, but also comments on his crossword-completing process and answers he finds interesting.

Thanks to his blog, I now know UGLI is a Jamaican tangelo brand. And tangelos are orange/grapefruit/tangerine hybrids. Maybe I’ll incorporate Ugli into my next lunch club recipe. I bet wrinkly fruit would be good with lentils…

If you like this blog post, please help me out by taking 5 seconds to vote for me! I’m trying to win a contest to win a trip to tanzania and volunteer as a teacher!  Click here to vote! It just takes 2 clicks!

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Photo of the Day – 1/29/08

by ryan

Testing out a new artistic way to use the turntable to make spirograph style creations.

Photo credit – courtesy of Chris’ I-Phone.

Where’s Our Invitation?

by ryan

There must be some sort of terrible mistake. I was checking out the 2008 Bloggies Award site and there was no nomination for the Exploratorium Explainers blog. I was thinking that we would win best sound editing, most likely to succeed, and most attractive group of bloggers at the very least. Oh well. I guess our mix of science education and frivolity is a little too edgy for the conservative blog award community.

All bitterness aside…this is a cool link to check out other well respected blogs and even vote if that’s the kind of thing that you might be into.

The Eight Annual Weblog Awards (2008 Bloggies)

Ice Ice Baby

by Ann Bartkowski

This winter (or austral summer- depending on where you are), I’ve spent some of our break and a few weekends working in the webcast studio, where Ice Stories: Dispatches from Polar Scientists is happening.  The Exploratorium is currently webcasting with scientists who are in Antarctica, working on all of this amazingly cool research and having what seems to be a pretty good time down there.  Here’s some other info I picked up from being in the studio:

Happy International Polar Year!  From 2007-2009 the 4^th International Polar Year (IPY) is taking place.  IPY is basically a coordinated effort among all of the countries with the aim of collaborating on scientific research to learn as much as possible about our world and our place in the infinities.  The 1^st IPY took place in 1882. Seventeen out of the 24 Americans who participated in the Arctic expedition of the first IPY starved to death.   In order to survive, the rest of the expedition  had to pull a Donner Party…  This IPY is going much better for us.  There’s now enough funding to hire chefs to cook for the scientists so they can focus on their research. 

My favorite video to play on the television screens in the studio called Penguin Science.  Visitors can’t seem to get enough of watching wobbly birds in their tuxedos slip and slide across glaciers. It’s also amusing to watch the adults who – in an effort to get their small children to walk like penguins- waddle around the studio themselves, flapping their arms like flippers. 

One interesting thing I had never realized about penguins is that they have no land predators, which means humans can walk up to them without scaring them away.  So the commercial Coke runs at Christmastime…you know, the one in which a polar bear cub tumbles into the middle of partying penguins and the penguins are momentarily terrified of the bear but then the tension is broken when the baby penguin offers the polar bear a coke and then everyone is happy…unfortunately, doesn’t happen in real life.  Because coke is disgusting and polar bears and penguins wouldn’t want to drink it. And also because polar bears and penguins live at different poles.   

As the coldest, driest, highest continent, the climate of Antarctica is also pretty interesting.  It’s currently –23 °F  at the Amundsen-Scott  Research Station at the South Pole. If you factor in windchill,  it’s –47°F. Brr. And although 70% of the earth’s fresh water is frozen in the mile-thick Anarctic Ice Sheet,  Antarctica is a desert.  And it’s a dessert too if you are San Francisco Chef Elizabeth Faulkner:  http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2007/12/san-francisco-c.html#more

There are also volcanoes on Antarctica.  Mt. Erebus, near the US’s Mc Murdo research station has a permanent molten lava lake in its crater. But this formidable climate doesn’t prevent researchers from taking part in the annual Race Around the World.  It’s tradition for anyone stuck at the South Pole for Christmas to participate in the laid back race that covers a couple miles and crosses all of the time zones.  Or if you want a real challenge (and you have a spare $15,000) you can also be flown to Antarctica via private jet from Chile and be registered to run in the 100K Antarctic Ultra Race.

The combination of cold temperature, low water vapor, thin atmosphere, and 6 months of darkness makes Antarctica the perfect place to build a telescope which can be used to search for the origins of the universe. There’s an enormous telescope (10 meters in diameter) at the South Pole looking for galaxy clusters.  There’s also a telescope called Ice Cube designed to detect neutrinos given off by supernova explosions and gamma ray bursts.  There are trillions of neutrinos streaming through your body every second, but in order to detect them, you need some sort of transparent medium, such as ice.  The team working on Ice Cube has tunneled down 2.4 km (that’s equivalent to over 9 Transamerica Pyramids stacked on top of each other) below the South Pole and placed sensors in the ice that detect light emitted when the neutrino crashes into the ice.  

Ice Cube- the telescope, not the gangsta rapper- should help us learn more about Dark Energy and Dark Matter…is anything cooler than that?  And does anyone want to take a trip to Antarctica with me?

SRD(MD)s

by ryan

One of the best perks about being an explainer is that you get to play with stuff before the exhibits go on the floor. For example today we messed around with the centerpiece of the geometry playground exhibition that’s coming out this weekend – some stellated rhombic dodecahedrons. And while that might not sound so exciting, imagine these 15 lb. hard pointy geometric shapes that look like brightly colored land mines and can fly wildly in any direction. They can be stacked, climbed on, used as chairs but hopefully not as dodge balls.

I personally think its pretty cool that even though we don’t know exactly what will happen with these Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedrons of Mass Destruction (SRDMD)s the developers trust the visitors to have a good experience. We know for sure that they will make an impact on the minds of children who get struck with the brute force of geometry.

Working together like some geometry loving insects.

A version of the exhibit for the mice that live in the bio lab.

Antoine found a great place to hide out when he needs some alone time roaming the mid.

Cloned Meat

by ryan

We were having a pretty interesting debate today over the Explainer lunch table (as I’m sure happened all over the country today) about the FDA’s decision to approve cloned meat for eating. People are obviously very passionate about the issue, and it encompasses many scientific, ethical, and moral questions.

I’m wondering if the objections to the meat has more basis on stigma and misconceptions then an actual understanding of the cloning process. I know that I have a very limited knowledge of what goes on in the cloning of animals and how that differs from the natural processes. My first instinct is to say sure, cloning is a good idea, pass me a tasty burger and if scientists say it’s okay then I’m okay with it. But for others there are a whole host of issues about the morality of humans interfering with natural processes or possible side effects that we don’t have knowledge of know. I think a larger issue is that people have such a disconnect between the food they eat and the methods of farming, killing, and preparation.

Here’s a nice article from the NY times about some chefs who want to get people familiar with the animals they eat…

Chef’s New Goal – Looking Dinner in the Eye 

To me the whole issue of cloned meat remains pretty confusing although it seems like a genuine case of people needing that scientific knowledge to make informed decisions about their lives (whatever decisions they come to). What do you think?

Explainer Cookbook

by Anne

I’m excited about the explainer cookbook we always talk about, so I’m volunteering to start posting my lunch club recipes. Here’s what I’m bringing for lunch tomorrow. There are many things that might make this recipe even better that aren’t in my kitchen tonight, like cilantro, fried onions, or lime juice, but it still tastes good. (A little too zesty for my taste, which means that it’s probably just about right.)

Lunch club, by the way, is one of life’s best things.

Coconut Chicken and Rice

4 organic chicken breasts, 2 cups chicken broth, 1 can coconut milk , 2 shallots (sliced), handful of fresh basil leaves, 1 1/3 cups jasmine rice (dry), garlic, black pepper, lemon pepper, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1 cup sweet peas

Mix everything together except the peas in a big casserole dish. Cover. Bake at 425 for 35 minutes. Add the peas. Easy! I’d love to see your recipes here too.

An Explainer Legend

by ryan

As I wrote in my last post, I have been reading some books about physics including one biography of Micheal Faraday. For those of you who love to hit the snooze button he’s the guy who got a job at the Royal Science Society after the previous lab assistant got in a fist fight. After that break he basically discovered everything that we know about the forces of electricity and magnetism and the connection between them. As if this wasn’t enough, he also was a proto-explainer delivering a Christmas lecture to the children of London each year starting in 1821, even after he became the head of the society. There are some great quotes in the book about his philosophy and style of the lectures. Alan Hirschfield talks about how, “Faraday made sure his young listeners were entertained while they learned: He wrote on paper using an electric pen; burst iron bottles with freezing water; burned gunpowder in water and pieces of iron in alcohol; exploded a hydrogen balloon with an electric spark; created an arch of iron filings above a concealed horseshoe magnet; [and my favorite] made his hair stand on end from accumulated electric charge”

Faraday wrote, “I will return to second childhood, and become as it were, young again among the young.”

His lectures were, “laced with adjectives like wonderful and beautiful. ‘Look at those colors,’ he told an audience while projecting light refracted from a crystal. ‘Are they not most beautiful for you and for me (for I enjoy these things as much as you do.’ He tried to awaken the rational inquirer in every child…”

It’s something very nice for me to realize that even for the greatest scientists, the spirit of discovery and curiosity of children provides so much value. It reminds me of what we were talking about earlier today where it’s so much easier for kids to accept that there are not necessarily right answers and that there’s value in the process of experimenting and playing.

New Year’s Resolution:’Be More Uncomfortable?’

by ryan

I’m not sure how many of y’alls check out the web-blog-sites on the side of this page, yet I would like to call attention to a really interesting series that ‘Museum 2.0′ guru Nina Simon has been exploring regarding the nature of discomfort in Museum experience. In my orientations with the school groups I often say something like, “this museum is very different that what you might expect.” Right away the visitor loses some familiarity with the experience and is forced to look at things in a different and possibly uncomfortable manner. Now, I think that we all use this break from the ‘comfort zone’ to provide memorable, educational, and positive experiences. I think that Nina’s articles provide some great insights about both the Exploratorium specifically and museum philosophy in general.

Nina lays out the four categories for individual posts as Content, Interaction, Programmatic, and Creature Comfort.

I would check out all four articles (I think three have been posted already), but here are some excerpts related to our museum. In the post Program Content Nina writes, “This fall, I went with friends to see the new Mind exhibition at the Exploratorium. We went on opening weekend and elected to watch a couple of short films related to humor, including one by Mira Nair on the laughing clubs of India…The film was long for a museum (35 minutes) and geared towards adults, so the audience had thinned appreciably by the end, when a staff member invited all of us to join her on the floor of the museum for our own laughter club. About twenty of us stood near the main entrance in a circle, laughing loudly, laughing like monkeys, laughing like idiots, and heartily enjoying ourselves. I came out of it truly amazed by the power of the museum—not just to elicit laughter, but also to induce bizarre and voluntary acts of silliness in front of and with strangers. It was the kind of experience I wish I had at lots of museum programs—the staff and the content pulled me out of my comfort zone, engaged me in something unusual, and made me feel great.“

In the article Interactive Content, she writes, “Example two comes from the Exploratorium’s Mind exhibition…in which people are instructed to match up four kinds of words: male names, female names, work-related words, and family-related words, with two categories…As I watched people race to sort cards into the right categories, I wondered why the Exploratorium chose the gender/work/family test instead of the most famous IAT, the Race Test. The Race Test, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, asks people to associate black and white faces with words related to good and evil. The unpleasant result is that most people, black and white, associate white more readily with good and black with evil. Finding out that you associate women with family feels less icky than discovering that you associate black people with evil. (I won’t go into the reasons…) Does that make it a more comfortable experience? Does it make it a less impactful one?”

These excepts provide a starting point for discussions about the possible benefits and worries that occur when visitors are asked to do something outside the ordinary. It was really helpful for me to read all the articles and think about how we work each day to simultaneously make people comfortable and allow them to experience valuable discomfort for educational purposes. We usually do a great job at naturally assessing the situations and deciding how much to push the individual. Yet its important to think about these things so that the visitors don’t feel like they’re staring down the barrel of a cannon.