Crosswords and More Hybrid Fruit

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 [...]

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Photo of the Day – 1/29/08

Testing out a new artistic way to use the turntable to make spirograph style creations.
Photo credit – courtesy of Chris’ I-Phone.

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Where’s Our Invitation?

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 [...]

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Ice Ice Baby

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 [...]

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SRD(MD)s

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 [...]

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Cloned Meat

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 [...]

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Explainer Cookbook

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 [...]

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An Explainer Legend

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. [...]

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

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 [...]

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