Just came across this article about the Mission Science Workshop. I had never heard of this group before. Seems interesting. Has anyone checked them out yet?
Link to SF Gate article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/12/27/MNSQ14ODSG.DTL
Link to Mission Science Workshop homepage: http://www.scienceworkshops.org/site/sf/
So I’m now approaching hour 19 of chilling in SFO, interrupted only by a brief visit to the Airport Marriot to sleep for a bit. My roommate is gone, my cell and ipod are dead, I read the copy of Science that Ryan/Santa gave me in my vest pocket cover to cover, there’s too much stimulation for me to focus on my book, and I’m sick of flipping through magazines with adorable photos of Suri Cruise (but can we get her and her itty-bitty designer outfits for the cute room in the MIND exhibition?).
Luckily JUST before I was bored to death, I discovered the terminal I’m confined to has what’s called a “Kids’ Space” according to the signage, but my preferred nomenclature is “airpOratorium”. Basically there is a large rubbery floor which (for reasons that are still unclear to me) is painted with giant meteorological symbols (like the ones for cold front and the like) AND on top of this lovely flooring is a random grouping of explo exhibits. The airpOratorium is definitely the most interesting space in the entire terminal, and it’s been providing me with hours of entertainment. So much that I’m apparently now blogging about it. What I am calling “Roam Airport” consists mainly of my own experimentation and play, as well as a significant amount of observing. It’s weird not to be able to interact with people as I’m used to doing at the museum, and I’m making a concerted effort not to creep out any travelers out by approaching them or their children since I 1) don’t work here, and 2) am wearing dirty clothes that I slept in last night instead of a conspicuous orange vest. For awhile Roam Airport also consisted of taking lots of photos and videos, which is probably why my cell battery is now dead.
This is how my roommate chose to explore Aeolian
Landscape at 1am:
Meanwhile, other not-so-weary travelers (who must have hailed from a time zone where it was still a decent hour) were analyzing and experimenting with the exhibits with incredible depth:
One thing that is really striking to me is how well everyone is interacting at the exhibits. These kids are in some unfamiliar place surrounded by other kids they didn’t know and they are all cooperating and happily playing with each other. And without being in a school mindset or having an orientation, they’re conducting really great experiments together. Like what will happen if happen if we race our hot wheels cars across the bottom of the tornado exhibit where the fog comes out. Or what about if our cars are parked in the middle- will the tornado form around them? I was surprised that barely anyone ran in circles around the tornado; they most sat around the edges of it. Was it because the exhibit lacked a “if you’re going to run in circles run this way” sign? Or because it was open on all sides (instead of the way ours kind of has walls)? Or do all the kids at the explO run just because one started it and now it’s become a thing to do?
There was also this sweet exhibit that didn’t have any signage…does anyone know anything about it and/or if it was made at the explO? It’s and 9 X 9 cube of TV screens with what I’m imagining is some sort of blue plasma going crazy in it that reacts to different touches, making it so that touches aren’t invisible anymore like Phil Collins thought…
Overall, it was really heartening (is that even a word? I’m trying to say it was the opposite of disheartening) to see how everyone, young and old, was naturally compelled to explore these exhibits together. And I’m really happy the explOratorium isn’t just in our museum but can be everywhere with people, whether our exhibits are there or not. Also, have you ever looked at the screens of the x-ray machines as your stuff goes through at security? I almost got detained there cuz the guy thought it was suspicious that I was so interested in how cool my laptop looked in it.
A week or so ago the Explainers had a wonderful training with Charlie’s friend Peter O’Hara from USF where we watched a human brain dissection. There was so much information to get from the fabulous presentation. It’s always interesting to see what each Explainer focuses on. We wrote down a list of what each of us thought was one thing we learned that really stuck with us. I collected them and found them this evening as a sweaty crumpled mass of tiny line pages in the pocket of my pants. Let’s get them off those pieces of paper and on to the internets.
There was so much other cool information that we learned. Sylvia and Charlie should have pictures of the dissection that hopefully we can upload on the blog eventually. There’s a lot of really nauseated expressions from bio newbies like myself.
Also Sylvia and Anne had a member’s class on Sunday about the brain. They used a blog in a different and cool way. They compiled a list of all the questions that the students and parents asked and then made a post for each one. Hopefully, the Exploratorium experts can give answers in the comments sections.
Here’s the link – Brain Question Blog
I think explainers could answer some of the questions as well. It’s nice to see the guerrilla blogging at the explo getting used in different ways.
wearing a mylar outfit.
And you may find yourself,
in another part of the world.
And you may find yourself,
awkwardly slow dancing with the sun.
And you may find yourself,
in a beautiful museum,
with a beautiful wife.
And you may ask yourself,
well…how did I get here?
Marcus and Ryan, you did a really great job editing this video, so I hope you don’t mind I made a remix of it. I really do enjoy the lovely and moving garbage band, i mean, garage band song you created, but I felt it was a bit lacking in nonsensical existentially philosophical self-reflective lyrics. I also added a surprise ending.
Last Friday, Amisha and Lianna hosted a training focusing on the Sun Painting exhibit. Ann B. dressed in Mylar and Aiona and Manpreet dressed in white. Watch them show off their moves.
Watch the Sun Painting Premiere!
Here’s engraving that Paul D. assigned us to find for a homework assignment.
It shows Richmanns and the engraver getting rocked by a ball of lightning.
Wikipedia says…
He was electrocuted in St. Petersburg ”while trying to quantify the response of an insulated rod to a nearby storm.” He was attending a meeting of the Academy of Sciences, when he heard thunder. The Professor ran home with his engraver to capture the event for posterity. While the experiment was underway, a supposed ball lightning appeared and collided with Richmann’s head leaving him dead in a red spot. His shoes were blown open, parts of his clothes singed, the engraver knocked out; the doorframe of the room was split, and the door itself torn off its hinges. Reportedly, ball lightning traveled along the apparatus and was the cause of his death. He was apparently the first person in history to die while conducting electrical experiments
Ball lightning seems to be a pretty mysterious phenomenon. But regardless it’s probably a bad idea to fly a kite in an electrical storm.
Or as Ben Franklin (probably) said…
Dost thou love life? Then only write about dangerous electricity experiments and do not conduct them yourself.
So last week Marcus and Antoine did this sweet study group focused on the exhibit Hoop Nightmares. For anyone who doesn’t know, this exhibit allows you to try and shoot baskets with and without these glasses that make things in front of you look like they are over to the side. After shooting several baskets with the glasses, it’s harder to aim with normal vision, since your brain has gotten used to the basket seeming to be elsewhere. (Incidentally, Richard Brown just sent out an email today about how this exhibit is now part of an exhibition somewhere in SF about drugs, as it allows people to experience temporary memory loss.)
So anyway, for their study group Marcus and Twan made us our own prism goggles and facilitated a relay race game involving walking/running to and from a bucket and getting a basketball into it. It was disorienting and even a bit scary to attempt to move our bodies through space when our brains couldn’t quite interpret what we were seeing, but overall it was just completely hilarious (especially when you had normal vision and were watching someone else stumble around).
After a few rounds of the game, we sat down for a discussion and someone mentioned this study done about goggles that invert your vision. For some reason, I became super interested by this idea awhile ago, so I did a bit of research on it then and figured I would share with you what I found.
It seems the first published research on this was done by Stratton at the very end of the 19th Century. He made goggles that rotated the wearer’s vision 180 degrees, so everything was upside down. In 1897, he published “Vision without inversion of the retinal image” in the journal Psychological Review. In this paper, he alleged that after wearing the goggles for awhile, the participants brains had flipped the image so they perceived it as right side up even with the goggles still on. Which would be awesome…if the experiment could be replicated consistently with the same results, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.
The most recent study I could find on this was published in the journal Perception in 1999. Entitled, “The myth of upright vision. A psychophysical and functional imaging study of adaptation to inverting spectacles”, this study is accessible online here and it explains everything way better than I could ever attempt to summarize, so here are some fascinating (in my opinion) excerpts from the discussion and conclusion:
“All subjects showed a rapid adaptation of motor skills. On the third day of the experiment, they were capable of walking freely without a stick. Subjects performed all tasks of everyday life with none or minimal aid. During the second half of the experiment, they were able to find their way in a crowded department store and to ride a bicycle. The execution of very fine movements, however, was slowed down and remained so until the end of the experiment.”
“The subjects reported that at times they had the impression that they themselves, rather than the world around them, had been turned upside down, but that they knew that this was not the case. But no subject claimed that he had regained upright vision or that his visual image matched his body sense at any point during the experiment, not even when the subjects were exploring the visual scene by touch”
“Our four subjects showed a visuomotor adaptation to prism- and mirror-inverted vision that was similar to that reported in previous studies (Kottenhoff 1961). Yet the results of the perceptual tasks and the subjects’ reports about their experience suggest that this visuomotor adaptation did not rely on a return of upright vision. Their rapid behavioural adaptation to the new spatial structure of the visual image might have to be explained by the learning of new motor patterns and increased skill at spatial transformations (Held and Freedman 1963) rather than an adjustment of the perception of the world, seen through the mirror or prism, to the conventional orientation. The fact that none of our subjects reported upright vision during the experiment is in keeping with parts of the previous literature. Of the five classical experiments with inverting spectacles, only two (Stratton 1897; Snyder and Pronko 1952) resulted in reports of upright vision of some sort. In the three other cases, visuomotor adaptation occurred without major changes of perception (Ewert 1928, reported in Kottenhoff 1961). The five subjects who wore upside-down inverting mirrors at Innsbruck University for periods of five days to two weeks during the years 1947 ^ 1954 all showed rapid and partly spectacular motor adaptation, including the ability to ride a bicycle or to go skiing. Around day 3 of the experiment they reported an increasing ambiguity of the visual image. Sometimes they would see an object upside down, sometimes in its conventional orientation, depending on the context and the extent to which the violation of gravity was felt to interfere with the visual image. These effects can be described as an interpretation of the visual image guided by previous knowledge about the external world and information about one’s own position in it rather than fully fledged upright vision (Kottenhoff 1961). Even Stratton himself, who otherwise gave the least ambiguous account of perceptual changes, conceded the importance of the appropriate “mental attitude of the observer toward the present scene” (Stratton 1896). It is also worth considering that none of the previous investigators tested their subjects’ claim to upright vision with context- independent tasks, such as the reading and shape-from-shading task used in our study.”
I couldn’t figure out how to access Stratton’s “Vision without inversion of the retinal image” paper online, but I did find its predecessor, “Some preliminary experiments on vision without inversion of the retinal image”. And although this study may be flawed and not draw the best conclusions, I think it’s really interesting to read especially to learn about how Stratton built inverting goggles and how he felt when he wore them himself.
Also, on a related note here’s a ridiculously phenomenal video I found called Living in a Reversed World made apparently quite a while ago by Institute of Experimental Psychology University in Austria. It doesn’t involve inverted vision, but instead reverses vision between the left and right. I always lose it and crack up around 5:30 minutes into the video I also really enjoy the nonchalance of the professor in the video… Oh, you just dropped a glass on the floor and it shattered on my foot. No matter, just ignore it and draw on this chalkboard so we can continue doing this science experiment….
So anyway, this is just my very limited current understanding of vision inverting and prism stuff. If you know more please add it! Sorry- I didn’t originally intend to write an intensely long post …thanks for reading it if you actually did!
Having facilitated the Philosophy demonstration several times now I am feeling inspired to revisit some of my own favorite philosophical ideas. Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living is one philosophical work that has had a profound impact on my thinking. The Importance of Living was Lin Yutang’s attempt to present his take on classic Chinese philosophy to American readers. Originally published in 1937 it was a best seller at the time. Anyway, here are a few quotes that speak to me! Please respond with your own favorites!
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“There is always a flavor of disenchantment about philosophy. The philosopher looks at life as an artist looks at a landscape- through a veil or a haze. The raw details of reality are softened a little to permit us to see its meaning…The philosopher is therefore the direct opposite of the complete realist who, busily occupied in his daily business, believes that his successes and failures, his losses and gains, are absolute and real.”
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On the four characteristics of the scamp, who was Lin’s ideal character. “They are: a playful curiosity, a capacity for dreams, a sense of humor to correct those dreams, and finally a certain waywardness and incalculability of behavior.”
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“Talking with you for one night is better than studying books for ten years” (old Chinese saying)
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from Thomas Merton’s translation of Chuang Tzu’s poems (a Chinese philosopher I discovered while reading Lin’s book)
The Man of Tao
The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Harms no other being
By his actions
Yet he does not know himself
To be ‘kind,’ to be ‘gentle.’
The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
He goes his way
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself on walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won’t complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding ‘Yes’ and ‘No.’
The ancients said, therefore:
The man of Tao
Remains unknown
Perfect virtue
Produces nothing
‘No-Self’
Is ‘True-Self.’
And the greatest man
Is Nobody.
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Are you still reading? Wow! Good work! Here are some more tidbits from The Importance of Living
“From my own observation of life, this Buddhist classification of life’s humbugs is not complete, and the great humbugs of life are three, instead of two: Fame, Wealth, and Power. There is a convenient American word which again combines these three humbugs into the One Great Humbug: Success. But many wise men know that the desires for success, fame, and wealth are euphemistic names for the fears of failure, poverty, and obscurity, and that these fears dominate our lives. There are many people who have already attained both fame and wealth, but who still insist on ruling others. They are the people who have consecrated their lives to the service of their country. The price is often very heavy. Ask a wise man to wave his silk hat to a crowd and make seven speeches a day and give him a presidency, and he will refuse to serve his country…There are a few select souls who can wear their reputation and a high position with a smile and remain their natural selves; they are the ones who know they are acting when they are acting, who do not share the artificial illusions of rank, title, property and wealth, and who accept these things with a tolerant smile when they come their way, but refuse to believe that they they themselves are thereby different from ordinary human beings.”
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“There is the wisdom of the foolish,
The gracefulness of the slow,
The subtlety of stupidity,
The advantage of lying low.”
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Well, congratulations! You made it! Thanks for reading. Whadaya think?
Haikus are a great way to explain the way we experience something…anything, by distilling our thoughts into a few select and simple words. A few weeks back in training we created haikus about DNA. They are really delightful!
Trillions clump; it’s me
Invisible bio blend
Sex chain extraction
Life chain mutates you
Sex strings trillions tiny gene
Invisible clump
Invisible code
Rise itty mind boggling fate
Identity squirt
Unique complex strip
Invisible recipe
Direct everyone
Explore snot-like stuff
Soap spit tilt pour extraction
Mutate nano swirl
Amazing little cell Dixie spit
Step flowers you!! Spit strand, spiral strands
Unique evolution, unique mutation reproduction
