There’s a big emphasis on things you can try out yourself, like a nifty display case that shows the different ways that seeds or other bits of biological material can disperse to islands. (It used ping pong balls and levers and stuff. Really pretty fun.) Even before you go inside, in the parking lot, you get some real hands-on experience of a simple machine, by lifting this real live truck:

Obviously, as a reasonably-informed adult, and one who successfully completed the unit on simple machines in third grade, I know that you get more out of a lever the farther you are from the fulcrum, but boy, it takes on new meaning when you use it to lift a truck. (Note the actual space between the tires and the pavement.)

The museum has a lovely trio of space ships:

From left to right, a whole swath of space history: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. That Mercury capsule is the very one that Ham the chimpanzee rode in on January 31, 1961. The Apollo capsule flew in 1975, which was after the moon landings were done; its main claim to fame is that it docked with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. All three are on loan from the National Air and Space Museum. I wonder how many of these things the Smithsonian owns, and where they all live.

The Science Center has a huuuge exhibit on ecosystems (which is kind of tucked away and easy to miss – a shame, because it’s like 75% of the museum). I particularly enjoyed a room about polar research. It’s kept extra-chilly and there’s a wall of ice where you can feel how well different insulating materials work:

They have a mitt made of fur, one stuffed with down, and so on, so you can see which one feels warmest. I can’t remember anymore, but I had fun poking the wall of ice. In the neighboring desert room I was amused to see a display on Katy Hinman, a former bat researcher who I was distantly acquainted with in college.

One of the most striking things in the museum was in the L.A. section of the Ecosystems exhibit. An artist took glass plates, put stencils on them, and left them outside on roofs in Los Angeles for one month. Here’s what happened.

And that, my friends, is just how much particulate pollution falls out of the air in Los Angeles. Makes you never want to breathe there again, doesn’t it?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The museum started in 1976, when a bunch of Japanese bonsai growers donated trees to the U.S. as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. This was one of the original gifts, and it’s the oldest tree in the collection:

This Japanese white pine has been “in training,” the label says, since 1625. 1625! It was passed down through generations of the Yamaki family, who had a bonsai nursery in Hiroshima. Their nursery was less than two miles from where the atomic bomb went off, but the Yamaki family and their trees avoided major injury. Here’s a nice article about the tree from the National Bonsai Federation.

Normally I think that tree is displayed with a less distracting background, but in winter they collect all the bonsai and penjing (the Chinese version of bonsai) in one pavilion and put a temporary roof on it. Since everything outdoors was covered with a hard, thin crust of ice yesterday, this decision seems to make a lot of sense. These trees are from temperate environments, so they need shorter days and cooler temperatures for part of the year, but that doesn’t mean they need East Coast-style ice storms. “Greetings, venerable pine! We hope you don’t mind if we hang 16 pounds of ice on your perfectly shaped branches!”

Those branches don’t perfectly shape themselves. Here’s a European Hornbeam having its twigs molded:

This plant is a bit younger–an upstart, really, compared to the Yamaki pine. It’s only been in training since 1972. The bonsai collection has been supplemented over the years by donations from bonsai enthusiasts, including a gorgeous Japanese white pine given by King Hassan the 2nd of Morocco. I don’t know if he was a bonsai grower, but he apparently owned at least one.

It’s cool to see all these plants in winter. It also made me want to go back to see them when they bloom and leaf out in the spring. Just think of the years, decades, and centuries of loving care that go into making and maintaining these perfect indoor representations of outdoor life.

Bonsai appeal to my sense of cuteness. You expect to see little fairies dancing on the moss under the trees. We’ll have to settle for this guy, though.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The V&A’s jewelry collection is amazing, but two things impressed me the most. First, the cast iron jewelry from 19th-century Germany. (Actually Prussia, I think.) Who knew you could make cast-iron jewelry? Well, you can. It’s black, like you’d think, but quite delicate. The other thing I thought was totally cool was the chatelaine.

I knew that chatelaine was a word, but I think I thought it had something to do with chattel. (And I’m not totally sure I knew what chattel meant; the meaning I was thinking of, slave, is archaic.) But it’s actually the feminine version of chatelain, the keeper of a castle. And it has a second meaning: this thing.

Women’s clothes weren’t always made with pockets, but that doesn’t mean women didn’t carry things around. They had one of these, a sort of ornamental chain worn at the waist with useful stuff hanging off of it, like keys and scissors. This one was made of cut steel around 1850 in London.

Seriously, the museum goes on and on and on. Somewhere in the back of a set of galleries is this bed:

But, oh no, it’s not just any bed. It’s The Great Bed of Ware. Haven’t heard of it? Well, that just proves you aren’t living in 16th century Britain. It was so famous, it made an appearance in Twelfth Night:

…and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of
paper, although the sheet were big enough for the
bed of Ware in England, set ‘em down: go, about it.

A traveler first wrote about it in 1596 in an inn in Ware, in Hertfordshire. The real textiles didn’t survive; these hangings and bed coverings are based on other textiles of the time.

The museum is truly mind-blowingly ginormous. Here’s a room of 20th-century design:

Note that the upper reaches of the room hold part of the library’s collection.

And then there’s large quantities of sculpture. And that huge wall thing at the end of this gallery used to be in a church, although I completely failed to collect any information about it.

I mean, I have a little information – it’s a choir screen, which goes between the part of the church where the congregation hangs out and the part where the action happens. They used to be common, and now they’re less common, if I remember correctly from the label. They’ve been taken out of a lot of churches, including whatever church that one used to be in, and some ended up at the V&A.

Including the one in this picture:

What’s that? You say the choir screen isn’t the most noticeable thing in that picture? Yeah. That blue-green thing is a glass sculpture by Dale Chihuly that hangs in the big main entranceway thingy. I think “Dale Chihuly” is a good bet whenever you see a swoopy monumental piece of glass sculpture.

I was at the V&A for a couple of hours and really just barely scratched the surface. I suppose I’ll have to go back sometime. One thing that makes that easy: Admission is free. I love free museums. Not only because I am totally cheap, but also because I feel like I can just go in, look at a couple of things, and leave again. There’s no need to stay for hours and get my money’s worth. Well, come to think of it, that’s less true in this case, because I had to get all the way to London – with a plane ticket from the U.S., then a train ticket from Guildford for the day. But anyway, V&A. Yay.

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The label says it was made in Athens around 490 BC. Some people who make their own yarn still spin this way, with a drop spindle. You hold the wool in one hand and spin the yarn around with the other, just like the nice lady is doing on the vase.

This was in a section on daily life – apparently Ancient Greek ladies made their families’ clothing from scratch.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Here’s a weird fact. The “Panama Canal Museum” is in Seminole, Florida, and it’s just about the U.S. involvement in the canal.

The museum in Panama City is the “Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá.” That is something along the lines of “Interoceanic Canal Museum of Panama.” Or “Interoceanic Panama Canal Museum.” Or “Panama Interoceanic Canal Museum.”

This museum is about the whole canal, from when it was but a twinkle in the eye of…um, somebody famous in olden times, to the 1880’s, when it was a totally messed-up French project, to when the U.S. picked it up in 1903 and finished it in 1914, to the handover when Panama took control of the canal in 1999.

I’m a little hazy on some of the details because there was no text in English. Which is fine – it’s not like most U.S. museums are falling over themselves to put writing on the walls in foreign languages, so I can’t really complain. (Notable exception.) They do provide a decent audio guide in English.

Unfortunately, most of the actual facts kind of went in one ear and out the other. Also, they don’t allow photos inside, so even if there had been English wall text, I couldn’t have taken pictures of it to remind myself.

So I present you with the one artifact you can take pictures of.

I bet every vaguely maritime-themed museum in the world has at least one of these on display. They’re really pretty. This one is made from brass and crystal. I think the audio guide said it was designed by the guy who made the Eiffel Tower, but now I’m not so sure, because I don’t think the Spanish label says that. It’s certainly connected to him somehow, and Mr. Eiffel was involved with the failed French attempt to build the canal – he was supposed to design the locks.

Oh, if you haven’t seen one of these, it’s a lighthouse light. Impressive, n’est-ce pas?

One of the things that most amused me was a reference to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Eh? Pirate? I thought he was, you know, a Sir of some sort, and didn’t he hang around with Elizabeth I? So I pulled out my handy Kindle with 3G and looked him up on Wikipedia. Answer: One man’s pirate is another man’s privateer. England and Spain were at war, so he could totally get away with pirating Spanish ships. Also, he was a slave trader. Ugh.

Later I used the handy Kindle to find out what the Spanish Main was. If you’d forced me to come up with a definition, I think I would’ve gone for, like, a fleet of ships. (Apparently I thought the Spanish Main was the Spanish Armada.) It turns out it was actually Spain’s mainland colonies around the Caribbean, particularly the Central American coastline. Am I the only one who didn’t know that?

They do have one other artifact you can take pictures of: the museum itself. It was built as the Grand Hotel in, uh, sometime in the 19th century, and later served as the headquarters for the French canal project, then the U.S. one. Those headquarters later moved, but when they were looking around for a place to put the museum, they came up with this building.

It’s quite grand, and it sits in the middle of a neighborhood with quite a grand past, Casco Viejo. (Here’s the UNESCO page about the area – it’s the Historic District, not “Panama Viejo,” which is the ruins of an earlier city near here.)

Keep an eye out for more canal-related blog posts in the near future. There are plenty of canal-related museums to go around. There’s even a website called canalmuseum.com. I don’t know what/where/who that is.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Then there’s this, from the Omni New Haven in New Haven, Connecticut:

Just as busy, but a little more autumnal.

A few weeks ago I was at a conference in Vienna and was excited to discover: wood floors!

Well, actually, the carpets make better pictures. But still, I was excited. Europe: It’s different. I guess.

photos: me, of course

]]> http://heyhelen.com/2011/05/conference-room-carpets/feed/ 0 http://heyhelen.com/2011/04/female-dogs-see-through-your-tricks/ http://heyhelen.com/2011/04/female-dogs-see-through-your-tricks/#comments Fri, 29 Apr 2011 23:33:09 +0000 Helen http://heyhelen.com/?p=2523 This week for ScienceNOW I wrote a story about a sex difference in how dogs think about physical objects. One of the sources I talked to called the results “odd” and I think you’ll agree. Nobody really has any idea why this difference exists. I recommend watching the video with the story, if only for what appears to be total confusion on the part of the dog. Here’s the story.

To accompany this story, I submit a completely unrelated, yet charming, photograph of a dog. Her name, for your information, is Hamburglar.

photo: me

The sign by the door tells you you’re getting “PREHISTORICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND PETROLOGICAL, ZOOLOGICAL, OSTEOLOGICAL, PALEONTOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM LIBRARY.” So right away you know this is a museum to be reckoned with. And then you go inside, buy your ticket, and approach the collections from the bottom of this grand stairway:

Then imagine your excitement when you enter the first gallery of minerals and it looks like this:

The old wooden cases! The endless ranks of rocks, labeled only in Czech and completely uninterpreted!

My boyfriend and I had fun figuring out what the minerals were – some, like “kuprit” and “zinkit” were pretty easy, but we had trouble with “zlato” – the team was split between gold and pyrite. (It was gold; pyrite is “pyrit.”) “Smithsonit” was quite self-explanatory. Most I probably wouldn’t know in English, either, like “diopsid” and “smaragd” and “axinit.” We went from there into a room of meteorites (chondrites is “chondrity”), also displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets – which, the English sign told me, were designed by the architect of the National Museum building and a professor of mineralogy. The cases were installed soon after the building was completed in 1891.

The fun of working out what the minerals are is fairly representative of the kind of fun you can have in the National Museum in Prague. Now, you know I love my natural history museums, and this one is lovely. It’s great at one of the functions of natural history museums: displaying cool stuff. But it scores low on another function: educating the visitor. The schoolkids we saw wandering through looked pretty universally bored, with the exception of these girls:

The zoology halls were redone in the 60s – note the somewhat more modern-looking cases. Here’s a closer look over one girl’s shoulder:

Other exhibits in the museum included fossils, birds, reptiles, and an exhibit on Czech fairy tales that was really quite hard to follow if you are not familiar with (a) Czech fairy tales and (b) Czech.

The exhibit was kind of exciting to walk through, because it was modern and was done to feel like a forest and villages and such, so it had dim lighting, ramps and passageways, and a very different feel than the glass-cases-in-large-rooms aesthetic of the rest of the museum. There were even labels in English, but we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on; the exhibit appeared to be blending artifacts from the tribes that lived in the area thousands of years ago with the tales that Czech children grow up with, and it just didn’t make a lot of sense to a person who didn’t grow up with those stories.

I think that’s enough Czech natural history for one day. More soon.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me

So two weeks ago, when I was in Maui for a story, I stopped in at the Old Lahaina Courthouse to see their display on whaling. Maui was an important stop for whalers. They left New England on years-long voyages to catch whales and stopped in at this tropical paradise to load up on supplies (potatoes, goats) and catch up on the fun (booze, ladies) they’d been deprived of at sea. There’s even a sea chanty called “Rolling Down to Old Maui.”

The display at the courthouse was a bit slim, but here are some cool items:

Those long things are called spades; they were used for cutting up whales. They’re resting in a pot used for melting down the blubber. Whale oil was used for things like lubricating sewing machines:

and lighting lighthouses:

This one used to be in the lighthouse on Hana, at the southwestern tip of Maui.

So, I wouldn’t recommend a special trip to Maui to see the Old Lahaina Courthouse, but I’d certainly stop in if you’re in the area, say, at one of the whalewatching tours that leave from the harbor across the street. That’s a somewhat nicer way to chase whales. The courthouse is right behind this awesome banyan tree, which takes up an entire block.

That’s the trunk in the background – it was planted in 1873. The aerial roots all came in later, reaching down from the branches to the ground. I sat under it for a while writing postcards, and a group of Japanese tourists gathered around me. I wonder where they are now?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me.

Unfortunately, my point-and-shoot camera was more interested in the car than the caterpillar, but you get the idea: fuzzy and cute. It’s the larva of some kind of tiger moth. If it were daytime and in focus, it’s possible that a person who knew their caterpillars could tell you which of the tiger moths, but as none of those conditions are fulfilled, you will just have to live with it being a woolly bear of indeterminate species.

I know this is entirely routine biological fact, but I still find it totally unbelievably amazing that a fuzzy fat caterpillar can seal itself up in a cocoon, break itself down, and rebuild itself into something with stick-like legs and scaly wings.

Thanks to the Iowa State University Department of Entomology, I have just learned of the existence of The Woollybear Festival (The Largest One Day Festival In Ohio). It’s in September. There’s a parade and everything. Ooh, and Vermilion, Ohio, is the home of the Inland Seas Maritime Museum! Now I definitely want to go.