Category: Have Science Will Travel

The MIT Museum

I was in Boston a few months ago and managed a visit to the MIT Museum. I found the museum among the geeky travel destinations in the Geek Atlas – very much like my series here, but with more actual science. The Miracle of Science Bar + Grill, which lists its menu on a periodic table behind the bar, is only a few steps away from the MIT Museum, but it wasn’t open when I walked by.

Kismet!
Kismet!

The museum wasn’t open when I got there either. Apparently, getting places early is a thing I do. It was spring break. So, I waited with groups of school kids and their adults. When the doors opened, the groups had to wait to go in. I was able to walk past and immediately went upstairs, where it was still quiet. Upstairs is where you want to go to see the main exhibit. It’s very small, but there are lots of neat things to see. Like Kismet, the robot! (In fact, I just discovered that I saw Kismet on his tenth anniversary of being in the museum!). Continue reading “The MIT Museum”

GeoGuessr: Addendum

xkcd by Randall Munroe (Creative Commons BY-NC)
xkcd by Randall Munroe (Creative Commons BY-NC)

I don’t know how I missed including this xkcd with Eva Amsen’s Have Science Will Travel post on GeoGuessr. I know you have ideas about why I failed, but those are not nice thoughts and my mother reads this blog. So, keep them to yourself.

Also, are we rationing the letter “E” and I didn’t get the memo?

 

La Brea Tar Pits

Help!A few years ago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) found a mammoth in their parking garage. It was dead, of course. The mammoth was one of hundreds of fossil specimens recovered in the expansion of the museum’s underground parking garage.

They were expecting this.

LACMA is built directly next to the La Brea Tar Pits, an area where oil has been bubbling up to the surface of the earth for thousands of years. In that time, many animals got stuck in the tar, causing a very local high density of fossils. Continue reading “La Brea Tar Pits”

GeoGuessr

GEoGuessrCropI’ve traveled all over the world the past week, without leaving my house. Like many travel geeks I’ve been playing GeoGuessr – the game where you have to guess the location from a streetview image, and get as many points as possible in five rounds.

Everyone plays it differently, but my rules are as follows: you can move around in the area to look for clues, but you can’t use Google to find locations. So even if you find out the name of the town you’re in, you still have to find it on the map. Continue reading “GeoGuessr”

Bandelier National Monument

8755876832_11d0034d10_bAs part of the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop, we had the opportunity to visit Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Bandelier is justifiably famous for its impressive Pueblo ruins. The landscape and vegetation made clear that the environment here swings between extremes – the idea of “average” is almost meaningless. Trees showed evidence of both fire and flood damage. Brown turned suddenly to green for a thin strip around a stream. It is a land of contrasts, of beauty, of life, and of death.

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You may also run into a mule deer or two or four. Continue reading “Bandelier National Monument”