The Exploratorium had a lot of Pi Day builds and activities.
What a baseball does, as a result of how it is thrown. I think this must be a regular exhibit (nothing to do with pi, as far as I know). This pic doesn't do much to capture the amount of info displayed. The exhibit showed how the ball spins in each case, too, as well as how it moves sideways and down.........
Lots of 'Splo people were here to welcome people and to demo. Here's one. You can't really tell from this pic, but the pie is like an air surfboard, and she is zooming around on it. Hovercraft, I guess.....
My turn. You can't tell, but I'm moving right along here. If you tilted right or left, you could steer..........
Something was wrong with my locomotion. I don't know if the balloon ride messed it up, or what, but I had trouble not running everywhere (couldn't seem to just walk), and that same issue carried over to my pi surfing. After my initial zooming around over the island, I ended up barreling out to sea. I couldn't turn, I couldn't stop, I couldn't get off.............. SL ended up logging me off........
I was ok when I came back, so I guess it was an artifact of something I had done in my previous session.
Here I am in an exhibit about Brownian Motion. I have not looked that up, and the exhibit did not explain......... There were noises, and I was moved around inside the exhibit..........
Perhaps one of the less successful exhibits, from a pedagogical point of view, but it left me with some cool images...........
Inside a planetarium, looking at Orion.
There was a bridge from the 'Splo to a different island. One of the things I learned yesterday is that there is a line at the top of my SL window that tells me which island I'm on. Oh. Right. But I didn't learn that until the very end of my stay, so I don't know the name of this one.
People here are thinking about how we start from what we know when we encounter new technology. Only after a bit of time and experience with the new technology are we able to take advantage of the possibilities offered by the new way of doing things. This reminds me so much of the iron horse (and carriages) at the Henry Ford Museum..........
This build knew I was there, and animated itself in response.
This one was sort of disturbing -- these big blocks went up and down and it seemed that they could crush me, if I weren't careful...... It reminded me of the scene in Galaxy Quest where Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver are going over/under/between all those pounding things....
(Of course my feeling queasy about the possibility of getting squished is part of my old thinking -- my avatar can't be damaged by such things. At least -- not for any longer than it takes me to log out and log back in again! If I were more adventurous, I probably would have invited those blocks to try and smash me, just to see what would happen. Maybe they are smart [and kind?] enough to avoid hitting a person in their path?)
Continuing along the same path, these archy things lifted up over me as I walked. (You can see them, nearly prostrate on the path, in a couple of the images above.)
I liked this one, especially in contrast to the pounding blocks.....
Fountain, of bubbles, I think.
An exhibit on prehistoric markings opens with an interesting thought.
One of the points made here was that present-day people's desire to leave their own marks is seriously threatening the ancient marks.
They also said that people descended from the ancient mark makers sometimes have a tradition of covering over older marks to make their own. "Who owns the marks?" and who should and shouldn't be able to efface/deface them...........
I knew a Chinese man in the 70s who thought it was ok for the Cultural Revolution to destroy art from earlier periods. I disagreed -- surely that art belonged to humanity and not to the revolutionary Chinese to destroy?
A conundrum.
From this island I could see another, and attempted to fly there, but was told I wasn't allowed to be there. Ok, fine, I don't want to be anywhere I'm not wanted!
I could see yet another island, which looked quite forbidding, with high cliffs, but I wasn't stopped from going there. It said it was about helping not-for-profits use emerging technologies.......... I wandered around there a bit, and then walked across a footbridge to Health Island (this is where I noticed the island's name on my screen).
This is the most urban place I've been. It was eerier, being in this urban location with NO other people, than it has been in more woodsy or beachy places.....
Health Island is British, as you can see.
Here is the first swimming pool I've seen in SL.
Then it was time for dinner in RL, ending my sojourn in SL.
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