The day after my final exam was turned in I went on a walkabout. That is, I went outside (where I had not been in a while) and just walked about wherever I wanted to go. Everyone else was at work/school so I took a bus over to the Mall and started at the outdoor sculpture garden.
Contemplating modern art is always much more palatable when you can compare it to taking exams.
My main goal, though, was to get to the Air and Space Museum's new exhibit on time and navigation. Why? Because learning how clocks work is just about the most exciting thing in the world, especially after exams.
And because I always love walking past the Apollo 11 Command Module right after the entrance.
The time and navigation exhibit was amazing. Whoever put it together really thought carefully about the progression of the exhibit and what sorts of multimedia should be present. It started with a brief explanation of ocean navigation before the 1500's and the very real dangers of just plain getting lost and having no idea how to get back home. You wouldn't think "accurate timekeeping" would be the answer to a navigation question, but it is, and this was presented fantastically well with an interactive game involving plotting a ship's location using a sextant a clock.
You had to align the sextant with a certain star on the back wall and then the game showed you a PDF of an old star-chart where you could see the longitude given by the angle cross-referenced with the current time.
The exhibit also had a reasonably well-acted pictures in frames talking to each other (featuring an Apollo-era astronaut, a WWII-era pilot, a justifiably confused 1800's-era ship captain, a modern-day military navigator, and a very confused modern-day person who just stumbled into the center frame) in order to explain, again, the basics of how time is integral to navigation. There were examples of clocks from the very earliest pendulum designs all the way up to a cesium atomic clock, and with each new clock there was some sort of explanation about the increased navigational accuracy that the clock's invention allowed.
I'm making clocks sound like fun, right? Right?
I liked it so much that I forced Kelsey to come see it in the middle of one of our runs on Sunday. That was before her car got broken into. Speaking of which, we have a video of the guy who broke into Kelsey's car walking away with her purse. This is courtesy of the very nice nerdy couple with excellent surveillance technology.
Kelsey was moments away from screaming "enhance!" while living out her CSI dreams in this couple's apartment.
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