Nerdy Day

Nerdy Day

Today I spent the day doing what I do best, nerdy stuff!  I went to the art museum and the planetarium.  Plus I got rid of some hazardous waste, but that's not too exciting.

Bellevue Art Museum

The Bellevue Art Museum is an awesome little gem in Seattle.  It's located across the street from the Bellevue Square Mall (bonus!).  The building itself is a work of art.  Check out the website, I can't even begin to describe it.  I love it because it's small and compact.  There are usually 2 or 3 exhibits going on at a time and you can usually walk through it in an hour or two.  They seem to focus on craft and design, in addition to art.  Which I think is another reason why I like it.  I once visited an exhibit where everything was teapots.  Another time they had old books that people have carved and created into amazing art.  I also remember another exhibit where people had created art with millions of little beads.  I love this stuff!

Today the main exhibit was paper art.  Origami!!  The thing that makes origami amazing is its complexity.  Most of the artists get very mathematical about it.  They plan everything out and theorize about what can be done.  There are computer programs to help them accomplish these amazing designs.  And it seems like a lot of the artists are Phds and engineers and such. 

One large room was filled with lots of paper birds hanging from the ceiling.  They were all made from sheets of US currency and they ascended from the ground to the ceiling, starting as just plain paper at the bottom becoming more and more constructed as they rose.  I have no bigger analysis for this other than "it was pretty".  I'm sure the artists was saying something profound or something.

There were lots of animals.  One was a moose and next to it was a depiction of what it would look like unfolded.  I found myself staring at that and trying to construct the moose in my mind.  As I read through some of the exhibit descriptions, one of the artists actually says he creates his designs in this way... well backwards.  He starts with the moose and slowly unfolds it in his mind so he can then transfer it to real paper.  My brain hurts thinking about this.

I was also impressed by some of the practical applications of origami.  One design inspired a collapsible heart stent that could be inserted into a human heart through a blood vessel.  Another origami inspired design was for a massive space telescope lens that could be collapsed so as not to break during transport into space.

There were also a lot of abstract designs.  Swirls and folded paper that looked like it was woven.  And a ball of paper cranes that was made from one giant sheet of paper.  

And of course there was a reference to the 1000 paper cranes story about the girl from Hiroshima who had Leukemia.  She believed that if she made 1000 paper cranes then she would be cured of it.  I remember reading this in school and learning to make paper cranes.  But what I don't remember them explaining was that this girl was made sick by the atomic bomb we dropped on Hiroshima.  By the way, one of the other exhibits at the BAM right now is a collection of arts and crafts produced by some of the Japanese interned by us during the second world war.

And what modern art exhibit would be complete without a used napkin casually placed in a display case.  It's called "minimalist art". 

I naturally want to try some origami now.  Or at least delve more into the mathematics of it.  PBS  has a documentary called "Between the Folds" that I'm going to have to watch.  

The Planetarium

I also went to the planetarium today (it really was a fun day, I really do live it up when TJ is not home).  Apparently the University of Washington has a really awesome projection system for studying stars and constellations, which I hear is better than what the Pacific Science Center offers.  I don't know if that is true.  But the data driving this system was mind blowing!  

A team of scientists undertook this project to take high resolution pictures of every inch of the sky.  High resolution means you can zoom in a lot before you start to lose information.  Not, however, as good as the Hubble telescope, but more expansive.  My little software engineer brain is exploding.  That's a s!*t load of data!  Where do they store all of it?  How do they stitch it all together?  How fast is the computer that retrieves it?  Is it available for everyone to use?  How many cameras did they use?  Do they take this pictures from Earth (certainly not cloudy Seattle)?  How massively powerful are these cameras?  I think I remember people volunteering their personal computer downtime to be used as extra CPUs for some massive NASA undertaking, I wonder if that project was related to this one.  I have so many questions!!  I almost want to go back to school, but I think I will settle with Google. 

First we saw the constellation patterns as they would look with the naked eye from anywhere in the world and from any time of the year.  We saw the North Star not move as the rest of the constellations moved around it.  We saw the Zodiac constellations move and cross the sun at their time of the year.  Which, by the way, is 2000 years out of date because when they came up with the different signs and their meaning, the Earth was tilted differently.  Does anyone remember that controversy a few years ago when somebody tried to add another horoscope sign?  What ever happened with that?  That was all fun and exciting.  But then our teacher zoomed in and we saw all the little star specks turn into galaxies and planets and nebulae (gas clouds).  Of course, I understood this in theory, but I have never actually visualized it until now.  So I was in awe.  And then at the end, the teacher zoomed way way way out.  We were actually able to see how the universe looks!  Again, how did they do that? 

I'm still in awe and excited about space.  What an amazing experience.  I highly recommend it, the UW Planetarium is open to the public!  Now I need to finally go watch Cosmos or find a podcast or something.

My friend Julia

Julia and I met in the Santa Cruz dormitory at UC Santa Barbara.  We shared a love of art and hatred of the silly party culture at UCSB.  Three years ago we connected after many years of not seeing each other and it felt like nothing had changed.

Last weekend I went to visit her in Denver.  She's such a great influence on me because she is super adventurous!  As the blog title notes, I'm really not adventurous.  I am a software engineer, I go to work and I go home.  I usually pick the safest route, no matter what.  I can usually predict all the horrible things that could possibly happen before I start anything... it's my super power, that and falling asleep on command.  So I've kind of taken on the life purpose of finding a more adventurous self because it sure sounds like a lot more fun!

So, back to my trip.  We went to Steamboat Springs, CO, which is a lovely little ski town a few hours outside of Denver.  It was 92 degrees in the afternoon and really super duper dry.  I live in Seattle, our summers are cool and humid with really long days (beautiful by the way, you should visit!).  So naturally we went on a hike.  I tell you, this hike was easy and I exercise regularly.  But man, the heat... I struggled a little bit.  Needless to say, I survived!  I think I drank (and sweat out) 3 gallons of water.  Also, I got a phone call from my fiancée during this hike, informing me that my house might burn down, due to an apartment fire across the street.  Luckily the heat and the hike helped to distract me from that.  I'm so thankful the fire and sun gods spared me and my condo and my fiancée.

As we walked along the dirt trail, I noticed a little grey cloud move from beneath my feet with every step.  They were grasshoppers!  I think.  So cool!  Although, it was unsettling occasionally feeling them on my leg.  There was also another other bug making machine gun noises.  And there were so many beautiful butterflies!  And ash white aspen trees with eyes (see the picture, these trees seriously have eyes!).  Colorado had also recently experienced some rain storms, so things were unusually green.

After the hike, we went to a party hosted by one of Julia's friends.  It was at a local museum, out in the country.  What a gorgeous countryside and a beautiful evening!  I chatted with an older gentleman who claimed there was an Osprey nest off in the distance.  There was no way he could see it from where we were, so I accused him of pulling my leg (although he probably meant for me to walk a little bit).  We didn't walk over, but we continued to try and see it as we were driving out of the parking lot.  Also, for some reason, this museum has a live wild Elk.  With a 12+ point antlers.  It was so regal and gentle while eating carrots out of the hands of 3 year old children, yet he was also so very wild and most certainly untamed.

 

F*ck you point!

Oh the next day...  Yup, we climbed to the TOP Thunderhead peak.  Which is normally a ski run in the winter, with the gondola running in the summer for mountain bikers (crazy fast) and downhill hikers.  Julia and I, we are adventurers, so we don't hike downhill unless we've hiked uphill!  As I looked up  from the bottom, I saw the halfway point where the gondola goes past a support pole and told myself that was the top.  And when I huffed and puffed up to that point, I was so relieved that I actually celebrated!  HAH!  I said "Julia, don't tell me that this isn't the top".  She said nothing and just kept hiking.  Ugh.  That was maybe halfway.  Maybe 30 minutes later we made it to f*ck you point.  Julia adequately named it such because you think you're almost done, but when you look up, the top is still so very very far away.

Almost the top

Needless to say, I survived!  And the views were stunning.  And we got to take the gondola down!  Which I much prefer to hiking downhill.  By the end I felt like I had scaled the Matterhorn.  Later I checked the distance and elevation, it was less than 4 miles and just 2000 feet.  It's amazing how I can look at something and make all these crazy assumptions that really color how I feel about the whole situation while I'm trying to tackle it.  I saw the impossible Matterhorn, I complained about how hard it was... pretty much the whole time... but when I finished I realized that it was totally doable and I felt great.  Julia, on the other hand, used run or hike up this mountain everyday and was perfectly content to walk in nature and talk to flowers.  I thanked my dear friend for the challenge and the positive attitude and putting up with my whining.

Julia's "we just scaled the Matterhorn and there's a rainbow!" pose

Before the hike I asked Julia "what if I can't do it?", she told me "I know you can do it.  And I don't usually think about whether or not I can do something until it gets to the point where I can't actually do it, and at that point I figure I can just turn around".  How profound and simple.  I have much to learn.

And for this accomplishment, we were rewarded with a blindingly bright rainbow, coloring the whole sky and showing us the way home.

My predictably and somewhat humorously unadventurous pose

The rest of our adventures were more to my comfortable suburban taste.  They included elixers, donuts, a to die for breakfast sandwich, shopping, and of course, Julia playing with her food.

And now some flowers and other pretty pictures.