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.