The Pursuit of Science.

I had an absolutely amazing day yesterday with H. in downtown Dallas. I was going to try and split it into more than one post, but we've got some more fun stuff planned this week, so I might not get a chance to post for the next couple of days. So let's start at the beginning.

This building is so expertly designed. I wish I took more pictures of the outer garden. 

Our first stop was the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. It was really easy to get to, very easy to find the parking, so I give it two thumbs up for ease of access. Once inside the building, we got our tickets and took the advice of our ticketer to start at the top of the museum and work our way down. On the top floor were the dinosaur exhibits. Even though I'm not a dinosaur rookie, there were still so many things I had not seen before that were mind blowing and creepy and ominous all at the same time. Like this little guy that I can't remember the name of because who would take a picture of the information when you can take a picture of a creepy fossil?

This was a specific type of sea creature. It looks like an octopus crossed with a jellyfish. 

I'm really glad we went on a weekday - there were only two groups of schoolchildren that I could identify, and everyone else was just two's and three's meandering through the museum. We only had to wait to try the earthquake machine, from which I learned it's easy to think you can stand securely while the ground moves under you, when it's actually surprisingly difficult. It seemed to me that the kids were not very interested in one of my favorite exhibits - the Gems and Minerals Hall. I was in awe of everything on display; it felt like we were in a cave the way they had the lights and the ambient music turned down soft and dark. Because of the way the exhibits were lighted, each piece was absolutely stunning in person, but was difficult to photograph. With that in mind, here are some of my favorites from the exhibit. And I should probably mention that there were museum employees present when I took these photos, and they didn't make any move to stop me, so I feel safe posting these photos (The Dallas Museum of Art is a completely different story).

This was my hands-down favorite of the group on display. I'm still learning its name - rhodochrosite. It's a manganese carbonite compound commonly found along manganese-silver veins; one of the better-known veins is in the Sweet Home Mine in Alma, Colorado, although there is also a prominent vein in Peru. Turns out Colorado actually made this their state mineral. It also comes in other formations, two of which were on display and I couldn't believe they were all the same mineral. The color isn't as true to life as the first picture, but I thought these were too cool not to show.

This is something of a rose formation - unsure what the actual formation is called. 

A slightly larger rose formation, perhaps. 

On the very bottom floor of the Perot Museum is the Sports lab. This where a group of scientists had the genius idea of setting up a video screen capable of portraying something very fast running in a single direction, and giving you the opportunity to run alongside it. I wonder if anyone has beat the video. They have lots of things to choose from. The two-year-old in front of us chose the tyrannosaurus rex, but somehow didn't make it to the finish line before the projection did. Poor guy. They used to have Felix Jones (running back for the Dallas Cowboys), but had to pull him when he got traded to wherever he is now and replaced him with two Olympic women sprinters. H. and I chose the cheetah. The cheetah placed first, but H. was only about a second behind it, and I was a second behind H. I think it's safe to say that even though we couldn't outrun a cheetah, we would definitely outwit it in battle. 

There was also a reflex tester station: a yardstick with a magnetic top would hang in place for a few seconds (that varied each time) then release and you would catch it. On the stick were hundredths of seconds instead of inches. I ended up with a 0.22 second reflex time, and H. with a 0.24. We both tried it twice, because he thought mine was a fluke and I thought his had to be better, but we both got the same numbers the second time around. So now I know which of us would be in a reflex competition in the Amazing Race. 

There was also a motion lab - they had a super slow-motion camera capture about five seconds of real-time action (ie: kicking a soccer ball, making a hockey slapshot, throwing a football, doing a tennis serve, etc.) and you got to watch it later on a computer screen. They have famous people on archive to compare your performance to, and it was hilarious how poorly I can kick a football. I'll have to figure out how to put the video up here sometime. 

Well, that's all for now. I've got a couple more mineral photos that are just interesting to look at, but I'll save those for their own mini-post. Right now I have lots more vacation-type things to do. Adios, folks!