Photo Hunters: Balanced

Pardon me while I whine: this theme is another hard one! wah! Why can’t we have something like “Victorian” or “urban” or “history”? I’d have loads of stuff for those.

Alas, balanced is this week’s theme. Ah well, it’s probably a good thing to be challenged; keeps you sharp! OK, so here’s what I scrambled to provide!

This is the world’s smallest church. It’s in the middle of a pond, in Oneida, NY. It can hold three people! You can read more about our trip here. I’d say the little thing is well balanced– enough for it to float on the water like that.

Here’s my son and daughter, on the moon, balanced despite the obvious lack of gravity. Photo taken at Syracuse’s Museum of Science and Technology.

Another photo at the MOST. You are supposed to be able to lift that ring and create a large bubble around you. We tried and Read more

The MOST, Syracuse, Part 3

The MOST– the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse, NY, is a big place. We spent the better part of 3 hours exploring everything. Downstairs, the museum has a play area for little kids, and cave-looking rooms with loads of displays and interactive stuff. You can read about our visits in Part 1, Part 2, and a big post about the amazing Toothpick City II.

I loved the coral reef in the fish tank. Wow!

A lot of the displays in the cave halls had to do with the local geology of Syracuse, which is situated in a briny, swampy area of central New York. Syracuse once supplied the nation with much of its salt, up until 1926 when the industry waned. There was a ton of science, geology, and history to absorb. It was a lot of information! Some were a little overwhelmed.

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The MOST, Syracuse, NY: Part 2

You can read Part 1 of our visit here, and about the marvelous Toothpick City II display, here. We spent about 3 hours, exploring everything we could at the museum– it was a blast!

Hands down, the best part was this– a “green room” display that had a TV with a basletball player. You could walk onto the platform in the green area, and appear on the creen with the basketball player! It was SO COOL!! This must be how the modern Star Wars movies are filmed, with live action before a green screen and the animated critters on a TV or something. I just loved this thing!

The kids seemed to really enjoy the Van de Graff generator and other gadgets like it. I think they perhaps enjoyed it a bit TOO much.

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Museum of Science & Technology, Syracuse

We visited the Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science and Technology (MOST) in Syracuse last week. Usually the museum is closed on Mondays, but due to the Easter vacation, they’d opened their doors. The building is situated at the Armory in Syracuse, a traffic-heavy circle in the heart of downtown. It took some navigating to get there. Parking was nowhere to be found (and it was 75 cents per hour, for a limit of two hours). So I parked in a parking lot across from the Erie Canal Museum that we’d visited last year, and we walked to the MOST (a brisk 15 minute walk).

The museum has a very nice planetarium that we’d seen before, years ago. Because of time constraints, I opted to go for just the museum visit. After paying the admission (which was reasonable), we wandered into the main part of the building. To our amazement, we saw a huge platform with oddly-shaped structures on it. Upon closer inspection, we saw that this was the famous Toothpick City II display, ongoing before our eyes! When it’s completed, it will be the largest toothpick structure in the world with almost 4 million toothpicks used when completed! The creator, Stan Munro, was there working on a new creation.

I have already written a post, loaded with photos, about Toothpick City II and Stan’s story. It’s just amazing! And you must go to Stan’s website to see his gallery of other structures. I can’t believe it’s all in toothpicks!

After we oo’ed and ahh’ed for half an hour there, we decided to pull ourselves away and explore the rest of the museum. It’s a HUGE museum, and we were there for 3 hours! The MOST is a science museum, with science-oriented displays and tools to explore and learn more about our world. There is too much there to cover all the bases here– I’ll simply detail some of our favorites, spreading it out into two or three posts.

We enjoyed playing with some lights displays. There’s one on ultraviolet light that we liked. Reminded me so much of the 1980s!

A display showing how monochrome light works was fun.

A human brain. Ick. Wonder who donated it? Someone from the NY legislature?

Ooo and this was cool– surround yourself with a big bubble! None of the kids were very enthusiastic about trying it, but when I begged, they gave in. Making a big bubble is much harder than it looks.

We got everyone involved. Read more

It Is Pretty Neat!

My post about our visit to Toothpick City at the Syracuse MOST got listed in the top ten at Reddit a few days ago, and my traffic soared. It was great, seeing people from every corner of the world check out the amazing toothpick structures by Stan Munro. I took 250 photos of our trip– couldn’t possibly post them all here! So I posted a few more photos at my other blog, the original New York Traveler, and you can see the entire collection at my Flickr page, too.

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