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Saturday, August 27, 2011

Arecibo

I'd never thought I'd ever spend this much time in a burger king.

Yesterday we went to the Arecibo Observatory. It's way in the middle of mountainous nowhere (which is typical for telescopes). The drive there made me a little nauseas; there roads just went up and down constantly with sharp turns. On the way back my dad actually took a video of the road. Anyway, it's the biggest single dish radio telescope in the world, or in Spanish (radiotelescopio).

The middle of nowhere (Arecibo)


It's quite large. twss.

I thought it was pretty cool, though there's not much to see there. They have an area with a bunch of science activity booths. Typical museumy stuff, most of which didn't work. Then there's this 20 minute video about a typical day for the observatory or something like that. The production value was pretty low. I appreciated it for the fact that the scientific things said in the video were real, because they were clearly not actors. I would've liked more explanation of how the thing worked. It did give a sense of scale though. They showed some engineers working on the thing and inside the secondary reflector, and you see how tiny they are. After the film everyone goes outside to the the observation deck and you look at it for a while.
Physics tea party.
They had a Nobel Prize
We got back to my grandpa's place just before it started raining. The church band was warming up. I guess the concert was last night. This time they had music followed by talking, repeat. Rather than trying to sleep I watched 20th Century Boys and several episodes of Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood. I still have no idea what happened in 20th Century Boys. I'm gonna need to watch the second one. Regarding FMA, is it just me or do things happen faster in Brotherhood? Everything is very familiar, so I'm not sure if the episodes weren't just reedited or if they're actually different episodes.


The support cables for the secondary reflector

Finally got both of them in a picture. They're quite skittish. 

Woah, Banana Flower.

One of those loud roosters, and my Grandpa's dog, Brownie


Animal Count: 15 lizards, 10 chickens, 5 dogs, 8 horses, 4 (fields of) cows
No new cats yesterday?

1 comment:

Fox Bubbles said...

Awesome! That looks like a lot of fun! Though boo that things were not working in the museum. That is unfortunate.

The banana flower is intennnnse!
Regarding FMA, the first several episodes are the same as the original anime,but the get reaaaally different really fast. I'm not sure if the episodes are more concise, but it is possible? Hope you like brotherhood! And get enough sleep. :) Silly church.