Day: January 26, 2009

[photos posted by Mommy, captions and comments by Daddy]

Mommy had a scrapbooking Saturday in San Jose, and it was too cold and rainy to play at the park, so Andy and Leilani finally made it to the Children’s Discovery Museum.

Side note for the San Jose city planners: having nothing but paid parking lots all over the downtown does not make it a big and lively city. $5 to park next to the museum and such bad traffic circulation (even without traffic) that you just can’t drive around the block to find a free spot—you got me once again.

Anyways, when we got there, Leilani was very happy to see that the Alice in Wonderland exhibit was being held over, even if Daddy didn’t think the art was very well done:

That wasn’t Daddy’s only gripe: the flower above this climbing structure said “Do not climb” but I didn’t take a picture of it because I don’t want to be a grumpy old man. Too many of the exhibits were just mini science experiments: turn the crank to make electricity, see how air bubbles rise faster in water than in oil, etc. We tried the Tech Museum in San Jose last time, and that was far too scientific for Leilani, so we were hoping for something else here. I guess San Jose will always be too techy and geeky.

Case in point: this next exhibit was all about circles, it just happened to have a few silk scaves to dress up in because SE Asian people make circular basket boats–not pictured were a few play vegetable the children had to fight over to put them into circular baskets to play market.

But on the positive side, the museum is huge and there are plenty of just playing things. There was a real ambulance and a real firetruck (parked inside), and this stagecoach too, like the one we saw in the (San Jose) parade. Daddy had never been in a stagecoach before, so he tried this too.

But perhaps the most unique and best part of the museum was the water room. Several large fountains and air tubes that shoot the plastic balls around, even a whirlpool that sucks them under water. In the part reserved for little kids, Leilani could place the balls in the water stream and make them balance there.

In the evening, Leilani helped Mommy to make the dough for baking bread:
See the finished bread here

Leilani quote of the week: “I’m getting too old for this!” [tosses a ribbon into her box of dolls] “My babies can have it now.”

Speaking of techy and geeky, Mountain View (near San Jose) has the Computer History Museum. It’s close to the freeway, free admission and free parking (ahh, suburbia). We are computer geeks at heart (except Leilani of course), and even though it was Daddy’s idea, Mommy enjoyed it too.

The reason we visited: the Babbage Machine replica. Invented in 1837, 2nd replica built 2008 and works, polynomial sequence calculator with integrated integrated printer (not shown).

Besides the Babbage machine, they had a few displays where Leilani was bored. But then we gave her the camera and we all spent 30 minutes in the room where they just had aisles of old machines with little explanation signs. The parents got to see and learn a lot, and Leilani had a lot of subject matter for her visual exploration.

All remaining photos taken by Leilani, uncropped and unedited, but no clickable hi-res (interestingly, the scale of her pictures doesn’t require hi-res). Disclaimer: 2 of these photos are in this post because somebody else likes them (not Mommy who chose them :-)

<for geeks only>One cube of a Cray 3, 1993, theoretically 15.17 GFLOPS (I think the iMac is still measured in MFLOPS) and the whole system one big Terraflopp (only 1 system ever shipped, 0.3G$). Not full of stars, “just” a bunch of processor boards back-to-back, 16 processors per board, and I think the whole thing had to be submerged in liquid nitrogen to run.</geek>

A bench, not a computer:

A sign, not a computer screen:

The back of a display board, not a computer:

Leilani approached the boy on her own to take his picture. I told her she had to ask his Mommy first, who then thought it was cute and took pictures of Leilani.

Daddy likes this one: Leilani doesn’t just have us pose, she takes interesting candid pictures of us too.

The mandatory foot picture, this time with Leilani’s favorite floor markings :-)