twoplustwoequalsblog

Today I went into Boston with Tom and Corey to go to the Museum of Science. We wore Legends of the Hidden Temple Shirts, but that’s another story for another day.

The main things we spent any time looking at in the Museum were an area with some Sony Aibos, and the Theater of Electricity. Everything else we either skipped entirely or just walked through quickly. In fact, I don’t think that the Aibo exhibit would have held our interest for very long had not an MoS guy come over and gave us a complete tour of the Aibo. The small crowd that formed around him as he showed off the various features seemed extremely interested, but most of what he was saying was entirely uninteresting to me. At first, he was asking about artificial intelligence, and I told him that I didn’t think the Aibo had any because it was simply an extremely complicated state machine. We simply had different definitions of the word. Then when I asked how programmable the Aibos are, he told me “completely” and pulled up a video of Aibos in the Robocup competition. That didn’t answer my question. Basically, Tom and I were way more interested in the technical details of the robot than the rest of the audience there.

Obviously, the Boston Science Museum, a museum designed to teach and inspire children, wasn’t the ideal place for us to learn about the specifics of how things worked. What the exhibits in the museum are amazing at is showing a concept such that you can grasp how it works and qualitatively feel it, but not completely understand it. I am at the point where I have seen a lot of the things usually covered in a museum. To impress me, you either have to show me something entirely new, or go into a level of depth in a specific subject area that is somewhere between losing my attention interest and just skimming the surface.

I guess what I really want is a science museum for geeky adults.