what about the plastic animals?

Tesla's Wardenclyffe Laboratory

Around the turn of the last century Nikola Tesla, inventor of alternating current electricity transmission and father of radio, built a laboratory on the Wardenclyffe estate in Shoreham, NY, just a few miles from the Wading River beach.  The lab was designed by Stanford White and largely paid for by J. P. Morgan as a radio transmission facility.  Secretly though, Tesla was working on a method to wirelessly transmit electricity around the world.  This gets to be a complicated story so I'm going to skip the details and say that Tesla ran out of money and was forced to abandon his project and sell the facility.  Behind the building was a 187-foot high transmitting tower.  The tower was torn down in 1917 for fear that the Germans might use it to send signals back across the Atlantic. 

The building changed hands over the years and currently Agfa, the photographic film company, is trying to sell it.  A non-profit group would like to purchase the site and turn it into the Tesla science center.  Agfa won't lower their price because the company wants to cut their losses after spending millions cleaning the land of toxic chemicals.  Thus, the building sits in real estate purgatory today.

Flakes

Amidst a mild snowy day panic that sent us home at noon today a colleague and I noticed that very flakey snow crystals were landing on our coats. Pretty, aren't they?

More Snowflakes:

Wilson Bentley photographs

Paula Nadelstern ice crystals and snowfall quilts based on Bentley's photographs.

Photos and everything there is to know about snowflakes and snow crystals from Kenneth Libbrecht.

Science, This Exit

Seen on I-35 while driving from Des Moines to Ames.   A railroad connects Huxley and Maxwell.  I wonder the person responsible for naming towns along the railway named these two after Thomas Henry Huxley and James Clerk Maxwell?

The Littlest Observatory

Saw this little astronomical observatory on US 169 a few miles north of Winterset.

Blue Sky

The sky turned a lovely shade of blue this afternoon.  If you stare too long you'll see an X in the middle of the photo.  It's some sort of lens flare.

Crossing 116th Street at Broadway this evening I saw this guy.  A couple of years ago he won a prize for his glow-in-the-dark nematodes.  The weird thing is that at the same intersection several years ago I saw this lady, who won a similar prize, but for writing.

National Radio Astronomy Observatory

The Reber Telescope

Blue Checker for getting around the campus

The Green Bank Telescope from afar

Continuing on our drive through West Virginia we find ourselves visiting the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank.  We also find ourselves referring to ourselves in the majestic plural which, if Mark Twain is correct, means we have a tapeworm.

The NRAO at Green Bank has the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.  The GBT is 100 x 110 meters, or two acres, big.  You can sort of see it through the rain in the bottom photo.  As a side note, we are tempted to return to West Virginia to photograph every item named after Senator Byrd.  We reckon that project will take us several months.

We couldn't take pictures of the GBT from nearby because the electronics in our digital camera would interfere with the telescope's reception.  The whole area is within the National Radio.  There's no cell phone reception and only a couple of radio and TV signals.  To minimize electronic interference while moving around the campus, NRAO employees use old diesel cars, mainly Checkers.  Parts for the old cars are beginning to get scarce.

The observatory has a nifty science center and public tours are free.  At the campus entrance is the first radio telescope ever built.  It was constructed by amateur astronomer Grote Reber in his Wheaton, Illinois backyard in 1937.  Reber donated the telescope to Green Bank in the 1960s and it was painted a patriotic red, white and blue for the 1976 Bicentennial.

Unrelated:  We have been spearfishing on Lake Winnebago.

Hill Arches

I have a charming story to relate!  Before last fall I hadn't been to the New York Botanical Garden in years.  On Sunday I went for the third time in six months.  The garden is having two exhibits I wanted to see:  Darwin's Garden and Moore in America.  The latter is the largest collection of Henry Moore's works ever exhibited in North America.  Both exhibits are excellent and well-worth seeing.  If that's not enough excitement there's a giant turtle in the Bronx River.

On to the charming story!  There were two boys, about four years old each, and a guy I took for their father when I approached Hill Arches, the sculpture above.  Then I noticed the guy wasn't paying attention to the kids and subsequently went away.  I waited for the kids to return to their nowhere nearby parents so I could take a clean photo of the sculpture.  A different family walked up.  Their son, who was about the same age as the original kids, tentatively approached the sculpture.  The original kids stopped playing, threw back their shoulders, balled up their tiny fists and got in the face of the new guy.  One kid started yelling "F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!  F*** you a$$!" 

Charming, right? 

The new kid ran bawling back to his mother.  Mom, and everyone else within earshot, was astonished.  A woman walked over from the row of tulip trees to the left.  The mother of the offended boy said "Your son said 'F*** you a$$' to my child."  The arriving woman replied "That's not my son," then grabbed him and his companion and walked away.  Everyone but me took their leave of the Henry Moore sculpture and I got my picture.

Visiting the Science Barge

The Science Barge

Zak, Sustainable Systems Director, builder of the solar panels, and excellent tour guide.

Little plants germinating in "rock wool" i.e. basaltic rock spun into fibers.

Cucumbers are ready for picking

Greenhouse cooling system - when the greenhouse gets too hot the cardboard is moistened and air is blown through to cool the house by evaporation.

In writing yesterday's post I lost my train of thought and forgot the punchline.  Before eating the gelato and searching for ice cream recipe books I had lunch at the Shake Shack, where I enjoyed the a tasty, thick vanilla shake.  It was a true dairy overload day!  Okay, now on to today's wit and wisdom...

Thanks to a story on Gothamist I visited the Science Barge on Saturday.  The Science Barge is a demonstration project of New York Sun Works, a non-profit that promotes "sustainability by building and testing ecologically responsible systems for the production of energy, clean water, and food, and by scientifically observing and measuring human impacts on the local environment." 

The barge itself is a sustainable urban farm that is touring the city's waterfront parks over the next couple of years.  Power for the barge comes from solar panels, wind turbines and biodiesel and waste vegetable oil.  Water comes from captured rain and purified river water.  They are hydroponically growing cucumbers (that looked great), tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and basil.  A recent addition is a school of tilapia.  All that is done with no waste water and no net carbon dioxide emissions.

New York City's population is expected to grow by a million people over the next twenty-five years.  All those extra people gotta eat.  NY Sun Works, has estimated that the rooftop space in the city is sufficient to grow enough vegetables to meet the city's needs.  Whether that is practical is another matter, the point is with a little creativity and ingenuity a lot more food could be sustainably grown within the city.

The Science Barge is docked at Pier 84 (at 44th Street) through June.  In July the barge moves to Riverside Park (at 72nd) and then onto Stuyvesant Cove Park (23rd St) in September.  Tours are free.

Mysterious Fire at the Museum

1 second exposure.  Note man standing next to tree near center.  No fire or smoke.  Trees in background all green.

4 second exposure.  Smoke and fire in the background.  Man has disappeared.  Big tree is disappearing.  Trees in background losing their greenery.

8 second exposure,  Fire dying down.  Lots of burned trees.  Big tree to right of center has fallen.  New man appears.

8 second exposure.  Smoke clears some more.  Tree to right of center begins to reappear.

There's this one diorama about forest fires in the American Museum of Natural History that has always intrigued me.  The diorama sits off in a little nook by itself.  The window is maybe a third as tall as other displays in the hall.  It is recessed several inches into the wall.  Most intriguing, however, is that the display is dark.  Very, very dark.  So dark that you can see some trees on the right foreground but not much else.  Since the diorama has been dark every time I've looked at it over the years, I assume that it isn't a matter of a blown light bulb.

When I took a look last week I noticed that the ledge was large enough that I could rest my camera on the shelf and take a long exposure photo.  I took a half-dozen or so photos, changing the length of exposure and other settings.

Imagine my surprise when I get home and look at the photos on my computer.  There's either ghosts in the display or it is cleverly animated.  How did they do that?  Now I have to go back and be the strange guy who stares at the diorama for 15 minutes.

Little Items in a Big Museum

DeLong Star Ruby

Carved by Faberge

Very small beets, carrots and onions in the Hall of New York State Environment

Flowering apple trees diorama

Farmer on his Deere

In contrast to the Museum of Modern Art, the American Museum of Natural History was eerily empty on Wednesday afternoon.  I spent most of my visit in the Hall of Gems and Minerals and the Hall of New York State Environment.  The latter hardly ever gets any visitors, yet has truly amazing dioramas.  Check out the details in the above photos.  The hall is on the dark side so my photos didn't come out so great.  You have to pass through the NYS Environment hall and the Hall of Meteorites to get to the Hall of Gems and Minerals.  The gems and minerals location is a bit rundown, but the collections are incredible.

If you've been reading the diary you'll know that I'm descended from DeLong's.  Apparently not the branch of the DeLong family that donated the ruby to the museum in 1937.  That ruby was one of several gems stolen in a much-celebrated 1964 jewel heist.