AAMAS Continued

A bit sleepy tonight, but feel like advancing the blog, so you’ll have to put up with a somewhat sleepy and disoriented style, and less editing than usual…

Wednesday we spent a bit of time in Central Park and at the museum of natural history. It was super-hot, and at the museum it was almost impossible to find the entrance. They have a large raised quad with water play areas and stuff, and it looks like that’ll be the entrance, but actually the entrance is hidden half underground…

Also irritating at the museum is the fact that they have security guards to check your bags and that knives are not permitted. This brings me to a general rant about the people in the United States right now. They are scared shitless. It’s ridiculous. Here’s a digression about knives. We were at lunch at the conference, and having just had my front tooth installed (see previous entry) I wasn’t biting into things like freaking hard apples. So, I whip out my trusty Leatherman Juice CS4 and started slicing away. As one, the 8 or so people around the table winced, inhaling sharply, and bent away from me. Several people asked how I got the knife through the airport, and how I got into the country with it. Have these people never heard of checked baggage? Now it wasn’t like I was brandishing this knife or something, and it is a freaking pocket knife not some 16” hunting extravaganza… Geez people, knives were invented by hominoids many thousands of years ago, and they are a basic survival tool. You could probably make an argument that humans would never have evolved into the ridiculous knife-hating freaked out scaredy-cats that those americans were without frickin knives. Get over yourselves people.

Anyway, the security guards were lazy and so I and my leatherman were allowed into the museum. It was pretty cool, although the animal dioramas could have been (and actually may well have been) done by the same person who did the one at the Ottawa museum of nature. Not thrilling, but pretty.

Not sure if Tony reads this blog, but if so, here’s the musk oxen!

We also saw the hall devoted to indiginous people of the area. And, in the coolest part, we saw the hall of metorites. This was cool, as they had the largest meteorite fragment in the world there, all 24 iron tons of it. Somewhere along the way someone at the museum had the brilliant thought that if this 24 tons of iron made it through the atmosphere, hurtling at speeds of up to 10 000 km/h then it likely won’t be much damaged by curious hands. (This person almost certainly wouldn’t have had a problem with my apple-eating.) Therefore, most of the metorites that are too heavy to steal are available for touching. Pretty cool. One of them had been sliced open at the end, revealing a crystallized iron pattern not found in any “earth-originating” iron.

Never saw iron crystal before

Central park was beautiful, and much more varied than I thought it would be. We saw this cool castle (now a weather station) that we were able to go inside of. We also walked through a very wooded area called the Ramble, which was very nice. (Although we did inadvertantly locate a naturist area in there…) One weird thing about the park was that many of the grassy areas were fenced off. We noticed this elsewhere in the city as well, with Parks New York seeming to have missed the point about green space. Many of the fences had open areas to allow access to the park, but these fences (all temporary plastic ones) really got in the way of the nice parkey atmosphere. I don’t want to be a downer about it though, the parts of Manhattan that we visited had surprisingly many parks with lush grass and mature trees. It definitely added a relaxed feel to the city which would otherwise have been missing.

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