USA Page 3
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Of course, the highlight of the Harvard Museum of Natural History is their famous glass flowers. I thought that "glass flowers" meant shiny, ornamental-looking things but these, these were quite something else. They looked very very real.
If nobody had told me that they were made of glass, I may well have mistaken them for being real. They were created using the same techniques that jewellers use to make small bits of ornamental glassware, except the object in this case was to make realistic models of plants.
The level of details was astonishing, especially on plants like these, where there were very fine hairs.
They were mostly models constructed on a 1:1 scale, but some were enlargements and others were even cross-sections of various parts of plants. I still had trouble believing that they were glass...
In addition to the glass flowers, no museum of natural history would be complete without an extensive collection of rocks. I must say that Harvard's collection is the most extensivest collection I have ever seen.
Among them was this Iron meteorite. It has been cut open and polished so you can see the crystaline structure of the inside which was, one would think, probably formed in a zero-gravity environment.
The good thing about having a very extensive collection of rocks, is that some of them are quite pretty.
MIT pure maths people pour over the times crossword. It really is a team effort here and Friday's crossword is supposed to be the hardest one of the week. We flew through yesterday's crossword... and we did the same today... although it did take slightly longer. The moral of this story, if you're into crosswords, come to MIT.
A corridor in MIT. They all look the same... no really, they do. So do all the buildings. I guess they made the architecture uninspiring so the students would spend less time outside ogling at the buildings, and more time inside ogling the maths.
These two scrabble buffs go at it with words that I never knew existed (especially those two-letter ones). Notice the chess clock - yes, scrabble is very competitive here.
After touring MIT, we had a lovely dinner at a Portuguese restaurant, which was generously paid for by the department.
Afterwards, we went to a pub (The Thirsty Scholar) and drank no small amount of beer. That wasn't paid for by the department...
The Boston Museum of Fine Arts... housing much more than fine arts alone.
As is customary in all good museums, there is a section devoted to the archaeology of the ancient near east (one wonders why there is only ONE subject on it at Melbourne Uni). They had a wonderful collection of cylindrical seals which were, in my opinion, superior to the stamp seals... but they were eventually replaced by the stamp seals.
Nick looks at some seals, while i capture a small man on my digital CCD and a blurry lion in the background.
One of the special temporary exhibits which was on was a showcase of some interesting fashion photography. Here is a foot, in a very high-heeled shoe... through an x-ray machine. You can see the buckles...
Here is a very well-decorated harpsichord. It is probably so that whoever is playing it can put a recording on, and nobody will notice his fingers not moving, or the levers not plucking the strings because they are too busy looking at all the lovely decorations.
These are exactly what they look like - glasses. Someone, who was bored at a dinner table one day, decided to do this properly, and tuned up some glasses for dinging in tune...
Some interesting guitars. Notice the one with three neck, clearly evidence for a long standing alien occupation of our planet as one needs at least four arms to play it properly (and humans don't have four arms).
The museum building itself was quite impressive. In the centre, there was a lovely decorated dome.
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