self-archive part thirteen
Seeing is your brain's best guess....This sentence of great wisdom is on a staff member's door. I thought I would share. I am beginning to feel weird about leaving. I read Sally's blog and I think perhaps she may feel the same, Dana too. I am just getting very used to my routine here. I move tonight to North Beach - it will slice my commute into tiny pieces and provide me with more time to wander. I wanted to talk about museum visitors too. After a full week here, I have begun to get annoyed with some of the visitor's. City Vanessa is coming back to life, where as Marcie would say "purple aura" Vanessa is fading and "I'm tired of being herded like cattle, and watching your kid pitch fits" is settling in. Maybe its awesome that I am leaving soon. Watching visitor's interact with the exhibits and each other is pretty depressing for me actually. I feel like everyone is in the business of ruining everything for everybody else. No one can wait their turn and no one can stand it when someone else is having fun, they have to be having fun too. Its strange. I have also seen many parents acting their kids age, and picking on them about one thing or another. Another symptom of our civilization's sickness. People have pretty good attention spans for all the exhibits. The Exploratorium has even published a book about Advanced Prolonged engagement with exhibits, clearly they know what they are doing. I have a short attention span, and even I stick with exhibits too. People really loosen up here. Its not like galleries or art museums where everyone is in admiring mode. Here people are really in play mode. I spoke with an explainer who said when they were a kid, they loved this place the most but had NO idea it was a science museum. I imagine that happens a lot. Blake, my friend, was saying that in Bay area restaurants, (his line of work) parents behave extremely differently from where we grew up.
"When I worked at Steak n' Shake, there were some parents I wanted to call the cops feeling really bad for the kids. "Sit down Johnny (said while pinching the shit out of said child's arm)!" Whereas here, the other day I was waiting a table and while the parents were ordering the child was standing on the table screaming and the parents said "Don't mind him, he's just a boy." "- Quotes taken from Blake
One more difference between Georgia and the Bay Area. Go figure.
In watching visitor's engage with “Bicycle Wheel Gyro”, the first noticeable thing is everyone smiles. It is a chair with a pipe parallel to it that has two bicycle wheels with handles resting on it. The idea is to spin the bicycle wheel while its held by the pipe and then pick it up and sit in the chair. Once in the chair, if you tip the rotating wheel at an angle it propels you and your chair spinning. It does not matter your weight, the force of the wheel will do this. This exhibit is an island just before the skylight area. In an open space, you approach it, and engage. It seems inviting. Everyone stops at it, and if too many people are crowded around it, visitor's generally come stop back again on their way out of the exhibit. This is good form, that you get a second chance to play with things on your way out, since there is one controlled exit/entrance. It didn't use to be, and that was considered a positive thing for its lack of control. I could not find a date for when that changed. People are anxious to wait their turn, and often anxiously spin the second bike wheel as if their were a pitcher warming up in the bull pen. Many of the kids physically stop their friends chair from spinning, parents certainly don't protest their children's behavior as it speeds up their “day at the museum”. On average, there seems to be a semi-standard two kids to parent ratio with each person taking about a minute and a half at their turn spinning. This means each average group spends about 4 and one half minutes at the “Bicycle Wheel Gyro”. There is also a seemingly random chain hanging down from the center sign, and every boy-child (as opposed to girl-child) grabs it. I could find no function for this chain.
"When I worked at Steak n' Shake, there were some parents I wanted to call the cops feeling really bad for the kids. "Sit down Johnny (said while pinching the shit out of said child's arm)!" Whereas here, the other day I was waiting a table and while the parents were ordering the child was standing on the table screaming and the parents said "Don't mind him, he's just a boy." "- Quotes taken from Blake
One more difference between Georgia and the Bay Area. Go figure.
In watching visitor's engage with “Bicycle Wheel Gyro”, the first noticeable thing is everyone smiles. It is a chair with a pipe parallel to it that has two bicycle wheels with handles resting on it. The idea is to spin the bicycle wheel while its held by the pipe and then pick it up and sit in the chair. Once in the chair, if you tip the rotating wheel at an angle it propels you and your chair spinning. It does not matter your weight, the force of the wheel will do this. This exhibit is an island just before the skylight area. In an open space, you approach it, and engage. It seems inviting. Everyone stops at it, and if too many people are crowded around it, visitor's generally come stop back again on their way out of the exhibit. This is good form, that you get a second chance to play with things on your way out, since there is one controlled exit/entrance. It didn't use to be, and that was considered a positive thing for its lack of control. I could not find a date for when that changed. People are anxious to wait their turn, and often anxiously spin the second bike wheel as if their were a pitcher warming up in the bull pen. Many of the kids physically stop their friends chair from spinning, parents certainly don't protest their children's behavior as it speeds up their “day at the museum”. On average, there seems to be a semi-standard two kids to parent ratio with each person taking about a minute and a half at their turn spinning. This means each average group spends about 4 and one half minutes at the “Bicycle Wheel Gyro”. There is also a seemingly random chain hanging down from the center sign, and every boy-child (as opposed to girl-child) grabs it. I could find no function for this chain.
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