As George is
soon to enter graduate school at the University of Maryland, we thought it wise enough to head on up for their annual Maryland Day. Honestly, when we sat down to look over the booklet for the thing, we realized there were
tons of tents and exhibits we wanted to visit and didn't know how we would cram it all in! It wasn't as difficult to see everything as we thought, though, and we had a good old time checking out the University's offerings. Like ice cream made with liquid nitrogen.
Truth is, I appreciate any demonstration that includes free ice cream. And on the other side of the temperature scale, a fire tornado!!! Seriously, I beg you to answer this question: what is cooler than a fire tornado? If you answer anything other than Chuck Norris, you are wrong.
The thing on the left is for cooling stuff down to a tiny fraction of 1 degree Kelvin (which is very, very cold). The thing on the right is a superconductor on magnet "rails." It floated back and forth on the track - super cool!
I know this is weird, but I can't get enough of these white boards you see around physics and math departments. They are filled with such lovely graphs and charts and numbers and equations. I'm always photographing them and showing them here like anyone else in the world is fascinated with this stuff from a purely aesthetic place. (That is, plenty of people are interested for the actual maths and things.)
And it screws up my formatting of the post, but I can't leave off this completely freakin' awesome fire tornado shot. Because what my blog needs is more FIRE!! This was by far the best thing we did all day. Thanks UMD!
