Today was "Take Your Children to Work Day". I walked with the boys over to school and spoke to their teachers to explain I was taking them with me to the University. We took the bus up to campus and then walked over to the registration area in the student union. The boys had been particularly interested in a driving simulation that you had to sign up for but, unfortunately, it had filled up instantly upon the registration opening, and no slots were left. We walked through and found a couple of other activities that looked like fun and then had some of the breakfast that had been provided. Daniel, who normally eats almost nothing for breakfast ate three mini bagels (plain) and a container of yogurt.
We had more than an hour before the first activity, so we stopped by my office, checked on the fish, and I got them to do some work in the intro labs (setting the names of individual workstations -- I haven't found a way to set the LocalHostName parameter using a reverse lookup or something.) We looked at some hydra, planaria, and a crayfish that happened to be down there. Afterwards we visited the business office, walked through the greenhouse, and went to visit Bob Wilce. Bob visits me with technical questions on a regular basis and always asks about the boys. He was tickled to see them and gave them a warm, grandfatherly visit -- he let them look at the algae he was working on through his stereoscope and showed them some herbarium cards he had produced. Then we hurried across campus to psychology.
We had signed up for play with Sniffy the Virtual Rat, but I didn't know where Tobin hall was. We found students to direct us and arrived just as the program began. Sniffy is a simulation of a rat to help students learning operant and classical conditioning techniques: first you associate the sound with the food, then reinforce when the rat stands up. The kids had a great time, although they eventually began asking questions like "How do you make the rat die?"
They provided a voucher for us to buy lunch for the kids at the Hatch. The boys wanted to get popcorn chicken and fries. At first I was worried I would have to get my food at the same place, but they were flexible and let me get my lunch at the Indian place.
In the afternoon, we visited the herpetology collection. The boys had a great time seeing the turtles, snakes, lizards, toads, and frogs. A student showed us around at first and then Al arrived with a couple more families and got out some of the animals for a closer look.
At 2pm, we visited the chemistry department for a whole set of "activities" -- in point of fact the kids only got to observe, but the demonstrations were pretty good. They watched pennies having zinc deposited on them (makig them look silvery) and then heated until the zinc and copper formed brass (making them look golden). In another part, they saw some exothermic reactions that produced steam and smoke. In another part, they saw some tricks using liquid nitrogen and dry ice. In the end, each kid got a little bag with two of the treated pennies.
On the way home, we stopped off at a place I had seen once in the bowels of another building. There is a shop on campus where they blow glass to make custom glassware to support the research labs. We stopped by the door and peered in. The fellow had two torches and was finishing a small piece of connected tubes. He invited us in to watch and got us glasses that blocked yellow light made the flames easier to look at. He had a small rubber hose attached to on opening and the others were all blocked off with corks. We watched while he connected the small apparatus to a larger one and finished off some rounded ends. He would heat an area and use little puffs of breath to push out the softened glass to create the rounded areas.
When we finally walked home, I was exhausted and had to take a nap. It is a lot less work to just go to work.
StevenBrewer