Long Update

Sorry I missed updating, I've been a little busy. On Friday Nobu and I went to see the park and the national science museum in Ueno. The park was hosting a flowering bonsai competition, which was really beautiful. They had somewhere between 75 and 100 bonsais, lined up along the main street in the park.

The national science museum had a really wide range of stuff, ranging from natural history to more modern science exhibits. Nobu was really bored by the natural history, it was stuff that he'd already seen a lot of, but I thought some of it was interesting. The early Japanese history, on the cavemen, and the evolution of early civilization in Japan was cool. I'd never seen much on that. It was really similar to early American history, or history anywhere for that matter, but it was still interesting to see the minor differences.

The modern science parts of the museum we really good. The first part we visited was targeted more towards children, but it was really good anyway. They had a bunch of cool physics demos; a really powerful electromagnet, Thompson's ring, that demo with the bicycle wheel and the stool, some neat static electricity demos, a pulley setup.

The next room was on mechanical innovation, and had a bunch of really cool mechanical setups. Nobu liked this part a lot better. They had a rotary engine, and a bunch of early clocks. I thought the coolest part were the mechanical equation solvers. The one pictured could solve a set of equations with 9 linear variables, so nine equations of the form ax1+bx2+cx3+....+hx8=ix9. Pretty amazing stuff.

The last part of the museum we visited was on modern physics. It was probably one of the best displays I've ever seen at a museum. It started out on a section explaining basic measures in physics, and demonstrating the units of measurement: meter, second, kilogram, amp, ohm, volt, mol, etc. all with hands on activities. The rest of it featured a whole bunch of really cool, important physics experiments. The included the Cavendish experiment, a demonstration of enthalpy, some demonstrations of spectral lines, a Michelson interferometer, and an experiment measuring the speed of light using a flywheel and a fiber cable (similar to the rotating mirror experiment).

The coolest part of everything was probably the cloud chamber the museum had. It used super-cooled alcohol vapor to detect ionizing particles. So, you could watch through the window, and you would see paths form in the mist whenever an electron, a proton, or a cosmic ray passed through it. I took a video, I'll upload it once I get time.

Yesterday we went to Akihabra and the Sensoji temple. Akihabra is also known as Akihabara Electric Town and is a large shopping district that sells a lot of video games, computer equipment, electronics, anime, etc. Essentially its one gigantic shopping area for nerds (otaku in Japanese). Nobu was looking for merchendise related to a fairly obscure video game he plays, so we went around to a bunch of stores looking for things. In Akihabra most of the stores have tiny storefronts, and then go up like 5 or 6 stories. Unfortunately the merchendise was usually in the upper stories, above the games and manga (comics) so we did a lot of walking. We also saw a lot of weird stuff. Like giant pillows with anime school-girls on them, mouse pads with anime school-girls on them and breast-shaped gel wrist-wrests. A lot of things with anime school-girls on them. It was a little strange at times, but a lot of fun overall. Some really awesomely geeky stuff.

After Akihabara we went to the Sensoji temple. It was raining, so we went through a little fast. It was really really crowded, and seemed like a real tourist pull. The building was really amazing, but I can't say it was particularly Japanese or even really like a temple. Like I said it was really crowded and definately a tourist trap. I'd like to try going back during the week, when it might not be so crowded.

Today Nobu and I moved again, back from Sa-chan's (Nobus's Mom's friend) house to Nobu's family's apartment. I had a lot of fun staying with Sa-chan and her husband, and I'm really glad I got the opportunity to meet them. I have 3 more days before the program starts. Hopefully we'll find some more cool stuff.