NYC Day 3.1 - Parks and Museums Day

Finally, on Day 3 we got north of 44th street, and wandered up to Central Park. We walked up the west side of the Park, past the defacto John Lennon Memorial Zone. The only positive I can say about that is that that it is rather remarkable the number of people who show up to pray at the site where a mosaic memorializes one of the world’s most famous atheists by spelling out the title of a song that is nothing short of an ode against theism and capitalism.

We didn’t go up there to see the Dakota as much as to go to the Museum of Natural History. This is a big museum with remarkable collections, but I was there to see two cool things: “Space stuff” and Dinosaurs.

The Space stuff started out really exciting, then got progressively less so. There was a big, spherical, planetarium-type theatre in the middle of the great hall, and collected about it, several models of planets, to scale. See the photo below, the planetarium is the big curve on the left, and the 4 gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were hung there, to scale. I didn’t see the Earth anywhere, but I calculated out it would be about the size of a tennis ball.

It wasn’t the incompleteness of the models that disappointed me, it was the movie the planetarium. In the lobby, they had a short video featuring one of the real rock stars of astrophysics, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I think Neil is one of the best spokespeople for Science in the world today, and was glad to see he was going to be narrating the movie.

Alas, the movie starts and it is a female voice. I’m hunting for it while listening: Pamela Gay? No, too urban-sounding. Jill Tarter? No, too Jewish. Wait! Is that Whoopie Freaking Goldberg!?! Crap.

You see, this is a problem. There are some incredible scientists, and some incredible science educators, in the United States. My cult-like adoration of Carl Sagan aside, I can think of at least four people in this picture alone who do incredible science, are phenomenally eloquent, and can narrate a movie about the history of the universe from a point of knowledge at least as well as the twit celebrity from the View who, even on Star Trek, was so far from being a scientist that they made her the Starship Bartender!

But this is America. Even in a building dedicated to science and scientific discovery, people won’t listen to someone talk for 20 minutes unless they are “famous”, even if that fame comes from starring in a movies with Ted Danson. In the United States, “Famous Scientist” is a sorry contradition in terms. Seriously, name me the most famous living American scientist. Tough one, isn’t it?

Ok, back down on Earth. After Whoopie told me about the life cycle of stars (the ones in the sky, not the ones of which she is a group), we wandered down to the dinosaurs. The dinosaur (and, to be more inclusive, prehistoric life) collection at the museum was remarkable. Probably to shut up whiny science geeks like me (see paragraph above) their dinosaur collection was in two large rooms, divided in the only logical way: by the relative orientations of the ischia and pubes. The Hall of the Sauriscia had beautifully-mounted samples of theropods and full-sized sauropods, raptors were shown adjacent to transitional birds and early birds, so you could trace the (now obvious) evolution from dinosaur to bird.

In the Hall of the Ornithiscia, there was a great collection of armoured, spiked, and incomplete but compelling plant-eaters.

But it wasn’t all dinosaurs:

The Permian synapsid Dimetredon (a distant antecedent of reptiles and mammals)

Armoured mammals

Mammals from the Age of “Holy Freaking Tusks”

Placoderms (early jawed fish)

Turtles (which Tig regard with significant skepticism)

flying reptiles (there were no flying dinosaurs, right?)

 And a life-sized blue whale to put things into perspective:

We only saw about a third of the museum, even than at a pace faster than ideal. We only saw a third of the gift shops! Really, we should have spent two days in this museum, but there was much more to see across the park…