Homely Scientist

Happy New Year all!  I took a break over the holidays, so I have a backlog of stuff to write about (like a flying Patrick the Starfish launcher toy).  I’m going to start off with my visit to the Royal B.C. Museum the kids, my mom, my brother, and I enjoyed last week.

The lead exhibit (and I assume it’s a travelling one) that the billboards advertise as "Sexy Beasts", but is all about animal mating strategies.  Sound boring?  I thought so too, but I was wrong.  Way wrong.  The whole exhibit, with lots of hands-on stuff for people to do, is about the colours, sounds, smells, etc that animals employ to propagate the species.  Yeah, this could get a little nasty, but when you get into stuff like at what depth a fish’s colours are brightest to attract a mate or an orchid that mimics a female bee to get pollinated you realize that it’s some pretty amazing stuff.

Since I have an annual pass to the museum I’m going to try to go back and really go through the exhibit (chasing a four-year-old really limits the amount of reading and learning you can do).  Beyond the coolness of the whole exhibit, which I wish I could go into more but I didn’t get to experience that much of it, this is also a lesson about science.

With all things in science you need to keep an open mind.  I figured that the exhibit would be boring and not worth it.  I had a closed mind about it.  Nope, I was wrong.  To be a good science geek you need to be open to new and challenging ideas.  You need to be able to try out an idea that might challenge the conventional wisdom, but might lead to a breakthrough or new discovery.

If you want to take a look at the few (good) pictures I was able to take, here’s my Flickr set from the day.  BTW, the RBCM just added (or recently added) an aquatic exhibit like your in a submarine (very Capt. Nemo-esque) … my son T had a blast pretending to steer and looking through the periscope.

Tags: Royal B.C. Museum, learning science

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