Boulder Scientific Tour
This morning, I got up bright and early, ate some Cheerios, and headed out to a bus waiting to take me and a bunch of other geeks on a tour of some of the scientific facilities in Boulder, Colorado.
Our first stop was the Boulder branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
First, let me say, Boulder is gorgeous. I will definitely have to go back when I'm not stuck with a tour group to explore it more thoroughly, but I think I may want to live there.
But back to the NOAA. We first stopped at the security station outside. A security officer came onto the bus and said that we were all going to have to get off and go through a metal detector, so anything we didn't want to take through the metal detector we should leave on the bus. Being the good Americans we are, we didn't question this, but did as we were told. We were all given temporary name badges, and went through the metal detector, then got back on the bus which took us on to the main building.
Now... since we could leave whatever we wanted on the bus and were given an opportunity to retrieve it before going into the main building, can someone please explain to me what the hell the purpose of the metal detector was? These people need training on how to design a security checkpoint system, because this ain't it.
Anyway, here's my temporary name badge.
Yep. I should have expired... nine minutes ago now. Maybe they were on Greenwich Mean Time.
A half-size prototype of a weather satellite, suspended from the ceiling just inside the door.
Some neat artwork in the lobby.
Pics from the solar observation lab...
Some neat artwork on the wall outside the solar lab.
The blue and white cylindars are sample bottles full of... well... air. The NOAA receives 40,000 samples per year from volunteers and organizations around the world, and analyzes them for levels of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, oxygen, etc.
This is the lab where actual weather forcasts are accurately made... or not.
Just two of the several rows of parallel supercomputers used to model climate change and weather patterns.
Computer simulation only goes so far. This rather cluttered lab is where actual chemical reactions are tested at various pressures. When we entered the lab, our tour guide said, several times, "DO NOT STARE INTO THE FLASHING GREEN LASER!" The first question to be asked by one of my fellow tourists was, while they were looking avidly around the lab, "Where's the laser?"
Got all that?
The air tanks all along the wall are the various types of gasses used in the experiments. The woman who designed the lab (I can't remember her name right now) won a Nobel prize for discovering the chemical process in which CFCs break down the Ozone.
Okay, I've got a lot more, but it's really late. More tomorrow.
Comments
Evidently, they are not as worried about the bus and the people on it. They don't want anyone to blow up the building.
Lucy
My guess is that these people aren't worried about terrorist threats and only make you pass through the metal detectors to satisfy some idiots in DC who say it must be done. This is just their way of thumbing their noses at the system (and you call yourself a geek!).
GMT (or Universal Time as they call it there at NOAA) is currently 6 hours later than your local time (when CO goes off DST it will be 7 hours later). Had they been using that clock you would have expired at 6:00 PM local time.
This makes me miss the days when I worked at the National Severe Storms Lab in Norman. 8:-)
Had they been using that clock you would have expired at 6:00 PM local time.
You mean I was already dead? And I'm dead now?! Wow... I've wondered what it would be like to be a zombie.
What can I say? If I weren't such a fuck-up with numbers I'd major in meterology...I still want to move to Oklahoma and chase tornadoes, though. Just not for NOAA, or the NWS. I'd be--dare I say it?--"off the radar". AHAHAHAHA
Watching a tornado in the distance is even more bizarre, because you're sure that somewhere something is getting fucked up--but everything in your immediate vicinity is perfectly normal. Wwwwweeeeird.