Museum of Science

We really could have spent the entire day here, but we cut things short to catch a NH Fisher Cats game.

First off, we attended a bubbly museum guide's meerkat show-and-tell presentation, which was moderately interesting. On our way out, we walked by a diorama of ... a fisher cat!!!

Things quickly looked up from there. We spent some time with the unlabeled bird exhibit - picking them out on the the computer to find out their names, songs and call signs (er, I mean calls). The woodpeckers' song, like their call, apparently includes their rat-a-tat pecking.

Nearby, a room of East African items (many hides, furniture, bric-a-brack, and these amazingly cool doors) collected by a lieutenant colonel and donated to the museum in honor of his father, a rear admiral:


The room on collections and classification (especially shells) was pretty cool. This ant nest looked more like modern sculpture than anything else:





We lingered in the Mathematica room, and also saw the Whales movie in the OmniMax theater.

The highlight was probably the "Seeing is Deceiving" exhibit featuring MC Escher (not to be confused with MC Hammer):



The Escher drawings and the other optical illusions were all familiar to me, but it was still cool to see them. Three or four of the Escher drawings appeared to be originals, which was really fun. I hadn't seen a 3-D version of the faces/vase illusion before though; it was a slightly lopsided vase on a turntable, so that it looked like the silhouette faces were talking!