Well, just good chocolate.
San Francisco is much prettier than Los Angeles. I got to spend a week in each recently, and in addition to the gulls and sea lions, I got to visit Ghirardelli Square, the tourist mall that lives in what used to be a chocolate factory. So awesome, and very pretty at night.
The Exploratorium is a classic science museum, with a particular phenomenological style, but it works very well for them. OMSI should have more of their classic exhibits on display, because our visitors haven't seen them in decades, if at all. Two in particular: Light Play is a simple optical bench focusing activity we should copy in the laser lab, and Watch Thief is the editing video activity that we must expand into an entire exhibit.
Among their awesome exhibits was a music experience where tunes are played out of octave. So the first three notes of Row Your Boat are in 3 different octaves, and each following note, while in tune, jumps another octave. A very awesome, challenging experience. There were amazing films about how different people use sound in their life, and an exhibit where you get to be a car mechanic listening for different problems in an engine.
They also had an example of the Stroop Effect in 3 languages. I found the same difficulty reading the colors in Chinese, where I knew only one of the words, as I had in English.
There was also a spectrograph that showed me the different tonalities of different voices, and the different lilts in different phrases – an image of a whole story. It's a tool I've experienced before, but I was in the right playful frame of mind to discover new things with it. (In looking for a good link that explains spectrographs, I was reminded of people who have created sounds that make very distinct pictures on them.)
In a different video section, there was a bunch of cursing that was bleeped out. The kids in the theatre reacted identically to the bleeps as they would have to actual cursing, giggling and murmuring to each other about the exciting inappropriateness of what had just been uttered. I found that amusing and fascinating.
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