I’m a law student in Washington, DC - I’m living my geek vacation, thank you very much. (Though not much longer, sadly - graduating in three weeks.)
Seriously - every time I’m just walking around the city, and I see the Capitol or the Washington Monument, I have a serious nerd moment. Especially the Capitol - I get some perverse joy out of thinking that our Republic can trace her heritage back to ancient Rome herself, but wields wealth and power beyond the wildest dreams of Rome at her Imperial height. Wow.
More specifically - we have the Smithsonian (all of it!), the think-tanks and grad schools (with public lectures), the SilverDocs documentary film festival, and on and on and on. I miss the city, badly, whenever I leave.
The VLA in New Mexico (“Contact”, “2010”, some other movies). Very impressive, very cool to see. ( I had a layover in Puerto Rico and missed an opportunity to see Arecibo ).
Greenwich, England to be at longitude 0 and to see Harrison’s clock.
Taveuni, Fiji to be at longitude 180 and straddle “today” and “tomorrow” (kind of)
Galapagos Islands, Ecuador to cross back and forth across the equator as well as see the cool tortoises, iguanas, boobies and all the undersea life that is there (including whale sharks).
I was coming here to mention DC. The Air & Space Museum is worth it alone, with a real moonrock you can touch, the third (spare) Viking Martian lander, actual space suits, etc.
Then there’s the naval museum, with actual control panels and duty stations from nuclear submarines.
Someone also mentioned the CIA/inteligence/spook museum, and we haven’t even touched the historical stuff.
Hmm, I wonder what would happen if you tried to take a picture of the NSA HQ building…
My last chosen vacation was two days at a sewage treatment plant.
Actually, the point was that they had a CORS station there. This is a “constant observation reference station” that is part of the GPS (global positioning system) world. CORS stations (redundant but seems to be the way it is said, like “PIN numbers”) are used by surveyors to get accurate GPS measurements. You use a GPS receiver that can record pseudoranges, which are an intermediately processed form of positioning information that includes, for every second or every 5 or 30 or 60, separate information based on each satellite you can see. The information looks like this and typically includes things like the carrier signal phase shift:
08 1 27 17 43 34.4515367 0 6G 4G 2G17G 5G10G13 0.000000000
43696370.669 120076569.986 -1717.141
43025512.817 114975682.001 674.270
45695755.869 7700213.058 -2984.928
45082506.534 12354763.927 788.515
44991383.475 18177996.659 3374.927
45898930.571 16645207.422 1089.181
08 1 27 17 43 35.4515367 0 7G 4G23G 2G17G 5G10G13 0.000000000
43716289.803 120181244.894 -1716.908
47181370.864 6043465.807 -1046.049
43044973.666 115077965.586 674.410
45715917.092 7806155.755 -2984.695
45101940.425 12456933.593 788.338
45010331.576 18277579.592 3375.068
45918315.124 16747076.316 1089.107
Then you go home and postprocess your date. You get similar data for a CORS station near your site, and also ephemeris data, from the WWW. Special software then works out a best estimate for the vector from the CORS station to your receiver location. Or, you use two receivers, and similarly work out the vector from one to the other. The point of doing this is that you can get positions accurate to a few inches, and it is especially interesting to do it very close to a CORS receiver, because the vectors between the CORS receiver and your own are very short, because you can measure them independantly, and because the absolute coordinates of the CORS receiver are known to something like a centimeter or even a millimeter.
But a sewage plant is interesting in other ways too. About 30 years ago I worked repairing instruments, often at a sewage plant. They have their charms. Nothing more cool than a Muffin Monster, in its own way.
If you can’t get to the Amazing Meeting, come to DragonCon . The Skeptic Track at DragonCon is huge and has a lot of the same people. In the same area they have science and robotics tracks of programming.
This is all in addition to the stuff that you associate with science fiction/comic book conventions. There are tracks of programming devoted to Star Trek and to Star Wars and to Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Firefly/Angel. These include panels with stars of the shows as well as the purely fan activities like a “Once More With Feeling” sing-along.
A B-36, an (well, the only) XB-70; Bockscar; the Apollo 15 CSM; an example of almost every stealth aircraft in the U.S. inventory, and a flying saucer, all under one roof? They’d have to carry me out on a stretcher.
Even cooler-er, at least of a couple of years ago, they had a steam-powered…motorcycle. Formerly of the SFFD, IIRC.
And I hope to head to the Computer History Museum next weekend, myself—they’ve got a working (reproduction) Babbage Engine on display (!) till the end of the month. I’m curious as to if it’s lubricated with linseed oil.
And at Anne Neville’s suggestion of Griffith Observatory; while you’re near Griffith Park, how could you pass up…Bronson Canyon?
Hell, that cave entrance outranks Jerusalem in cultural and sentimental value, as far as I’m concerned.
I’m going to LA in two months and that’s actually top of my list of places to visit. The Ackermansion (home to more classic SF stuff than I can count) used to have tours as well but I think those stopped when Forest Ackerman died earlier this year.
I just remembered one of my favorite places, the Exploratorium in San Francisco. They had fun and fascinating interactive exhibits before just about anyone else did.
Since that idiot went on a killing spree last year they don’t close down the street to vehicular traffic on Sunday or holidays. Used to be that there would be so many people there on those days that they’d make the main road pedestrian-only. It’s so crowded now that sometimes it takes 5x longer to get places.
Heh! I just went there on Tuesday, in fact. It was about two hours before closing, and I was on my way back from the zoo*, so I thought…what the hell?
Ten foot tall Jacob’s Ladder…live chicken embryos at various stages of development in petri dishes…plastinated brains…Atari’s Lunar Lander (which I finally got to play, after seeing it there for the first time 15 years ago…a giant, motion-sensitive scorpionoid robot…a cosmic ray cloud chamber…
Best $14 I ever spent on the spur of the moment. Even the gift shop rocked.
Does planning a vacation around meeting a bunch of on-line nerds at the Georgia Aquarium count? It ended up that I didn’t get to go, but goodness knows I tried!
And yes, DC is the ultimate geek vacation zone. To extra-geekify it, be sure to tour -under- the Lincoln Memorial (duck through the doorway to the left of the stairs) and don’t miss the NIST museum NIST
Also, the National Medical Museum (Used to be at Walter Reed, but they’ve been threatening to move it, so double check) contains the actual bullets that killed Lincoln, and the instruments used to try and remove them from his brain. Ooooohhhh, ahhhhhhh! ! !
Oh, and the Bureau of Weights and Measures in Maryland is close, and superrrrrrrrr geeeky! ! !
But if some local with a big grin on his face advises you to drive up to CIA HQ and ask for a tour, deck him!
(Though not much longer, sadly - graduating in three weeks.)
