Seeing the Light

BAY WATCH: Rumor had it that today was going to be a beauty. Upon upping, we found out the rumors were true! We had lots to get done today, but decided Job 1 was getting a walk in along the waterfront.

We parked near the Louis Dreyfus terminal. The Port Star was docked. 

We saw lots of shore birds wishing they could get at the young salmon under the protected nets (to the right).

A trio of seals was keenly interested, as well. The one shown below paralleled us along the shoreline for a mile each way.

Down in the Olympic Sculpture Park, we always stop by "Echo" and say hello to her.

The sculpture is named for a mountain nymph of Greek mythology. Echo offended the goddess Hera by being too chatty, preventing her from spying on one of Zeus’s amours. To punish Echo, Hera literally left the nymph of speechless - except for the ability to repeat the last words of another.

Artist Jaume Plensa reportedly modeled the work after a young girl he knows.

On our way back north, we stopped at "Pocket Beach," where the kids threw rocks in the sound and the dogs worried that their humans were in Great Peril. Fortunately, CJ and Annabelle survived the rock skipping shenanigans. 

THE LIGHT STUFF:  The kids received a great ScienceWiz kit called "Light" for Christmas. Recently, we finally dug into it. It includes 25 activities, such as splitting light into a cascade of rainbows, making a kaleidoscope, bouncing, bending and blending light and more. 

Annabelle will tell you a bit more about her initial experience with it. ...

There are three primary colors of light: Red, blue, and green; not yellow. If you mix red and green, you will get yellow; red and blue, you will get magenta; and green and blue will give you teal. If you use the full rainbow, you will get white! The experiment we performed to test this was we;
1.       Colored a disk in rainbow colors.
2.       Connected the disk to a high-speed motor.
3.       Connected the motor to a battery.
When the motor spun, the colors blended together into a peachy color! (the book said it’s only close to white if the colors are perfectly balanced, which they rarely are)  Then we tried a disk that was half red and half green, and it was a mustard-yellow color! We even tried this disk with a cool pattern. When we colored the shapes red and green, we got a little peach ring! It was really fun.
The other experiments we did were making a prism work and making a kaleidoscope. We took a rectangle of Mylar and folded it into a triangle. Then when you put it up to your eye and move something in front of it, it will look like there are dozens of it! The kit is really cool, and that’s not all it has! I’m excited to try the rest!

Interestingly, my cell phone camera wouldn't capture the disc as a blended color (which it definitely was to our naked eyes). But this looks pretty cool!

Using a Mylar-covered piece of card stock, the kids constructed a kaleidoscope. 

They used it to look at everything from their own fingers to colored markers and commercial displays. 

We couldn't help but think of the cover of Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" while using a triangular prism to make a rainbow (not very visible in this photo, but believe me, it's there!).