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tanarillToday, we went to the Corning Museum of Glass. Corning glass people came up with the kind of glass used for LCDs, fibeoptic cables, and space shuttle tiles, so they really know their stuff. I got in free because (get this) I am below twenty. That will never happen again in my life, I'm sure.
The first part of the museum was an exhibit of arty glass. I'd never really thought of glass as an artistic medium before, but. One of the most beautiful pieces, Woven Heaven, Tangled Earth, looked like a giant filigree snowball. The giant, slightly convex Black Cube appealed to me as something that could be stolen and made into a starship drive in a story somewhere. But by far the most frightening and thinky thing there was It's Raining Knives; it so seems to me that it's about to.
The next section was all about glass through the ages, starting with the Ancient Egyptians and moving forward. There were some brilliant examples of glass out of Rome, the Islamic empires, and a lot out of Venice. I was really stunned by some of the things they made, showing once again that just because they lived a long time ago does not mean they were stupid. I was most impressed, however, by the ruby gold glass, and how little time it took for medieval alchemists to figure out how to turn a piece of gold into a nanoparticulate suspension of the same through the use of strong acid, even though they had no idea why that worked. And these were some absolutely gorgeous modern glass pieces, ranging from a stained-glass screen to a beautiful table to an iridescent . . . thing.
Next I went and saw a couple of shows. The hot glass show was pretty standard, a guy making a bowl by hand, and the old man who was dealing with the blowtorch and small glass rods didn't make a glass dragon and instead made some kind of glass zippo lighter, complete with glass flames. JJ immediately went to submit his own design and, being a geeky engineer, he drew it to scale in top, front, side, and isometric views.
The last bit of the museum was things done with glass. It briefly explained how to make LCD screen, car windshields, even glass that's opaque unless there's a current running through it, at which point it becomes clear. But the most interesting part by far was the part about the development of optical glass and fiberoptic cable. Fiberoptic cable is really amazing stuff, and it's actually not that hard to make. Basically, you coat and ingot of optical glass with a sheath of a different kind of reflective glass, and then stretch; much like the kind of taffy with patterns in, the glass layers stay in the same place, but get much thinner. Then end width is barely thicker than a human hair. In a demonstration, it showed how much coaxial copper wiring it would take to match the bandwidth of a single fiberoptic cable. And the phone companies didn't initially jump on fiberoptic cable because they saw no need for it.
The gift shop was like a china shop. Some of it, in fact, was a dishware shop. The gifts ranged from chintzy to works of art in their on right. And that was Corning glass.
Then we drove to Rochester. We finished A Hat Full of Sky on the way. MW went to dinner with her friends Suzie and Barry, while they rest of us went to have dinner with my Aunt Janet and her more-or-less husband Dave. They gave me a livertini. It's exactly what it sounds like, and exactly as surreal as it sounds. They also gave me meat-stuffed peppers and cake (not a lie!). And, since I hadn't seen her since JJ's Bar Mitzvah, we got all caught up.
Tomorrow we're going to Stratford (the one not upon Avon) and seeing Taming if the Shrew.
The first part of the museum was an exhibit of arty glass. I'd never really thought of glass as an artistic medium before, but. One of the most beautiful pieces, Woven Heaven, Tangled Earth, looked like a giant filigree snowball. The giant, slightly convex Black Cube appealed to me as something that could be stolen and made into a starship drive in a story somewhere. But by far the most frightening and thinky thing there was It's Raining Knives; it so seems to me that it's about to.
The next section was all about glass through the ages, starting with the Ancient Egyptians and moving forward. There were some brilliant examples of glass out of Rome, the Islamic empires, and a lot out of Venice. I was really stunned by some of the things they made, showing once again that just because they lived a long time ago does not mean they were stupid. I was most impressed, however, by the ruby gold glass, and how little time it took for medieval alchemists to figure out how to turn a piece of gold into a nanoparticulate suspension of the same through the use of strong acid, even though they had no idea why that worked. And these were some absolutely gorgeous modern glass pieces, ranging from a stained-glass screen to a beautiful table to an iridescent . . . thing.
Next I went and saw a couple of shows. The hot glass show was pretty standard, a guy making a bowl by hand, and the old man who was dealing with the blowtorch and small glass rods didn't make a glass dragon and instead made some kind of glass zippo lighter, complete with glass flames. JJ immediately went to submit his own design and, being a geeky engineer, he drew it to scale in top, front, side, and isometric views.
The last bit of the museum was things done with glass. It briefly explained how to make LCD screen, car windshields, even glass that's opaque unless there's a current running through it, at which point it becomes clear. But the most interesting part by far was the part about the development of optical glass and fiberoptic cable. Fiberoptic cable is really amazing stuff, and it's actually not that hard to make. Basically, you coat and ingot of optical glass with a sheath of a different kind of reflective glass, and then stretch; much like the kind of taffy with patterns in, the glass layers stay in the same place, but get much thinner. Then end width is barely thicker than a human hair. In a demonstration, it showed how much coaxial copper wiring it would take to match the bandwidth of a single fiberoptic cable. And the phone companies didn't initially jump on fiberoptic cable because they saw no need for it.
The gift shop was like a china shop. Some of it, in fact, was a dishware shop. The gifts ranged from chintzy to works of art in their on right. And that was Corning glass.
Then we drove to Rochester. We finished A Hat Full of Sky on the way. MW went to dinner with her friends Suzie and Barry, while they rest of us went to have dinner with my Aunt Janet and her more-or-less husband Dave. They gave me a livertini. It's exactly what it sounds like, and exactly as surreal as it sounds. They also gave me meat-stuffed peppers and cake (not a lie!). And, since I hadn't seen her since JJ's Bar Mitzvah, we got all caught up.
Tomorrow we're going to Stratford (the one not upon Avon) and seeing Taming if the Shrew.
