Science Sphere Globe

My company’s foundation announced today that they were donating one million dollars to a local science museum. I guess to make them more competitive, more modern, and to help steer kids towards careers in science and engineering if they’re so inclined. This is a pretty hefty sum of money, so I looked into what this money was being spent on and one of the things they’re going to install is a Science on a Sphere® exhibit. So I looked up and talked to a woman in my division who’s involved and it seems pretty neat. Basically it’s a big sphere that, by way of projectors, becomes a live globe. It will show current weather patterns, simulate weather patterns, show all aircraft in the air in real time, or if you wanted to get crazy, you could project the sun or another planet on it. On the NOAA’s site (they make this thing and sell this thing) they had a slide show going of other places that have this live globe. Some looked pretty cool, but some looked totally lame. The woman I was talking to about it asked me to send her the pictures I found and let me know what I thought, so I picked out some of my favorites and least favorites and added a little commentary, and then I decided to put them here too. Now although there are pictures, these are not my pictures. Thanks to the NOAA for all the pictures, and for selling us this thing for the science museum.

Ours needs to be less like Rockport (very boring)..

And be more like Korea (South Korea; nobody should be more like North Korea)!

Here’s a casual, open set up:

But it’s maybe too casual. It doesn’t emphasize the awesomeness enough, like a dedicated room would.






Chicago added some nice touches with the dome and the continents:







This is cool from a design standpoint, but you can’t get very close. People will want to be able to see the details:







I think the lady in yellow is the Queen of England. If we could get her to come to ours that would be key:







I’m pretty sure this one is in the lobby:

That’s definitely not OK, unless the stuff inside is exponentially cooler.







This room seems pretty slick:














Want more information? Go here: http://sos.noaa.gov/ Want some pictures? Go to my Flickr!

P.S. Formatting this post really cheesed me off. Damn blogger kept wanting to embed the pictures and have the text wrap around them, which was all wrong for the way I did my comments. Only way I could figure out to fix it was to blow up these stupid pictures, so sorry. It's still not even formatted how I wanted it. The text for the pictures are too close to the previous picture.