Liberty Science Center and Google Maps

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Since the kids are off from school this week it’s time to take advantage of the opportunity, and turn it into a “real” educational experience by going to a museum with Dad. The Liberty Science Center is one of the newer “touchy-feely” museum’s that actually encourage you to interact with the exhibits, instead of looking at them through a glass cabinets. Everything is a learning experience and you can see many of the machines running the buildings through clear lucite, like the escalators and ATM machine. They also have an 18′ diameter Hoberman Sphere, a 4 story tall steel cable you shake to learn about wave energy, x-ray films, life sized skeleton puzzles to put together, and lots of other cool stuff. Additionally they also have animal touching stations where you can feel things like live pencil crabs, sea urchins, horseshoe crabs, sea snails, snakes, and even 3″ long South American cockroaches (gross but cool). However one of my favorites … err the kids favorites, was the sub zero presentation. The instructor talks about matter and changing of state from solid, to liquid, to gas. Of course one of the most entertaining ways to demonstrate this is with liquid nitrogen. You take a rubber glove fill it with water put it in the liquid nitrogen and then break the fingers off like icicles. Smashing a frozen balloon into a million pieces is always fun too, as is dumping it on the carpet to turn into a fog that creeps across the floor. Does it show I’m a product of a Sesame Street education? This September they are closing for 2 years for renovation so get a move on if you want to go.

Now as I live on Long Island and the Liberty Science center is in Jersey City, New Jersey I needed directions. So I used the mapquest link in from the website. I have this problem quite often in New York, the direction planner has you get off the parkway, get on some busy local streets and then get back on the parkway. Usually you can discount that part of the directions, but sometimes it completely invalidates the directions making them useless. This was a failing of both Mapquest and Google maps in this case. So I said to myself “Self … how could they fix this problem?”, and I came up with the answer, Waypoints. For example instead of having me take the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE) and the Manhattan Bridge to Manhattan, allow me to choose the Queens Midtown Tunnel as waypoint, and figure directions based upon that. Technically this would result in a more expensive trip (via tolls) and a longer trip in mileage, but actual time traveled is about 30 minutes faster. So if any of you Google Engineers see this (and yes I know some of you do read here) feel free to implement it, I relinquish all rights to the idea. Additionally feel free to contact me if you need more clarification.

tags: (Google Maps | mapquest | Liberty Science Center )

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