{"id":58,"date":"2015-07-05T16:48:40","date_gmt":"2015-07-05T16:48:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/?p=58"},"modified":"2021-06-02T17:50:37","modified_gmt":"2021-06-02T17:50:37","slug":"i-love-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/?p=58","title":{"rendered":"I Love Science"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, if you’re not a member of the Ontario Science Centre<\/a>, go fix that, right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Not just because science and rational evidence-based decision making is the only way forward, and Canada has been lagging<\/a>\u00a0in<\/a> its<\/a> support<\/a> for<\/a> pure<\/a> research<\/a> ever since Harper was elected. You should also join because it’s fun, interesting and sexy (there, I said it) to learn and know things. Science Centre membership also includes free entry to Science North<\/a>, where we came to spend the entire day.<\/p>\n

Now, as much as I like the Science Centre, Science North is even cooler because you get to touch every damn thing. Their motto seems to be something like “if you can’t touch it, it’s not real”, and I wholeheartedly agree. Coincidentally, that\u2019s also why I don’t believe in pandas. It’s also great for Those Johnston Kids. The opportunity to touch science, I mean – not the panda myth.<\/span><\/p>\n

We love Science North is the point, which is why we dedicated an entire day to plumb it’s mysteries. Not a lot of a day, or even most of it – all of it! We packed up our camp pretty darn quick in order to get from the campground to Science North by the time the doors opened.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0875a\"<\/a>We were careening – seriously, the road is awful – down to the highway when we spotted a red fox lazing on the side of the road. I slowed down to a crawl in order not to frighten it away, but I really think I needn’t have bothered. It didn’t look like it was going anywhere. It just sat there scratching itself and looking at us exactly like an old rez dog. ” You gonna go by, or what?” Short Pants even got out of the car, but that only got the fox to sit up.<\/p>\n

\"IMG_0879a\"<\/a>Then, while we juggled cameras trying to get a picture, another juvenile fox popped out of the woods and joined the first. I think it was a mother\/child relationship or, more correctly, a bitch\/kit relationship. Insert your humour here. Eventually the adult sauntered down the road toward us so I hustled Short Pants back into the car. The fox continued on passed\u00a0us and down the road as if we weren’t there. The juvenile fox was not so sanguine and clearly did not want to get anywhere near us. After a few fruitless attempts to get the adult’s attention, the juvenile slipped off the road into the bush and made its way\u00a0parallel to the road. Of all of us, Holly took the best shots.<\/p>\n

Later, while the kids were distracted, we came around a corner and surprised the biggest black bear I have ever seen. It ran off the road before the kids saw it or I could get a picture, so you don’t have to believe me. It was huge though, like a polar bear spray-painted black.<\/p>\n

\"mastodonbuild\"<\/a>Despite the morning’s excitement, Science North was not in the least anticlimactic when we arrived. Those Johnston Kids built a mastodon to kill time before the planetarium opened. The movie playing in the planetarium was about the obvious likelihood that life exists on other planets in our galaxy, but the interesting part was that it was narrated by Rupert Grint<\/a>, the actor that played Ron Weasley in the Harry Potter ™ films. Now, he did a fine job, but narrating planetarium films in Sudbury can’t be the sort of thing he imagined doing after a co-starring role in one of the biggest movie series of all time. Some child actors just don’t age\u00a0well I guess.<\/p>\n

\"P7020319\"<\/a>We spend most of the day on the 4th floor which is devoted to machines, physics, and the human body. We built racing cars, magnet structures, delivered the news<\/a>, \u00a0and took brains apart. We watched a “4D” movie about fighting forest fires in Northern Ontario. We saw all the\u00a0special demonstrations that are held in the central theatre: air pressure, chemistry, and flying squirrels were a hit.<\/p>\n

The 3rd floor is plants\u00a0and animals of Ontario, and it’s full of live exhibits, all with their own quirks. They have a blind snapping turtle, a somnolescent beaver (save the jokes – this is a family site!), and a de-scented but flatulent skunk called Spencer. I can tell you firsthand that a skunk fart is not a sniff easier on the nose than skunk spray.<\/p>\n

The 2nd floor is rocks and insects. Those Johnston Kids aren’t at all squeamish about holding bugs, even big ones, or eating them. The staff, eponymously called Bluecoats after their lab coats, keep a dish of toasted crickets and mealworms on hand for the brave or, in our case, merely peckish. I prefer the nacho flavour.<\/p>\n

\"P7020325\"<\/a>In the end, they had to literally throw us out of Science North, the last visitors in the building. That was only after we had begged another 15 minutes in an attempt to finish our Le Mans race on the slot car track. Frequent mechanical failures and hasty rebuilds to eke out a bit more speed kept us from the finish, but hey, that’s Le Mans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, if you’re not a member of the Ontario Science Centre, go fix that, right now. Go ahead, we’ll wait. Not just because science and rational evidence-based decision making is the only way forward, and Canada has been lagging\u00a0in its support for pure research ever since Harper was elected. You should also join because it’s … Continue reading I Love Science<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":843,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58\/revisions\/843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thosejohnstonkids.ca\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}