Sacramento Discovery Museum

March 27:

Today Harrison and Amanda went to the Sacramento Discovery Museum with Jon and Tanalee Oakes, their uncle and aunt. This is a picture of Harrison decoding a message. We learned that computers use 1s and 0s to read letters. That is called binary or base two. The most common code is ASCII which means American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Harrison learned that his name in binary ASCII is 1001000 1100001 1110010 1110010 1101001 1110011 1101111 1101110. He weighs 45 pounds on Earth, but only as much as a koala bear on Mars, 17 pounds.

Amanda learned, "If I was on Venus I would weigh 38 pounds." Also, butterflies come out in the day, and moths come out at night.

There were lots of other things at the little museum. Pencil lead is made from graphite. (Harrison used graphite A LOT when he was building his pinewood derby this week.) Fossil coprolite is petrified mammal dung. Dragonflies can go up to 25 miles per hour. And we saw a porcupine on a cart and it kept on getting off and on. Once it came close to us.

All photos, text, and page design are Copyright (C) Robert A. Reiser, 1998-1999, All Rights Reserved, unless otherwise noted. No portion may be duplicated without prior consent from the author.

"Learning Family" and the Learning Family Logo are trademarks of Learning Family LLC, used by permission.