Warning, Your Pants May Explode

A long day finds me wrapping things up while snuggled into bed around 12 AM. My wife is sound asleep beside me, despite the incessant clicking of me on my laptop.

Breakfast was nice, as usual - everyone gathered around a single table. We met Russel's partner, John, who also seems to be a good guy. The art dealers seem to be multiplying because every time I run into one of them, there are more alongside. They certainly seem to think we should run off and visit every art museum in the countryside, but they obviously don't understand us uncultured Midwestern folk.

Rather, what did we do, we hopped a train (actually two trains) to take a ride out to Salem to hear about the brutal deaths of the Salem Witch Hunts. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as it would turn out), we just barely missed our train to Salem and had to wait two hours for the next to leave. Rather than sit in a train station for two hours, we pulled out our trusty "I'm a tourist, now leave me alone" map and looked to see what was nearby. The closest attraction, aside from the eye and ear clinic, was the Science Museum. Being a couple total geeks, we happily made our way over there.

We tooled around for a bit and it wasn't long until we spotted this:





That's the world's largest Van de Graaff machine, constructed by Van de Graaf himself years ago. For anyone that doesn't know what one of these things does, it generates large amounts of negative charge on the huge domes on the top which, naturally, look for ways to get the heck away from one another. In this case, the charge is so large that the machine actually creates lightning. They were planning a show for 7 PM so we opted to come back.

We hopped the train to Salem and made our way through a quaint community with tiny streets to the Witch Museum. The tour was short and, while interesting, we didn't really learn a whole lot more than we already knew. Nonetheless, we had a good time. A quick stop at a local diner for lunch and we were back on a train to Boston.

This time, we kept cruising southward to take a stop at the Sam Adams Brewery.





The tour is free and it's essentially a huge Sam Adams ad. But, in their defense, they give you three glasses of beer to sample and it's some pretty good stuff. I felt bad that my pregnant wife couldn't join me in sampling some of their brews. I might have tooled around the gift shop for a bit, but we were running short of time if we were going to make it to the lightning show. So back to the subway we went.

Oh, did I mention lightning?






The presenter really put on a great show and Liz and I even hung around for a while afterwards to discuss some things (being the ginormous geeks that we are). He was awesome to talk with - one of those times that you get to talk to someone that's really passionate about what they're talking about and no matter how much or little you know about the subject matter, they just pull you into it. So we talked some about magnetic fields, tesla coils, and the like - all the stuff that I had to learn once in college and now never use, even if it is cool.

Of all the things I learned, quite possibly the coolest was the "Skin Effect".





If you look closely at that picture, you'll see that the presenter is standing in an elevated "birdcage" which is made of metal and being struck by lightning. If you look even closer, you'll see that he's actually reaching out and touching that bars of that cage. Yet he remains perfectly safe. Apparently, the skin effect is such that the electrical charge will only follow the "outside" of the cage and won't cross to the inside and harm him. It seems bizarre, but it also seems to work. Lightning struck the cage many times and never did I see him burst into flames.

After wandering around for a bit longer, we took off to find some food. Just a word of warning, Friday night is not a good time to cruise downtown Boston looking for someplace to eat. We didn't get a table until 10 PM and that was at the Cheesecake Factory. The food was overpriced and wasn't particularly good, but it was food (or so they told us).

Finally, we made our way back to our B&B and out of the cold. Now, I can put the finishing touches on this post and curl up with my lovely wife.

Night, all.