Nora and I made a simple version of a pinhole camera today out of an old junk food can. I foolishly neglected to take any pictures of the construction process, but Nora and I collaborated about equally on all of the tasks (except the x-acto knife which I handled solo). The tube has a piece of wax paper suspended a few inches from a tiny, tiny hole in the bottom of the can. When light bounces off objects in the world, some of that light finds its way through the pinhole and creates a perfect (albeit upside down and backwards) image of the object on the wax paper. This is very similar to the way your own eye works and working evidence of how simple it would be for a species to evolve something as useful and (eventually) complex as an eye.

Here are some photos of Nora using our new camera (and some shots taken through the new camera with our old camera!

We got to see the zoo’s 3 week old baby giraffe (not shown).

As I’ve mentioned before, Houston has a pretty good zoo. Better still, it’s just over a mile from our apartment (right across a couple of terrifying streets from my office). We don’t go every weekend, but we go pretty often. We’ve recently discovered that the secret is to go at 9:00am on a Sunday when the animals are all still awake and eating or playing, the heat isn’t too dreadful yet, and the park is pretty close to empty. The zoo isn’t huge, but it’s just large enough that you can go for an entire morning and only see a tiny part of it. We’ll focus on birds or primates or we’ll just spend a long time watching the red panda (which Nora has declared “the cutest animal on earth”). This past weekend we went to the animatronic dinosaur forest (Nora was terrified of all of the dinos, we both were terrified of the T-rex even though, with those ridiculous arms, he couldn’t even tie a bow tie or open a can of coke). From there we went to the reptile house and one of the bird areas to compare the living animals to the extinct models we’d seen and talk about whether dinosaurs were more like lizards or birds. Nora decided that dinosaurs were a lot like lizards but that they definitely had bird legs and maybe bird necks and bird heads.

After our trip to the splash park, we wound up our visit in the primates exhibit. Nora loves hearing about how we share a distant ancestor with the chimpanzees and an even more distant ancestor with the orangutan and a still more distant ancestor with the lemurs. We talk about how natural selection works and about how a tiny ability (to run a little bit faster, jump a little bit farther, hold your breath a little bit longer, or communicate a little bit more clearly) can, over time, translate into an enormous advantage and, ultimately, a new species. Here we are clowning around and trying to connect with our distant, distant primate cousins.

Nora could be the next librarian at Unseen University.

Two primates pretending to be two other primates. :)

Nora and I went to the Cockerell Butterfly Center at the Houston Museum of Natural Science to check out the B’flies and get some science under our belts. The butterflies are, of course, the main attraction, but to get to them you pass through a really wonderful hands on exhibit that teaches little ones (and their big ones) all about how important insects are, how they’re nowhere near as scary as people think (except the vinchuca, that thing’s terrifying), and how –without insects– there would soon be no birds, fish, or mammals either. Then you get to look at pretty wings. Nora was frankly a little freaked out in the rainforest part that butterflies were going to land on her nose. I probably shouldn’t have told her that all of the butterflies would be clambering over one another to land on such a cute, little nose.