NASA Ames and USGS

On Thursday we had again a long day of visits. We started off at NASA Ames with a somewhat disappointing talk about radioactivity in space and afterwards a lab tour in a refurbished McDonald's with a "lunatic", because he is a big fan of the moon. This man looked a bit like the homeless people near our hostel, but looked a lot more sober and was really enthousiastic about documenting and archiving all of his artifacts. They picked an old McDonald's building as lab, because it was just standing there empty, which was kind of fun (their 'lab' was also appropiatly nicknamed McMoon).

Afterwards we finally had a long lunch break for the first time in days at the Google campus and afterwards we went to another part of Silicon Valley to learn more about earthquakes at the US Geological Survey. Everybody enjoyed this visit very much, although one of our questions still isn't completely answered: why are there so many sensitive and expansive machines in such a dangerous area as California? I'm afraid this is something we will never really understand.

In the evening, Jeremy, Danielle, Daan, Oli, Bram, Teun and I went driving through the city and tried to follow the sightseeing route, unfortunately, we did it the wrong way around (which is a bit of a heckle with all the one-way traffic in San Francisco), but still had some nice views.

As you probably noticed, we are a bit delayed with updating the blog. This is due to the long past few days. Most people came home after 12 and went straight to bed, but from now on we will be posting the blog again on almost every day!

Ester