The 2nd SCI183 lab class took place in the Museum of Science. We explored the Museum of Science and learned about many aspects of science that supports our life. The Museum of Science has numbers of exhibitions that explain about the scientific development very concretely but at the same time they are very easy to understand.
My favorite exhibition in the Museum of Science is one of the special exhibitions called “Running the Numbers”. This exhibition shows our speed of production and its potential environmental effect through art. The exhibition consisted of several very large printed computer artworks, and each large artwork is created by millions of small compressed images of cans, garbage, cell phones and other products. Each piece of art is very detailed, and it is very hard to see each image that make up the entire art. These works of art are trying to express the amount of garbage thrown away in a certain amount of time, the amount of plastic cups produced in a certain amount of time, and other massive production and disposal of goods that is happening in the real world.
Millions of images drawn in the pictures are countless, and every single person visiting this exhibition seems astonished about the scale of production happening in the world. These paintings let us realize that our daily life is directly affecting the natural environment, and they caused real feeling for the need for conservation of the environment to us. The United States became largely convenient by single-use plastic cups, plastic bottles and paper plates. Also, advertisements are everywhere in the U.S. They help make outdate products and encourage consumers to buy more. We need to rethink what we use to make our life more convenient in the U.S. We also need to consider reusing products.
Example numbers shown in the exhibition;
Two million plastic beverage bottles are used in the U.S. every five minutes
426,000 cell phones are retired in the U.S. every day
106,000 aluminum cans are used every thirty seconds
1.14 million brown paper bags are used in the U.S. every hour
One million plastic cups are used on airplane flights in the U.S. every six hours
Pictures from
http://www.boxvox.net/2008/07/elizabeth-royte.html
http://www.beemo.net/tag/photography/
