how nice it is to enjoy a morning with no crises needing to be solved

Today, the third day of the AGU meeting is a nice, mellow day for me. I have no crises I need to solve, and the schedule of talks/posters I wanted to see happens to list only posters for today, so no time constraints this morning. As a result, in addition to going to look at the posters I’d added to my schedule, I also made time to go look at the Exhibits. I picked up a couple of free AGU colouring books as gifts for my nieces, and thumbed through a few books I choose not to add to my already over-full luggage. Possibly the most interesting exhibit, to my eye, was the one with the large (~ 1 m diameter) globe which is a 3-D movie screen playing an animation of Earth’s tectonic history. I have longed to see such a thing ever since the first time I saw an animation of plate tectonics in action. To me one can have continents moving about on a flat screen as much as one likes, but it is not until one curves the screen into a globe that the spatial relationships are really accurate. How delightful that someone has done it. I spoke briefly with the man at the booth, who said that museums often purchase their technology simply so that they can display that particular graphic. I believe him. Alas, if museums are his target market, I somehow doubt that many universities will bother investing in his globe for their undergraduate classes at this time. I didn’t ask what they sell for, but it looked like the price would probably exceed typical budgets.

I am very much looking forward to the geoblogger’s lunch today, and have arranged to meet a friend who works in the city for desert afterwards (good thing my plan for the day is posters only!)