I just got back from Epcot, with mixed emotions. On the one hand, I was appalled at the amount of advertising -- many of the exhibits were nothing but. On the other hand, the Spaceship Earth ride was way cool, as were the fireworks, and the teppan-grilled shrimp was orders of magnitude better than the amusement park food I’m used to.
There were some rich sources of irony that I made a mental note to write up here, but as usual, my mental notepad appears to have been erased (or perhaps it’s made of the reusable electronic paper developed in Xerox PARC, the demo of which would have been a lot more impressive if they’d actually been able to print anything on the paper! I was interested to see it, too; Ben Bova wrote a novel based on that technology at least a decade ago -- the technology was clearly coming then -- and I was hoping it had finally materialized.
Bought T a doohickey that I think he’s been wanting, or at least I think he tried to describe it to me awhile back. He didn’t get the idea across too clearly, and I doubt I will either. It spins like an old-fashioned noisemaker (the kind we used to have at Purim and New Year), but on the outermost edge is one line of about 8 LEDs. They blink at a rate such that when it’s spun, the eye sees words due to the persistence of vision. There are about 8 preprogrammed messages, and you can program 3 more. This being a Disney park, of course it cost way too much, but I think he’ll enjoy it much more than yet another T-shirt.
Posted by dichroic at April 25, 2001 07:31 PM