Modelling the "Dream Museum"

I put dream museum in quotes because while the PARI museum is, I suppose, my baby, I haven't decided whether or not I want to drown that baby in a bathtub. 

It's deeply surreal to have an accurate model of the museum's floor plan and to play around with it in the virtual world of SketchUp--especially when I then walk through the museum as is and get a sort of mental overlay of what I'm envisioning. I can see why designers use 3D modelling in the real world. 

Today, I have gotten the space room at least passably complete and begun to work on the impact room (with the meteorites). I also modelled the third room and have decided that it gets the proud distinction of housing general earth science--like the sandbox, for example. I figured out how to import graphics (from photos, say) into sketchup as well as how to resize things.

I gave up on putting a dinosaur in the impact room. The room is too small to fit anything more than the dust of a completely crushed tyrannosaurus skeleton, and who cares about that? It could probably hold a triceratops, if the tail was curved around, or definitely something fairly small like a deinonychus, velociraptor, archaeopteryx, microraptor, you get the idea. For now, I'm modelling it without--mostly because nobody has contributed a scale-accurate version of a triceratops to the SketchUp library. Skeletal or otherwise. 

This is not the entire room. This is the wall on one's left when one enters from the space room.

As far as the space room goes, I established where the satellite theme, space shuttle theme, and historical themes can go by the virtue of a partial wall (not presently in the room) dividing it into a sort of U shape. 

This is a view from the door. You can see the corner of a big STADAN station map on the left wall--which is the partial wall I mentioned--and the timeline on the right, as well as the fridge standing in as a size double for the ATS-6 satellite in front of a graphic of satellite orbits on the back wall. There's also a television, which is presently installed in approximately that location, which can play the ATS-6 documentary in full, if we so choose, or an edited portion. Or, of course, films about satellites in general. You can also see a sofa by the STADAN map, which curves in sort of a question mark to take advantage of the view outside--which is not, of course, included in this 3D model.

Here, of course, we have the Space Shuttle area. I have two of the screens presently on the wall included here, which can display space shuttle launch and landing videos--they're on NASA's website, about 8-10 minutes long for the good bits, and the most interesting bits are shown on the wall graphics. On the opposite side of the partial wall is a space shuttle model (we don't have one, I'm being fanciful), an interactive landing simulator (well, a computer set up to run the free Orbiter software--there's a new version coming out this year and it's free, unlike X-plane, and can do a decent landing simulator on a bog standard desktop computer. We could rig something with the controls), and the STS-121 tire. There's also a graphic you can't see from this angle of STS-121 landing. I'm not saying we have to include all these graphics; I'm including them mostly so that it's obvious what each area is. However, I would like to include these graphics.

There are also wall mounted display cases for smaller items in my sketches--things like the tiles on reentry, the laptops with the waving astronaut, that sort of thing. I also haven't finished the far corner by the exit, where you can just see a smallish brown display case. 

I'm torn about the third room. I got into the library, counted the tiles, and modelled its bare bones floorplan, mostly. (There's a far door I didn't include that I might need to go back in for, that kind of thing.) But what to go in there? I'm thinking a combination of the leftover rocks and citizen science. We can set computers up with our stuff in the control room (or duplicates of it, anyway), The Sandbox, and maybe some of the Zooniverse projects. The rocks can go into a rock cycle or gems of North Carolina exhibit. Or both, but it isn't *that* big a room. 

Hm. I'll work on it some more tomorrow morning. 

An update on something more quality-of-life related:

Unfortunately, Colleen--my roommate--is sick. With...something. We aren't sure what, but it's bad enough that she's been effectively quarantined, and I need to go get some of my stuff and take up a temporary residence in Building 4 with the guy interns. I also need to throw my pillowcase and blanket in the washing machine, just in case she's contagious. Hopefully it's food poisoning. If it's food poisoning, she'll be better sooner rather than later. At least I took my laundry home over the weekend so I have about a week's worth of clothing in my car--I only need to grab some stuff like my sneakers and maybe a t-shirt or two apart from aforementioned pillow/blanket. 

PARI is also a Pokemon Go! hotspot, just fyi. As well as Ingress. We had a Pokemon Go beta tester here and I learned a new way to summon Tim the Coding Guru. Just use "Tim" and "Pokemon" in the same sentence. He pops right up. It was a little scary, actually--not because he's super into pokemon or anything, he wasn't quite in the right generation, but because of the sheer rapidity with which he appeared. From several rooms away. He's also been attacking my Ingress resonators, although he doesn't know they're mine--bit sad, really, since all I can do is keep throwing them down and using them to try to level up. Ah well. 

Le sigh.