Thoughts of prime numbers and pi.

Our science focus changed once again in New Mexico, this time to astronomy for some hard-core nerd-tourism. About two hours southwest of Albuquerque is the Very Large Array, and conveniently for us they provide guided tours on the first Saturday of each month. Some undergrad astronomy students toured us around the facility, showing us the control room (which looked nothing like it did in Contact), the supercomputers (which looked nothing like they did in Contact), and also where a few scenes of Contact were filmed (I can only assume these did look like they did in Contact).

(EDIT: I take it back. I've now reviewed the scenes from Contact and the undergrads were wrong: the control room looked fairly similar to the real thing. They perhaps took out a few walls to open it up for camera lines, but overall the layout was correct and included the tacky '70s architecture. Stupid science students... what the hell do they know?)

For the sake of our photographs we were fortunate that the 27 dishes were in their "C" configuration, meaning the furthest ones were only a mile away; had they been in their "A" configuration the furthest dishes would have been 13 miles away and the closest slightly more than a mile.

About 30 miles west of the VLA is a town called Pie Town. If there is a human being capable of driving through a place with that name and *not* stop to get a slice, I don't want to know them.

Sadly, our choices of pies at the Pie-O-Neer café (get it?) were somewhat limited because a group of insane cyclists had blown through an hour before us on a marathon trip from Banff to Mexico. (Pie Town is near the continental divide (which amounts to a gentle hill down here) so I can only assume that was their route.) The owner told us she eventually refused to serve them any more or else she would not have any pies left for her normal customers. Good thing or else we would have never gotten to try some unique pie flavours: I had a New Mexico Apple Pie (apple and green chiles) and Jessica had pear & ginger. Both were delish.

Mmmmm... pie... and SCIENCE!

(July 6, 2013)