Okay, okay, just kidding I do remember. Actually, most of our time in Vegas wasn't spent doing vegasy stuff, partially because I am severely allergic to casinos and partially because we didn't have the time.
The only time we went into an actual, real live place of sin was to get breakfast at Mon Ami Gabi, on the recommendation of our friend Jen, where I had a tasty eggs florentine (aside from a little mixup on the part of the wait staff about onions...)
Oh, Alex liked the sky-painted onto the ceiling of the casino, so here is a picture:
But really, no trip to Vegas would be complete without going to the National Atomic Testing Museum! where one can learn fascinating facts about nuclear testing.
For example, did you know that it took years before the folks in charge of our atomic stockpile realized that side-explosions could trigger nuclear weapons? They only found out when one supposedly zero-yield test of an explosive near a nuclear bomb triggered a 4 kiloton explosion. Oops. After that, they started doing safety tests. Can you believe these guys managed to make an atomic bomb, but didn't build one that couldn't be accidentally set off?
I also learned that viewing atomic tests became a tourist attraction in Vegas and folks would get up early in the morning--around 5am--in order to watch. They'll make anything into a show in Vegas!
Another entertaining story is the rivalry between Livermore labs and Los Alamos. The Livermore folks, led by Edward Teller, wanted to push forward and produce an H-bomb, and tended to have a more carefree attitude about things. The Los Alamos folks were a bit more by-the-book and concerned about the consequences of the research. This led to a bit of a rivalry when the two labs split. On Livermore's first nuclear test, Ruth, the explosion fizzled and failed to even destroy the tower on which the bomb had been placed:
Los Alamos responded with the note: "Next time either build a bigger bomb, or use a smaller tower". (Some day this is going to come up in a Google search for someone looking for the exact quote, and they're going to think that's it. It's not. I'm quoting from memory, and the only thing more fallible than memory is ... well, I forget what it is. Anyway, Google search person, please do not use this blog as the source of a verbatim quote. Thanks!)
Alex's favorite part was a clothing catalog from JC Penny's. The government wanted to test the effects of a nuclear bomb on as realistic a scenario as possible, so it constructed houses with mannequins and then bombed the heck out of them, carefully documenting the house and inhabitants before and after the attack. JC Penny's contributed the clothing to this experiment and provided a fashion catalog for the bomb-savvy customer.
Another fun exhibit was on the Plowshares program, which attempted to find peaceful uses for nuclear weapons. Let's just say that if you think fracking is bad for the environment now, you probably wouldn't at all be a fan of attempts to mine natural gas via nuclear explosions in the 1970s.
If you don't get a participation certificate for your work on a nuclear test, really, it might as well have never happened:
While the museum was interesting, it was also a bit biased. Radiation exposure wasn't discussed much at all, and the general tone about radiation taken by the employees of the testing sites interviewed was, "well, maybe some of us are getting cancer, but it was worth it to protect the free world." I guess those with a dissenting view may not be around to express it.
There were lots of other things I learned about nuclear tests, but you probably don't want to know all of them. Instead, you should go to the museum and learn all about nuclear tests yourself.
Our next (and, spoiler alert, final) tourist stop for the day was Hoover Dam. It turns out that Hoover Dam is really big. It's so big that I really couldn't get a good photo of it:
We took the Dam tour, which gave us a view of both the power plant and a chance to go into the dam itself. It turns out that when the dam was build, nobody was really sure it would work, so they did what any good engineer would do: they put in lots of safety margin and massively overbuilt it (by like 70%) and they added monitoring so they could see if there were problems. In this case, the monitoring consisted of tunnels in the dam where they could measure cracks and changes/movement of the structure over time. In the dam tour, we got to go into these tunnels.
As it turns out, going into these tunnels feels a lot like going inside a very large, cramped, poorly lit concrete building. We did get to take some pictures by sticking our phone outside an air vent on the face of the dam:
The main cool things we learned at hoover dam are:
1) It's a giant arch--everything is held together by water pressure
2) it took almost as long to build the water diversion infrastructure that let them pour the dam as it did to build the dam itself (19 months vs 23 months)
Oh, and apparently the rated lifetime of the dam is 1500-2000 years, as the cement degrades under its own pressure (and that of the water). Guess they'll be a year 4K problem that involves lots of water.
Although 96 men died building the Hoover Dam (this only counts those who died on site...if you made it to the hospital, you weren't counted, so the real death toll is a lot higher) none are buried in the dam. This dog, however, is buried right next to it. I wouldn't want to be the guy who ran over the mascot:
After seeing Hoover Dam, we grabbed a quick dinner and headed for LA.
Despite being lovers of cats, we didn't visit a cathouse, so we didn't take any adorable cat photos for you. Instead, we found one on the internet:
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