Day 57 - Crash a Convention

Date: March 4th, 2010

I have crashed plenty of things in my life, but that's not the kind of crash I'm talking about here. See, there are two kinds. There is the "ram into something with something else" kind. That I've done a lot. I've crashed my bike into a tree, a wall, the ground, a car, another bike, the ground again and in one of the most embarrassing crashes ever, the beach. That's right, soak it in and let it simmer - I crashed into the beach once. I've crashed on roller blades - pretty much only into the walls of the roller blade place though. If scraping a parked car counts then I've crashed a car. I'm choosing not to count that. Forget I mentioned it.

Today I'm talking about crashing parties though. That is not, contrary to popular belief, the physical act of ramming something into them. Instead, its the social act of ramming your company into their party. I've never party crashed before. I can't say I saw the point. I was always more of a "play cards with friends" kind of partier than a "get drunk with acquaintances" partier. Just wasn't my speed.

That being said - I had another epic day in a city yesterday. I spent the whole day walking around DC and riding the metro looking for interesting things to do. There are a ton of museums I haven't been to and I've never toured the Ford Theater so I knew I'd find something new and fun. I rather like the "go out into a city and find an adventure" thing, now that I've done it a couple times. It was enjoyable.

The first stop was Eastern Market, which was not much a tourist spot. I would, however, recommend that anyone living within even a 30 minute drive of any part of DC, go there for food. Everything smelled so fresh - it was amazing. Just delightful. It made me wish I lived close enough for that - I'd like to believe I'd buy all my food there.

This place looks legit

Next, I hopped back up toward Chinatown. I'd been there before and I ended up going to a restaurant that Ben and Lisa had taken me to when I was in DC in October. Very little "new" had happened at this point. Although, understanding the metro to a high level of comfort was new for me - I generally went on public transit with friends who knew what they were doing and never bothered to figure it out.

This picture is wholly unnecessary

After my nice lunch in Chinatown I decided to just pick a spot on the metro and hope for the best. I still had 5-6 hours before I had to meet Ben for dinner. I had what I'm calling a blond moment and headed up to the Mount Vernon stop. You know why? To see Mount Vernon. In the middle of Washington DC. If you need a minute to google how stupid that was for a person with an Honors BA in History with a concentration on American History from a top university... go ahead... I can wait. Now feel free to commence pointing and laughing.

On the bright side, there was a convention center with a set of restaurants called "The Supreme Court". No, I didn't think that was where the Supreme Court met... I just wanted to get a picture. Instead, when I walked in the door, I was immediately distracted by signs for one of the conventions.

Good sir, I too am a robot enthusiast.

Robotics competition? Invited guests only? Too bad, I thought, because that looked really cool. I started to just walk past the entrance to the competition when I realized... it was wide open. There was a check-in table to one side with some very bored looking volunteers and an escalator down to the festivities. So I decided - I won't lie. If someone sees me I'll just apologize and walk away, but if I slip past then on to the robotics!

I was able to slip past.

Behind me is the robot building, pit area. All the teams were from high schools around the country and they sent people to build a robot meeting the specifications of the competition. Each of the teams was still frantically tweaking their robot when I walked through. They got called up in small groups to navigate the course that was laid out in the main hall. I found all that out from the nice gentleman who I got the safety glasses from (snazzy, right?) and who took my picture.

I watched the robot building for a little while and the competition and really enjoyed seeing high school kids from all different schools competing. A lot of them had gotten corporate sponsorship for their robotics teams, which was great because it meant that some of the schools that wouldn't be able to afford a team were able to send one. Perhaps the best part was how much fun all the kids seemed to be having. They were really into it. It was tres fantastic.

After I left the convention (about 45 minutes later), I decided to hit up one of my favorite museums with the time I had left. I headed over to the Museum of Natural History and went looking for new and interesting exhibits. There was one on butterflies that was totally for chicks. Ohh, pretty butterfly... I wish it was pink. Whatevs. Then I found one on human bones. Now we're talkin'. They were using human bones found at an abandoned colony in Maryland to find out what happened to the colonists during that time period.

Alongside that exhibit was a small, interactive forensics lab where you could see how bones were tested to show things about their, umm, owner... I guess. They had a real skeleton that had been found in an attic of an old house and donated to the museum a few years back. The purpose of the exhibit was for the people visiting the museum to find out what happened to the person in the attic - sex, age, height, what happened and when he/she was from.

The first stop was to determine sex - there is a part of the pelvic bone that grows differently in men and women so we used that to find out we were dealing with a man. Next we used his tibia to figure out an estimate of how tall he was -- about 5'8". After that, we looked at (but couldn't touch) another leg bone to figure out what happened to him. The bone had been eaten away at - it looked like termites had gotten to it. Turns out, that was a sign of a bone infection while he was alive. There was also a clean cut at the edge of the bone they showed us. The forensic anthropologist at the museum explained at the cut was clearly done perimortem (at the time of death).

So what happened to him? It would appear that our guy died after his leg was amputated in an attempt to stop the infection from spreading. That also gave some clues to when he died - probably before anti-biotics were common. The next stop was to look at his teeth to determine age. His wisdom teeth were halfway in. Based on the samples, that made him about 15-16 years old. This matched up with the pelvic bone which hadn't fully developed the male-female distinction. That difference soldifies in the early 20's.

The last two stops were both context - neither involved bones or parts of his body. Instead, we found a piece of paper that had been left with the body, identifying him by name and noting that they tried to amputate the leg. The other thing we found were several buttons from a Civil War Union solider uniform. Now we had as much of the story as we were going to get - he was a 16-year-old soldier, for the Union, in the Civil War, who'd somehow gotten an infection in one of his legs. They tried to amputate the leg to save him, but hte infection had already spread too far and he ended up dying from it.

As for why he was in the attic - there are a lot of questions about that still. Since he died in a border state in 1863 (the bloodiest part of the Civil War), its possible he was a POW and they didn't want to admit he'd died. Its possible he was being hidden by someone who didn't want to get caught. There are almost infinite things that could have happened to put him in that attic - but now we know how he died, at least.

It was another epic day in a city. I had two really incredibly fun acitivies I'd never had before - the robotics convention and the forensics exhibit. Then Ben and I went to Mongolian BBQ. So... it was a good freakin' day.