Sunday, June 11, 2023
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Blogpost content:
¨ Things I did during week two.
¨ Impressions I have after week two.
¨ Anticipations I have after week two.
Things I did this week:
Participated in Wikipedia Editing event.
I enjoyed the event. I have gained skill of Wikipedia article editing and understood how time consuming it is.
Visited a ballet performance for the first time.
The performance was good, I certainly can commend dancers’ choreography and toes strength. However, I do not have understanding or deep appreciation for this artform.
Visited National Museum of American History
Extremely interesting place and has a vast number of things from pop culture to transportation throughout the history of US. The ground floor has an entire hall dedicated to various inventions (engines, turbines, boilers, etc.) along with complete history of lightbulb invention and development.
Visited National Museum of Asian Art
I visited only a small part of the museum, but I had a chance to see some beautiful ornaments in Japanese section, Egypt section contains copious amount of small glass amulets (I think about all Egypt deities were there), and Islamic section had some Syrian glass (always wanted to see some of these glass works).
Impressions I have after week two:
The big part of this week was smoke from wildfires in Canada ascending on DC, on Wednesday first signs of smoke were visually identifiable (fog over long distance view), and on Thursday air quality had dipped to Extremely Unhealthy (purple). Fortunately, air is no longer Extremely Unhealthy, but still of Poor quality, from Tuesday I still see fog when I look on distanced objects. It is depressing to see that this situation might become a new normal in the near future.
Seeing that DC has a fair amount of homeless people has surprized me, I guess it is normal for here, however I had different expectations for the capital of US (DC so far seemed fairly progressive up until this point).
I had some productive talking about my projects with other NIST employees on department (laboratory? division?) wide coffee hour. I am glad coffee hour exists; it is a good way to get to know your colleagues.
Anticipations I have after week two:
There are few interesting SPS sponsored events coming up, as well as intern organized outings and events.
Daniil Ivannikov