04/01/10 - Singapore - Singapore Science Centre‏

Well, today was my last day in Singapore before I had to fly out that night, and my plan was to see Singapore's Parliament and the Asian Cultural Museum. But that changed when I found out Singapore has a science centre much like our Questacon. I found out in a roundabout way through a few photo blogs of Singapore, and at the time it had a Star Wars exhibit. No such luck this time, but they did have the 'Body Worlds' Exhibit, which is where human bodies are plasticised and put on display, usually stripping off layers of skin, muscle and bone. I completely ran out of time to see this as the science centre as a whole sucked me in.

Anyways, getting ahead of myself.

I spent the morning trying to track down a little thank you to Wade. Uncharted: Drakes Revenge, a Playstation 3 game that I've raved about that recently had a very highly regarded sequel. I must have went to (seemed like) hundreds of stores and could only find one copy of the American edition, that I was unsure of it would work. But I did spot another stellar title of Mass Effect for the PC, which I promptly got.

On the way to one shopping centre, I passed by the Ministry for Information, Communications and the Arts building, a 1930's era building that once was home to the police, serving as quarters, garage and administration. Today quite striking, with the mix of the old building itself, and all the window frames and shutters being brightly coloured. Walking through to the courtyard you pass by panels displaying the history of the site and end up looking at a nice water fountain. Behind this building was one of the entrances to Fort Canning Park, which had some well done murals around this entrance. To the right of the entrance there was some bronze figures dedicated to Singapore's Fire Brigades.

When finally I was done with the shops, I headed out to the Jurong East MRT station, which was the closest to the Singapore Science Centre. You could walk for about 10 minutes to it, or take the bus. The bus had air conditioning and dropped me right off outside.

The Singapore Science Centre starts with the displays straight away, with a huge animatronic T-Rex outside, the very pathways themselves being based on the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, a water park on the left side of the entrance that shows the various properties of fluids in motions and various physics examples for kids to play all over on the right. Entering, the first wing I went through was all about illusions, optical or otherwise. Passing through this I came to the central hub of the centre, housing a Tesla Coil with minimal protection around it. Perfect!
In this main hub room, there was many cool things to view, whether it be a Jacob's Ladder, a machine that you can generate smoke rings with, a disc that houses fluid that when you spin it produces very pretty turbulent flow patterns and a booth that houses a fountain that spray large water drops down, that if you adjust the strobe light, it can be made to look like the water is going up.

I was there in time for the Tesla Coil demonstration and the lady doing the talk got extra points from me by mentioning the Tesla Coils in the computer game, 'Red Alert'. Though, I don't think this one one is THAT lethal, just a little lethal for sure. For first demonstration was just a simple fire up of the Tesla coil, which brilliant arcs that I got one of my best pictures of. The second firing they changed the top wire to a single rod, and the bolt just arced up and out from the one side. The third firing, children were giving fluorescent bulbs and were to hold them up. They lit up as the coil did, to the oohs of the kids.

The final test went off with a bang, literally. Balloons were placed close to the Tesla Coil, filled with guess what, Hydrogen! They arced up the Tesla Coil and the balloons went off with a satisfying fireball to conclude the demonstration.

From there I went off into one of the spoke halls from the hub, which seemed to be all about electronics and visual stimuli. The first thing that drew my attention was a machine where you would type in anything you want, and letter by letter a 'sheet' of water would spell out what you typed as it dropped down from the top. From there, you could play a game in 3D using provided glasses, shoot robots using hand gestures and even play a shoot-em-up style game on a large video table, shooting by flicking your fingers and grabbing power-ups by well, grabbing them with your hand. Another table would see what you placed on it, and do draw around it. If you put something long and thin on it, it would make that a train track with a locomotive and carriages going along them. Throwing my phone on the table made flowers sprout out along the edge of it.
Yet another table was a dirt car racing game, where two people would using standard controllers to get their cars to an exit portal. The cool thing here, was a third person could move their arms over the display, and depending on how far you had your arm over the table, it would make higher mountains to block their way. I could make moving waves with my arms to deform the racing landscape.

A disc shaped table had a projection of the world on it, perhaps using google earth for reference. It was very cool. To zoom in our out, you would grab the edge and spin it left or right. If you want to move around, you would tilt the entire table in the direction you wanted to move. This is the future ladies and gentlemen.

I was looking at the science fiction displays when the call for the lightning show came up. I rushed with the crowd to the appropriate hall and waited for a few minutes for the show to begin. The first demonstration was a Jacob's ladder, followed by a demonstration on whether lightning like pointy or rounded objects to strike. It prefers pointy, but since the pointy's surface area is limited, it will go to the rounded if the pointy gets overloaded. The last demonstration had a large plastic disc placed between to the electrode and the earth. The question was, would it go around the disc, or would it go through. I had my thoughts on both being possibly correct, but when the lightning arced around the plastic disc in multiple areas like a old style carriage wheel, there was only one option.

Following the show, I hung around in this hall, viewing exhibits like little fans that turn by the heat waves from a light to displays on the different types of batteries. Upstairs from this hall was a exhibit on Virus's and Bacteria. It was well done, with scale models of the virus's when compared to a human hair, to a 3D presentation about how you can get the virus infects a cell. They focused on about 10 different virus's that are relevant today, such as H1N1, HIV and Hepatitis. The information was well presented and informing, I did get the impression the exhibit went out of its way to educate people about how HIV is not transmitted, to make people a little less fearful of someone who is infected. Things like a kiss won't transmit it, etc.
From there it was straight into how the human body works, with displays as well as various contraptions you could get on to test yourself. I managed to get the best balance time on the board there with a time of 2 seconds!

It was fast approaching closing time so I made a run for the Sight and Sound exhibition hall. One of the very first things to draw my eye was this machine that had metal filings on top in a thick layer. What you would do is to select a song and powerful magnets underneath would work like a visual equaliser to move the filings around in time with the music.
I want one.

Another video table had different shaped blocks on it, and you could adjust where the blocks were, or how many on the table to get 'music' to play with visuals being displayed on the table as well. There was also a perspective room, where one person would be in one corner, another person in the other and they would look like giant and midget from a certain perspective.

Closing time got me, so I got out of there and figuring a taxi would be the quickest way to get to where I was going next, I got one. Well, damn, Singapore as it turns out has a rush hour.
I got off at the Orchid area, to head to the Ion Orchid mall to get some flavoured popcorn for Athene, one because I ate a bit of hers, and two, it was the best thank you gift I could think of. What a nightmare. Took me forever to find the place, tucked in as it was in a corner, and that was only after I had given up and made my way to the MRT, to only find the shopping centre continued on the other side as well.

My bloody phone was out of credit and they only way to charge it was online, so I had to find an internet cafe to log on and recharge it. The time without said phone working gave me some worries, as I was not completely sure which station I had to get off for dinner.

I was rather late for our last dinner with Wade, Athene, Jackson and I. We went to a street where there were a whole lot of open aired restaurants close together, and you could order from different ones for the one table. Most of the food was pretty good, the crab gave me a lot of trouble as I tried to break its shell with chopsticks, only to later find nutcrackers under the plate rim.

For dessert we went to an Indian place around the corner, where firstly had this dish they explained to be was cooked tissue paper. It was basically just a sweetish cooked thin bread or waffle rolled up into a 'dunces' cap. The second dish was the same stuff with ice cream stuffed into a log of it.

Said our goodbyes to Jackson we made our way back to the apartment and I got to packing as I was leaving Singapore in a few hours. When all was done, Wade escorted me to the airport where we promptly went to the wrong terminal. (I swear I read it was terminal 2 not 3.) I was last in line for the check ins and made it through security to the plane. I got a lot of odd looks from the passengers for wearing shorts and settling down, we took off at about 1 am.

Singapore is hot and sultry, so pack accordingly. The public transport system I found to be excellent, it's based off a card you can purchase in any train terminal, just make sure your credit is up to date on them.

By no means did I explore the island in full, but what I did see was clean, modern and very heavily based in English. It would have to be the most ideal place for an english speaking westerner to visit for a introduction to asia.

I'd like to thank Wade and Athene for their hospitality, good will and knowledge of Singapore. Wade picked up me up from the airport as I landed and even waited around as I got lost inside trying to get out. (Construction was to blame!)

They took me out to various restaurants, ordered food I wouldn't typically eat, well more so wouldn't even know about and taught me how to use chopsticks.

It was really good to catch up, talk trash and get up to mischief with them, and I hope to do so again.