Museum Of Science, Boston

Parents say that they take their kids to the Museum of Science to spark a love of discovery, inspire an appreciation of the scientific method, and to learn about the world. That is all very nice, but the real reason you should go is to experience the hand stamp machines, which are in my opinion the museum's best and most popular interactive exhibit.

The museum treats hand stamping as a routine security measure, barely worth mentioning on their website. They do not realize that they have accidentally created the world's most popular introduction to practical robotics. It's supposed to be for re-entry purposes, but in my family, we consider it a special transitional moment, leaving us physically marked by the essence of Science.

There is no limit to the stamping, as far as I can tell. From our extensive personal experience, I can assure you these stamps wash off easily and do not stain clothes, even if your children get stamped so many times that their hands begin to resemble an extremely redacted CIA document.

This might seem to be a ridiculous amount of time spent talking about hand stamps, but trust me, it will slowly begin to make sense, when we get up to the snakes. At any rate, besides for the excitement of getting your hand stamped by a robot that might accidentally bite it off, my kids spend most of the time racing between the dinosaur fossils, the space capsule, and every button that looks even remotely pushable.

We shall start with the basics. The Museum of Science (mos.org) has all the expected features of the modern cultural institution known as a museum. It's clean and well-managed. It is staffed mostly by friendly volunteers. The facility is both stroller and wheelchair accessible, exhibits are translated into Spanish, and yes, there's parking. There are permanent exhibits and temporary exhibits

For a while, there was a temporary exhibit titled "Survival of the Slowest.” The exhibit featured slow creatures whose evolutionary success at survival shows the advantage of slowness. These included sloths, tortoises, and—most importantly for our story—several snakes.

One of my children had recently picked up the phrase "slow and steady wins the race," and over-generalized this idea to their everyday life. Seeing this exhibit, our child naturally took it as a personal vindication of their slowness. For example, they get dressed very, very slowly because they want to 'win the race'.

Me: What race?

Child: I am winning it! And THEY are losing it! BUSTED!

I hope they do not mind being busted, whoever ‘they’ are. Maybe they are dangerous snakes. Unfortunately, the Museum of Science never seems to have the snakes we want to see. This wouldn't be a problem if we hadn't become accidental snake connoisseurs.

Before we slither deeper into herpetological observations, please note that we do not speak Parseltongue. Our expertise in herpetology comes entirely from a single thrift store purchase, namely “Good Snakekeeping”, a book by a certain Philip Purser about the care and keeping of snakes. Philip Purser does not know it, but he is regularly quoted by my children.

My children have absorbed his advice and the information contained therein as eagerly as a python might swallow a mouse. Although I have made it very clear that they are not getting a pet snake, ever, they still like snakes, and so they asked a nearby museum staffer about the possibility of seeing an anaconda.

Anacondas (in case you haven't read Good Snakekeeping) are the largest snake in the Americas, capable of swallowing a capybara whole, and reach lengths of over twenty feet. The museum staffer regretfully informed us that they do not have an anaconda. The closest thing they had to an anaconda was… a boa named Andy.

All they had was a ball python. A ball python is a perfectly harmless pet snake that rarely exceeds five feet in length and spends most of its time curled up in a ball. Despite my partner's valiant attempts at snake-related sports humor ("It could be a basketball python! A baseball python! A football python!"), the kids remained adamant—they really wanted to see an anaconda.

I mean, what self-respecting snake enthusiast, having devoted countless hours to reading about feeding schedules, healthy scale patterns, and diagnosing conditions like mouth rot and scale fungus, could possibly be satisfied with a ball python that Philip Purser dismissively categorized as "perfect for beginners"?

The children began to whine. So I insightfully reminded everyone that we can't control other people's feelings. We can only control our own feelings. We can't make each other happy; we can only make ourselves happy. This philosophical truism, delivered in front of a thoroughly unimpressed and unimpressive ball python, did not make anyone happy.

But it wasn't until our third visit to “Survival Of The Slowest” that I realized we were living through a modern retelling of humanity's oldest cautionary tale. The museum was giving us an exercise in the original sin. Like Eve in the Garden of Eden, ignoring my warnings, my children seemed drawn to the forbidden glass as if by magnetic force. And while I would like to (not-at-all defensively) report that they weren't exactly tapping on it, they were definitely touching it, skin to glass.

This was a remarkable parallel to the episode in the Biblical Garden of Eden, where God gave what seemed like an unambiguous, basic rule: Adam and Eve could eat from any tree — except the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The consequence was clear: eating from it would lead to their death.

But then, as you see in the text in Genesis, Adam told Eve that God said not to even touch the tree. This was wrong, and a misrepresentation of the original rule.

Enter the Snake. This proto-rationalist-Dark Arts practicing serpent asked Eve about God's prohibition. Eve, based on Adam's modified version, claimed they couldn't eat or even touch the fruit without dying. The serpent, identifying this exploitable failure state in the rule implementation, promptly pushed her into the fruit.

When she remained very much alive, the forbidden fruit suddenly seemed less forbidden. One bite later, and, well, it ended badly for all of us. And so history repeats itself at the Museum of Science: the children visiting the Museum played the role of Eve, the museum staffers were cast as Adam with their well-meaning but overzealous interpretations of the rules, and the snake was the tempting snake. As in the original tale, everyone ended up punished.

The museum staffers were punished by having to spend their time at the museum scolding small children instead of educating people.
The children were punished by not being able to touch anything.
Parents and guardians were punished by enduring judgmental looks from others for their imperfectly behaved children.
The snake was punished by losing the ability to talk, losing its hands and legs, and ending up in science museums, where it spends all day crawling on its belly, listening to kids being scolded for touching the glass.

My children's current habit of touching rather than tapping the glass actually represents significant progress in their museum behavior, from a few years ago, when they would have been climbing it.

A few years ago, a deadly anxiety-inducing pandemic was spreading globally. We were existing in a perpetual state of sleep deprivation. You might remember it—it was kind of a big deal. There was something about masks, handwashing, and plexiglass barriers everywhere.

What was it called again? Ah well, no matter. The important thing is that the museum was fully prepared…to ensure that we knew exactly where the ‘No Climbing’ signs were located. Wherever we went, a museum staffer was always happy to helpfully show us these signs, which were everywhere a child might wish to climb. I felt personally responsible for — and embarrassed of — my children's misbehavior, and I never wanted to visit again.

But the museum really is a fascinating place, and my partner has an impressive amount of intestinal fortitude when it comes to taking them out in public. I'm acutely aware of every judging eye, so I found myself continually delivering carefully crafted lectures about proper museum behavior, just loudly enough for nearby adults to hear that I was trying, but hopefully not so loud as to disturb others.

"We respect the rules of the museum," I announced grandly, avoiding eye contact with possibly/probably disapproving strangers, hoping they would be impressed by my publicly visible performance of committed parenting even if they never see any actual results. I'm not sure this did anything for their behavior, but I like to think that my efforts contributed to our never getting banned from the museum.

But enough about my deeply ineffective parenting strategies. Let's talk about birds. The museum of Science has a huge bird exhibit, which is placed far away from the snakes.

We never get into trouble at the bird exhibit. That's because the exhibit consists of hundreds of stuffed birds that are all displayed on shelves, covered with plexiglass. Nearby, there are a few rocks that you're actually allowed to climb, making this my personal favorite exhibit for sitting down and pretending to do important work on my phone while my partner handles the actual parenting.

Here's where things get philosophically interesting: these fascinating specimens remain mysteriously anonymous. That's because there are NO LABELS. The birds look interesting, and some are ones I've seen before, and I would love to know their names. We even paid for tickets to learn about things like that at this museum. And got stamped.

Why don't they have labels? The exhibit designer, apparently channeling some sort of extreme realistic naturalist philosophy, claims this creates a more 'real life' experience. This is bad, evil, dumb, and epitomizes the realistic and natural constraints of optimizing for weird preferences over basic epistemic functionality.

This is a realistic and natural experience? You know, like in real life when 100 different species of birds are naturally sitting around on shelves in the middle of the forest, with a computer conveniently located nearby to look up their numbers and find out if they're endangered or not? Just like that.

Rant: This isn't just poor design—it's completely missing the point. They've managed to create an exhibit that simultaneously fails at being educational (having no labels) and at being true to life (consists of stuffed dead birds in glass cases in neat rows). Worst of all, it's counterproductive. I can't spend an hour playing bird bingo on your computer! I need to look at my phone supervise the children.

Finally, I would like to make some random observations about their commitment to bilingualism. The Museum of Science deserves credit for making their exhibits accessible to Spanish speakers. In fact, nearly every display includes accurate Spanish translations of the scientific content.

For me, this linguistic awareness makes their other institutional blind spot even more puzzling. All over the museum, critical safety information, emergency exit signs, and elevator warnings lack Spanish translations.

The museum seems to have decided that Spanish speakers should have access to knowledge about axolotls, neutron stars and plate tectonics, but not have any information about what to do in case of fire or which elevator not to enter with a wheelchair. I recommend that if you only speak Spanish, you should bring an English speaker with you – in case of an emergency.

Overall, the Museum of Science is a place I recommend visiting. We are fortunate to be able to access a scientific institution full of opportunities for testing the limits of both natural laws and human rules. While it may not be perfect, it provides many indoor opportunities for learning, even in the Boston winter, and even if sometimes the lessons we learn don't seem to be exactly what the exhibit designers intended.

Just don't tap on the glass—or touch it, or look at it too intensely, or think about it too hard. The staff will know.