How clouds are made

How are Clouds made? By leasing an anonymous-looking building, buying commodity servers by the mile, then engaging an infrastructure guy like Randy Bias to put it together? No - I meant real clouds.

So on the day after Thanksgiving, I brought my son to the Liberty Science Center in Liberty City, New Jersey, just across the Hudson from Manhattan. It's a great place - we agreed afterwards that it's right up there with San Francisco's Exploratorium. Boston Museum of Science membership got us in for free.

One of the features of the Liberty Science Center is its open spaces. It just doesn't feel as crowded as other museums. And, in the open spaces, they run Live Science events. One of the live science events, called "Sub Zero", focuses on the different states of matter. The instructors explained how matter can exist in a number of different states (including "Pennsylvania", as one kid answered :-) ).

At the finale, we saw how a cloud can be created by pouring water onto liquid nitrogen:



Hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving weekend, whether or not it was a holiday weekend in your part of the world.