News-Record.com

Folks from the Natural Science Center of Greensboro came to the General Assembly today, along with a lot of their colleagues from around the state. They set up booths all around the building and showed off whatever it was that made their museum special.

The Grassroots science museums took a cut in the House version of the budget and part of today's appearance was to argue for restoration of that funding.

The folks manning the Greensboro booth said that they'd had lots of traffic from pages and interns, although the day had been a bit light on legislators. (To be fair, pretty much every Wednesday there's some group of groups showing their wares, so it's pretty easy for this to blend into the background.)

Greensboro did have a pretty good display though. They had an infra red camera that showed how hot your body is.

Here's a picture of museum staffer Rick Betton aiming the camera at me and the thermal image it produced displayed on the monitor.

And here's Terri Cooke who donned a plastic bag as Martha Regester looked on. Even though Cooke was under the bag, the camera picked up both of the museum staffers just fine. I'm told the camera is useful if you're looking for critters at night.

No word on whether it's useful in finding room money in the budget for your program.