Sore Roots Trip Log--Day 13: ERNIE and the Science Museum
Robert & Laura
Last night, we grabbed dinner at the hotel and watched another soccer ("snooker") shoot-out between two teams whose national origins we never did figure out (Athens and somebody else--Slobovia?). Mostly we liked watching the commercials, which showed us that not only could you use your mobile phone (what we call a "cell phone") to send money to anybody, but you could even use it to place bets. Seems the Brits are well ahead of us in gambling technology.
7:30 am
It's a bright sunny day--all the dark storm clouds from yesterday are gone, and birds are singing and we know we're back in England, because the coffee is lousy. We're not sure we could make coffee this bad if we tried. Laura pleads for a spot of cream, and the head maitre'd takes pity on her and scrapes some whipped cream off a nearby scone and puts it in a pitcher (Laura cheerfully accepts it).
Robert gets a "traditional English breakfast" which consists of:
- Textureless sausage (again, this is a manufacturing puzzle: how do you remove all the texture from meat before pressing it into a sausage shaped tube? No wonder there's so many vegetarians in England)
- Fried tomato halves
- Pale, runny scrambled eggs
- "Back bacon" which is like ham that's been treated so that it has all the texture and flavor of shoe leather
Travel tip: try to get a cup of coffee from bass player John and look for a traditional French breakfast.
One nice thing about our hotel, though, is that there's a free bus that takes us to Terminal 5 of Heathrow Airport, where we can catch a tube train to London, which is where we're headed today.
9:10 am
London's underground has this fancy system of paper tickets with magnetic strips on them. You put them in a machine when you begin your journey and they let you in. At the end of your journey, you put them into another machine that swallows them and lets you out. It's pretty robust technology that creates minimal disruption.
At least until Robert uses them. Now Robert has a knack for using things the wrong way and breaking them. This came in pretty handy when he used to do some software testing, as he could quickly locate the flaws and crash most software during testing.
But this time, he's been trying to use it correctly and not ONCE has it worked. He puts the ticket in and the machine freaks out and flashes a red light or it spits the ticket back out or it just sits there like a dead bug. Every single time he's tried to use one of the machines, he ends up having to show his ticket to one of the customer service people, who roll their eyes and open the gate for him manually (and even then one time he managed to get his luggage stuck in the gate, requiring some man-handling of the gate by the customer service person).
10:00 am
This is our only day in London, so we have to pick one thing to see. The last time we were here we popped in on the Sherlock Holmes museum (http://www.wiztext.com/3tac/Day%2015.htm), so we can check that off our list.
We finally decide to go to the Science Museum, because we're suckers for science museums. It takes us about 45 minutes to get from Heathrow to the Science Museum (we don't even have to change trains--both Heathrow and the Science Museum are on the Picadilly line, of Cockfosters fame).
[And Laura gets to listen to a long and indelicate exposition by Robert on the possible origins of "Cockfosters," which involves a whole load of orphaned--well, you can imagine the rest.]
The Science Museum is easy to find: we just follow the signs that say "Hey, Tourists! Science Museum this way!" and without ever having to set foot in a street, we're at the Science Museum. Best of all, it's *free* (turns out all the museums here are free and we're in the Museum Capital of England, because there's more museums per square curator than anywhere else around).
The Science Museum has three stories that are jam-packed with exhibits and we decide to start at the top.
10:35 am
There's a show here called "Stronger By Design" that talks about how things can be stronger by using clever design. There's about 50 school kids seated on the floor, all about eight years old (the Brits don't use "grades" like we do, they use "forms," and we have no idea what form these kids are, but if they went to regular schools, they'd be about third grade).
The demonstration starts with a board acting as a bridge in a model, and a child volunteer shows how weak it is. Then it becomes a suspension bridge (which can hold five times as much weight). Then we learn about arches and eggs and have another kid-friendly demonstration that involves making a mess with eggs ("Eewww!").
It's a good demonstration, as it's interesting enough for grown-ups and simple enough for kids to follow. Having done our share of trying to explain science to kids, we're impressed.
11:00 am
Outside the demonstration, the third floor is all kinds of interactive exhibits for kids to play with and bang on and make noises with and generally burn up energy. They all have some scientific principle at work (levers, air pressure, viscosity and so forth).
Sure, 99% of the kids just make noise and bang on things with them. But every once in a while, we see a serious little kid trying to figure out how something works with the intense concentration you can find in eight-year-olds.
We encourage them, because this is the kid who's going to design our synthetic ankle socket when our natural ones wear out. Or who comes up with the holographic information display we'll use to maneuver our wheelchairs.
11:55 pm
We stop in at a milkshake bar, and discover yet another thing that the British do differently (see, if we weren't such seasoned travelers, we might have said "another perfectly good thing that the Brits have totally bolluxed up," but we're not, so we don't).
Seems that "milk shakes" have a considerably lower viscosity on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. As in, it's more like flavored milk than it is like a proper milkshake. It's good, though.
There's an exhibit about medical devices, starting with iron lungs and moving on through DNA sequencers. In one part of the exhibit, there's a reproduction of this "ancient" science lab from way back in the 20th century (1993) and we notice that there's a Compaq computer on the desk. "Ha ha!" we laugh, pointing at the ancient technology, until we notice it's got 3.5" disk drives and a CD-ROM drive and we can remember when both of those were brand new, exciting tech (yes, we even owned and played "The 7th Guest").
We feel old.
1:00 pm
We've made our way down to the second floor, which has an exhibit on the history of computing. One advantage to a museum on the history of computing in England, is that they have the actual original Difference Engines build from Babbage's original designs (he's considered the first person to design a computer). They are big, clunky things that could add and subtract automatically(!).
They also have the original ERNIE (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment), which was England's first big computer (like our UNIVAC, only it leaked oil). ERNIE is essentially a Lotto number generator.
The Brits wanted to encourage the sales of their version of savings bonds. So they had a drawing every so often and gave a prize to somebody who owned a savings bond. But they needed a way to come up with a completely random number and then match it up with a particular bond. Rather than have somebody roll a ten-sided die eleven times, they built ERNIE who took eleven hours to do essentially the same thing.
(Although to be fair, rolling a 10-sided die wouldn't be truly random. Because of imperfections in the face of the die, it would tend to favor certain numbers over others. It turns out that coming up with a truly random number is, in technical terms, "a bitch." ERNIE used an electrical discharge from a neon tube as the seed for its random numbers.)
On the other side of the hall is an exhibit about drawing tools (back before CAD programs, people had to draw circles and arcs by hand, and it turns out to be harder than it looks).
There's also an exhibit on topology and a bunch of glassware by a professional glass-blower who got fascinated by Klein bottles (a Klein bottle doesn't have an inside or an outside; it's a 4-D Möbius strip).
Our heads hurt, so we reluctantly decide to head home (plus Laura's cold isn't healing itself, even after seeing an iron lung). We could easily spend a week in this museum looking at and understanding all the exhibits.
2:00 pm
We break for lunch.
Which is a good time to talk about prices in the UK. They are deceptively high. For example, Laura got a bowl of soup for £4.75, which doesn't sound bad, until you realize that there's $1.66 in each pound so that bowl of soup costs $7.61(!) in real money.
Similarly, a slice of pizza is $7.61 and a soda is $2.89 and our subway (Underground) ride from Heathrow to the museum costs $8.50 each way.
It's a good thing the museum is free, because we couldn't afford it otherwise!
2:30 pm
We finally figure out how to order a ticket from the automatic ticket dispenser (we're a single ticket, other zone, Heathrow, multiples, two adults, zero children--it takes about 20 key presses to set it up correctly). But when the machine says that it "takes cards," they mean "takes English bank cards, not those cheesy American credit cards that the colonists find so handy."
So we still have to stand in line to get our tickets from a human being.
5:00 pm
This is our penultimate Trip Log, which is a fancy way of saying that assuming the plane don't crash, there will be one more Trip Log after we make it safely back home. Tomorrow we catch an Icelandair flight out of Heathrow (just outside our hotel window) and go back to Iceland and then on to Seattle.
Because of our direction of travel, we'll be compressing 36 hours into 24 hours which will feel like 48 hours.
So if you hear about anybody getting tossed off an airplane for singing "Passengers will please refrain from heading into Cockfosters!" that'll be us. Otherwise, we'll see you again on the other side of the Atlantic (and the other side of the Great Plains, as well!).
Robert & Laura
Sore Roots Tour