![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Sorry to rain on your parade
Mar. 18th, 2007 10:28 amSince I have meetings Monday, I stayed in London over the weekend. Friday night I went to Spamalot and then dinner with co-workers at a bit too exclusive Cuban-themed place called Floradita. They have a rather extensive collection of rum drinks, but sadly lacking in the girly-drink accompaniments of plastic monkeys, umbrellas, and fresh fruit. I tried to sleep in Saturday to catch up on lost sleep, but on my return from Reading the room I was booked into is a bit smaller, further back from the elevator, and close to some kind of pump or other that made horrible intermittent noise starting about nine in the morning.
Had a low-key lunch and dinner with co-workers, and spent the afternoon checking out the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. My main interest was in making the Computer Science equivalent of a trip to Mecca to see the Babbage Difference Engine display at the History of Computing exhibition. They had a few bits of the never-completed Difference Engine No 1 and Analytical Engine, as well as a modern full-sized Difference Engine No 2. There has never been a more beautifully gleaming artifact created for computing the iterative values of 7th degree polynomial equations through the method of finite differences, cranking out 31 digit results at 1/6 FLOPS (well not so much FLoating-point, more OPS). They are building a second one for exhibition in America, and had the partially completed device nearby. The unexpected bonus of the trip was that they have Babbage's brain on display! A jar below his portrait holds his right sagittal lobe and brain stem, a remnant of the 19th century obsession with dissecting brains of famously intelligent people. Insert CS geek squee here.
Today I went down to Trafalgar Square to watch the St Patrick's Day parade. The weather most of the week had been sunny and clear, but today is more blustery. Clouds rolled in and dropped a bit of freezing rain for about 15-20 minutes during the parade, but it cleared up again as it wound down. A number of girls wearing "Kiss me, I'm Irish" sashes--which I took to not be taken literally by tourists--Guinness brand hats, various uses of green sequins, green wigs and hair dye, and buttons. I thought the button that read "I'm Full of Irish Creme" to be particularly naughty when worn by either Irish men or women of any decent.
Later I wandered over to Covent Square and the British Museum. I expected the British Museum to be an homage at the heart of a once great and decadent empire driven to conquest by the desperate need of a good curry and a hot drink to get through the dreary winters. It wasn't. While a few galleries are dedicated to the history of the British Isles, the majority of the displays hold the artifacts of the powers of the ancient world, primarily Greece, Rome, and Egypt. I tend to skim through museums pretty quickly, and I have a strong preference for sculpture and monoliths rather than freezes and paintings, but my favorite bit was the Rosetta Stone. It's an artifact that proves the importance of redundant information storage and encoding schemes, and a cautionary tale that no matter how anal your culture is about documenting things, it's useless if nobody can read it.
Had a low-key lunch and dinner with co-workers, and spent the afternoon checking out the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. My main interest was in making the Computer Science equivalent of a trip to Mecca to see the Babbage Difference Engine display at the History of Computing exhibition. They had a few bits of the never-completed Difference Engine No 1 and Analytical Engine, as well as a modern full-sized Difference Engine No 2. There has never been a more beautifully gleaming artifact created for computing the iterative values of 7th degree polynomial equations through the method of finite differences, cranking out 31 digit results at 1/6 FLOPS (well not so much FLoating-point, more OPS). They are building a second one for exhibition in America, and had the partially completed device nearby. The unexpected bonus of the trip was that they have Babbage's brain on display! A jar below his portrait holds his right sagittal lobe and brain stem, a remnant of the 19th century obsession with dissecting brains of famously intelligent people. Insert CS geek squee here.
Today I went down to Trafalgar Square to watch the St Patrick's Day parade. The weather most of the week had been sunny and clear, but today is more blustery. Clouds rolled in and dropped a bit of freezing rain for about 15-20 minutes during the parade, but it cleared up again as it wound down. A number of girls wearing "Kiss me, I'm Irish" sashes--which I took to not be taken literally by tourists--Guinness brand hats, various uses of green sequins, green wigs and hair dye, and buttons. I thought the button that read "I'm Full of Irish Creme" to be particularly naughty when worn by either Irish men or women of any decent.
Later I wandered over to Covent Square and the British Museum. I expected the British Museum to be an homage at the heart of a once great and decadent empire driven to conquest by the desperate need of a good curry and a hot drink to get through the dreary winters. It wasn't. While a few galleries are dedicated to the history of the British Isles, the majority of the displays hold the artifacts of the powers of the ancient world, primarily Greece, Rome, and Egypt. I tend to skim through museums pretty quickly, and I have a strong preference for sculpture and monoliths rather than freezes and paintings, but my favorite bit was the Rosetta Stone. It's an artifact that proves the importance of redundant information storage and encoding schemes, and a cautionary tale that no matter how anal your culture is about documenting things, it's useless if nobody can read it.
