A Day at the British and Science Museums
Our youngest is doing the “Ancient Egypt” project at school this term – and will be spending half term creating a “project board” – essentially a board filled with any subject the child chooses, with a tick list of requirements such as drawings, written work, and a glossary. Of course nothing is ever simple in our house – her older sister is doing a project board on the second world war. Therefore we decided to hit two birds with one stone, and trek into London for the day – one of us visiting the British Museum, and the other visiting the Imperial War Museum. I drew the easier option – the British Museum (mainly because Miss 11 never shuts up, whereas her little sister is compliant, and quiet).
Of course the trip nearly didn't happen at all. My other half didn't get out of bed yesterday – suffering with a 24 hour bug picked up at a friend's house on Friday night. We had provisionally cancelled all plans for the weekend – but got up this morning, and she said she felt fine – so at 8am it was all systems go to somehow get to the train station a few miles away by 9:45. We did it.
The journey in was surprisingly peaceful. I say “surprisingly”, but it wasn't really – I picked up the Kindle Fire, and the Nintendo DS before leaving the house. I'm not stupid.
By 11am we had split into two groups, and I found myself walking along Oxford Street in the heartof London with our youngest daughter. She spotted a McDonalds sign. That's how we ended up walking along Oxford Street eating Big Macs from their cardboard boxes for breakfast. I didn't really think about it when we ordered it – she just said she wanted one. Here's a tip – a nine year old's hands are not big enough to hold a Big Mac. By the time she finished, she may as well have just head-butted the burger a few times – it would have had the same effect.
After a rapid clean up, and the beginning of “are we nearly there yet?”, I spotted the railings at the end of Great Russell Street – andas we made our way along, there was a suitable intake of breath from a little girl as the majestic columns of the British Museum crept into view.
The next hour was pretty much a sprint from room to room of the museum – looking at the colossal carvings of Amenhotep III (one of which accompanies this post), various sarcophagi (is that a real word?), and more hieroglyphics than you might point a very many pointed stick at.
By far the highlight of the trip – for me – was the special exhibition of the mummies. We had to pay, and wait half an hour to get in, but it was totally worth it. The British Museum has taken several of it's most ancient Egyptian mummies, and put them through modern medical imaging devices – cat scanners, and so on. The results, and their presentation are breathtaking. 3D interactive projections of the mummies bodies, peeling back the layers, and showing the remains of the skeletal structure, and internal organs.It was stunning. I could have stayed for quite some time, reading everything on display, but of course Miss 9 had other ideas.
“I'm hungry”
That's how we ended up in McDonalds again at lunchtime. Her idea. I gave in because it was quick, and inexpensive. While munching on fries and sipping a coke, I figured we had a couple of hours to kill before meeting up with everybody else.
“How about a trip to the Science Museum?”
She nodded. Half an hour later we had traversed the Victoria and Circle lines beneath the city streets, and re-emerged at South Kensington, on the doorstep of the Science Museum. It struck me as we walked in how lucky we are that all the major museums in England are free to the public. Miss 9 had no idea what to expect, and was suitably impressed with Apollo capsules, the J2 Apollo engines, and the various astronaut suits on display. They weren't really why I wanted to go though – I'm a software developer remember. I spied a sign across the room – “Computing – Third Floor”.
Oh. My. Word. We entered the third floor from the far end from the hardware I actually wanted to see, but in some ways it was a happy accident. Approaching a bank of filing cabinets covered in knobs and switches, I realised I was looking at one of the early supercomputers. While pulling thephone from my pocket to take a photo, it wasn't lost on me that the device in my hands was orders of magnitude more powerful than the several tons of hardware in front of us.
Finally we arrived at the entire reason for the visit. I pointed at the “Next” computer behind a glass case – and just as I did, two young black kids pushed in – laughing, joking, and making fun of it.
“Look at this – it's the oldest computer in the world- “... well that computer is the one that Steve Jobs was responsible for after he was fired from Apple. If not for that computer, there would be no modern Apple computers as you know them, no iPod, no iPhone, and probably no Pixar either”.
Unbelievably they were listening to me. I went on to describe the operating system – how OSX was it's direct descendant – how it had paved the way for Unix derivatives such as BSD, and Linux to flourish, and that it had been used by Tim Berners Lee to develop the prototype of the “World Wide Web” at CERN. I take a lot of this “history” for granted, by while talking it occurred to me that many people have no clue. By the time I finished, a few parents and other children were also listening. They all thanked me with huge smiles, and a few parents shook my hand. One of the kids that had been laughing called me “Sir” as he thanked me.
Maybe I'm in the wrong career.