Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 10

Oyrgpuyrl Cnex

Sat May 04 Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

Our tour guide, Mac, was a good presenter.

Bletchley Park, as you may know, was the center of the British cryptography effort during World War II. When I was there, it had recently been turned into a tourist attraction.

It was a pretty good tourist attraction. I started out with a tour of the grounds. Our tour guide was knowledgable about the history of the place. The history was interesting, but you can read about that somewhere else. I wasn't paying that much attention, really. Not at first.

Someone Set Us Up The Bombe

Sat May 04 Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

Movie sets

Rebuilding working bombes. (Sorry about the reflection off of the window glass.)

I started paying attention when we entered a concrete building that seemed to contain a few devices. Actually, it contained a few movie sets. These were meant to look like Turing bombes.

When I say "Turing bombes," I'm talking about bombe-shaped devices designed by Alan Turing to do some of the brute-force work of solving messages encrypted by the German-used "Enigma" machine during World War II.

They had appeared in the movie "Enigma." (The main reason to see the movie is for the brief view of these fake bombes ticking and rotating as they pretend to compute codes.)

More interesting was a room off to the side. In this room, people were trying to rebuild real Turing bombes--not just movie sets. Unfortunately, there wasn't anyone doing anything while I was there.

For Your Eyes Only

Sat May 04 Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

I don't have any photos of Bletchley Park's most interesting things. They had a four-wheel Enigma machine. They had a Lorenz machine. Most importantly, they had the Colossus Rebuild.

About a year and a half before my trip, news had started to filter out of the UK about some war secrets that had recently come to light. We heard of a machine called Colossus, a computer used for code-breaking, the first electronic programmable computer ever. It had been destroyed after the war.

Later, I'd heard that some people were working on rebuilding a Colossus. That sounded like something that I had to see. And so I put England on my list-of-places-to-see.

This building's rules forbade the use of digital cameras. They said that digital cameras would set off the burglar alarm.

I didn't have a non-digital camera. (Later on, I'd run back to the post office/gift shop to buy a disposable camera, but none of its photos would turn out well. There was glass over everything, making me reluctant to use flash. But the light wasn't bright enough for me to get away with that.) So I didn't get any photos of the Colossus rebuild, which is too bad because it was very interesting.

There was a big room in which there were some big racks on which were mounted some big circuits. These circuits were large because their components were large: vacuum-tubes.

They had one panel of circuits up next to the viewing window so I could see it close up. It was the size of my forearm. It was snaked with vacuum tubes, resistors and wires. It held the logic for, perhaps, a couple of AND gates.

There were some people in this room. Some of them were standing around and talking; one of them was facing one of the racks, soldering something. It was fun to watch them, geeks obsessed enough to work on wiring on a weekend.

I spent a lot of time staring in the window and taking notes on my grid-lined notebook. Eventually, this geeky behavior caused the people by the rebuild enough discomfort such that they asked me into the rebuild room. Ha! I jest. David Stanley wandered out into the visitor area to field questions, and I had enough annoying questions such that he let me into the rebuild area to spread the misery around a little. Thus, I was able to get a close-up look at the paper-tape reader, and a decoder made from telephone exchange relays.

I also revealed my ignorance of pre-transistor electronics. If someone talks about a "thermionic valve", they mean a vacuum tube. I guess vacuum tubes behave differently if you heat them up. (Oh, wait, this other thing I'm reading says that "thermions" are "electrically charged particles." Maybe "thermion" is British for "ion"? Maybe the "therm" doesn't have anything to do with temperature?) I think those guys quickly plumbed the shallowness of my understanding.

I wrote this down, but can no longer remember the context: "Pentode valves 'used in the ?counting? circuits', various carbon resistors, power tetrode valves, thermionic diodes, used in thyratron conttrol circuits. Surface mounting valve holders. Triode valves, mica capacitors. High wattage 3.9Kohm resistors used for anode loads for 807 beam tetrodes, Metal Oxide rectifiers, photoelectric cells for reading the holes... Tag strips used on the valve panels." It seemed important at the time.

I knew that I wanted to come back some day, perhaps when they'd finished the rebuild.

Second Opinion

Sat May 04 Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes

Another visitor wasn't so impressed by the computer. He was a boy, who might have been about eight years old. He looked through the window at a room full of circuitry and said, "But where's the computer?" He knew that when you opened up a computer, you could see circuitry inside, "the motherboard and all." His mom tried explaining that he was looking at the motherboard.

The boy seemed to find this disappointing.

Substandard

Sat May 04 Khan's, London

Khan's was, like the Standard, an Indian restaurant on Westbourne Grove. Their food was pretty good, but they didn't have chutneys on the table by default. Thus I determined that I should keep going back to the Standard.

Along the Thames by Foot

Sun May 05 Aside the Thames, London

Behind the Hinde: In a slip hemmed in by buildings, a replica of the Golden Hinde hunkered off the Thames.

There's a Clink Street, with some kind of jail museum on it. Maybe that's where the phrase "The Clink" comes from. As I walked along the Thames, I saw Clink Street. I almost missed a replica of the Globe theater.

I don't know what these were for.

And that's pretty much what I got out of walking along the Thames. There weren't many boat tie-ups. When I walked across a bridge to the North side, I noticed that the bridge wasn't a draw-bridge. So I couldn't expect any large boats upstream.

When you see this many tourists around, you may be in the wrong place.

This was somewhat worrisome. I planned to take a boat ride a ways upstream, and I hoped to see industry by the side of the river. More worrisome was the crowd of tourists I had to deal with to approach the boat-ride place. This was the spot of the Thames by Westminster Cathedral, and it was aswarm. So were the boats; I waited in line with far too many Americans.

Along the Thames by Boat

Sun May 05 The Thames, London

The boat ride was a wonderful narrated tour of the luxury apartments which now line the Thames. But if you wanted to see riverside industry, you were far too late.

At first, I wasn't sure why people wanted to build their luxury apartments along the Thames. The Thames isn't much to look at. Not much boat traffic. The water looks still. Then I figured that these people just liked the flat expanse of river that allowed them to have a wide view of the luxury apartments on the other side of the river.

Okay, it was interesting to see the shell of the Battersea Power Plant and I noticed that some of the buildings around it were interesting, but I came back and got better photos of them later.

The luxury apartments were too dull to take photos of, so here's the underside of a bridge instead.

The boat ride was a horrible waste of time.

(If you think that you'd like a narrated tour of luxury apartments along the Thames (perhaps to hear about celebrities, past and present, which inhabit them), know this: most of that stuff came along before Kew Gardens. I rode all the way out to Hampton Court, and the tour dude didn't bother narrating the last part; even he couldn't find anything worthwhile to say about it.)

I'm being overly harsh. Once we got a ways out of central London, it wasn't all luxury apartments. There were also riparian parks with grass, bike paths, and willow trees.

If I'd known what I was getting into, I would have taken a train to the start of this park-ish area, rented a bike, and had a beautiful bike ride, instead of a boring boat tour.

Hampton Court

Sun May 05 Hampton Court

That day, the splendid gardens of Hampton Court were windy and gray and not splendid at all. I was shivering with the cold. I went to a refreshment stand, hoping that they'd sell me some coffee. All of their beverages were cold. Also, a "lemonade" turned out to be a Sprite.

And so I sat on a bench in the cold and washed down a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with cold Sprite. I watched the tall grasses blow in the wind. According to signs, I shouldn't walk amongst the tall grass because there were bulbs buried in there, and I'd crush the bulbs. I interpreted this to mean that at some time during the year, those grasses held some pretty flowers, but that this was not that time of year.

The hedge maze passages were much narrower than I'd imagined.

Fortunately, I wasn't there to see the gardens. Nor was I there to see Hampton Court Palace. I was there to see the famous hedge maze.

Years before, I'd made a level for a game called Doom. I'd based the level on three famous mazes: the minotaur's labyrinth, Pac Man (Ms Pac Man, anyhow), and the Hampton Court hedge maze. I'd had no idea what Hampton Court's hedge maze had looked like; I'd just used a map I'd snarfed from a topology book. Now was my chance to see if I'd got it right.

I hadn't. This is probably just as well. The Hampton Court hedge maze would not have made a good Doom level. Most of its passages were very skinny, much too skinny for the cacodaemons I'd populated it with. The central "goal" area was only about eight feet wide. There were no benches under its trees; there was no room for benches.

Also, I'd been too lazy/untalented to draw a hedge-wall picture to cover the level's walls with. I'd used a provided vine-covered wall texture. Now that I was in the maze, I saw that this wasn't as bad as I'd thought. Many of the hedge walls were reinforced with wood or metal fences. I wasn't sure if these were meant to support the hedges or to prevent cheaters from tunneling. Speaking of tunnels, there was an arch at one point; I'd left the all of my passages open to the sky. Also, the passages were paved. I hadn't expected that, though it might have been the only way to keep the many, many tourists from crushing all of the air out of the soil.

It seemed like there was more than one way through the maze, although I wasn't paying that much attention. I concentrated on not colliding with my fellow tourists instead of on the layout.

Could Have Been Worse

Sun May 05 The Tube, London

On the train ride back, there were construction delays. I had to change trains at an out-of-the-way place. A train that was supposed to pick me up went missing. I rode crowded trains. I say they were very crowded, and I've been to Tokyo. A lady rested her butt on my shoulder while she took a mobile phone call.

But I was still glad to be on the train rather than on that boat ride.

Le Pen Jab

Sun May 05 Some Thai Restaurant, London

I was in some Thai restaurant on Ossington off Westbourne Grove. The Thai food was not as bland as that of El Paso, but it was bland enough for most purposes.

To cheer me up, 15% of the French population had voted for Le Pen, the aforementioned right-wing pigeon from outer space. This was not enough to give him rule of France, but it was enough such that it was clear that more French people were willing to vote for that kind of moron than Americans were. The next time some European tried to tell me what jingos Americans were, I could point at the French, and I'd have statistics on my side.

Royal Annoyance

Mon May 06 Buckingham Palace, London

I was storming along the street, coming from the British Visitor Center. I was angry. I'd hoped to book a three-night stay in Cambridge. I'd hoped to book ahead, to avoid Oxford-like troubles. I hadn't booked far enough ahead. I was settling for a one-night stay.

And now there was a building in my way. It was pretty annoying. What was it? And why were there so many tourists milling around?

Then I saw the royal guards marching around, with their assault rifles and their bearskin hats. Ah, I must be at Buckingham Palace. How annoying, there was a whole sprawling palace in my way.

But I was able to make my way around it.

Various and Assorted

Mon May 06 Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The Victoria and Albert Museum is a wonderful place.

E.g., I got pretty excited when I saw the interpretive text: "In 1864 the Swedish photographer Emma Schenson made a series of photographs in memory of... Linnaeus. Most photographs of the series were taken in his house... Linnaeus firnished his home as a kind of personal museum..."

So I looked at a photo, and it showed a room, and there was a glass display table against a wall. And I thought, how clever, there are probably plants growing inside the table, and then I looked more closely and saw that the table actually contained a tea set. And that was somehow more unnerving than the idea of plants inside a glass table.

There was an exhibit on prints and how prints are made. If I'd paid attention to it, I could have learned something. But I got distracted by things like the screenprint that Lee Wagstaff did with his own blood. Sometimes I'm shallow.

There was a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit, which was pretty crowded. No doubt the museum visitors found him foreign and exotic.

There was a quote from John Constable touching on maritime art: "The [Brighton] fishing boats are picturesque, but not so much as the Hastings boats... But these subjects are so hackneyed in the Exhibition that they have done a great deal of harm."

There was a huge Persian carpet, its twin at LACMA. I thought that maybe I had seen its twin--I remembered a big carpet. The V&A's carpet was kept in the corner of a dark room. The LACMA carpet, if I remembered correctly, was laid out on the floor of a lit room. Maybe the V&A's would last longer, but no-one would appreciate it.

In gallery 122c, a helpful animation illustrating the action of a Jacquard loom.

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