England Plus Paris: Part 14

I was just carrying a daypack with me, having left my heavy luggage back in London, so of course I was staying at a place close to the rail station.

The Tenison Towers Guest House was a fine place to stay. I don't remember much about it. Since I tend to remember bad things, I'm guessing that means the Tenison Towers were pretty good.

Actually, I do remember looking out at a suburban mix of trees and houses out my bedroom window, listening to rain patter on the roof. That was pleasant.

Punts sub Pontem

I sat on a wall, ate a sandwich from Nadia's, and watched the punts. I couldn't remember ever having seen such a traffic jam among boats. There wasn't room for many of them to pass under the bridge at a time. Thanks to some punters' lack of skill, there was even less room. It wasn't a pretty sight.

I Got Your Backs

I now understand the legend of the ugly duckling.

And so I set out from the locks. I helped some punters to drag their craft up from one waterway to another (over a ramp with rollers). A couple of these people were French. One said to me, "You are too much helping."

"Jesus Green" sounds like a product of Humboldt County, but it's really this park.

There was so little going on in the backs that I took this photo of a willow tree hanging over the Cam.

I walked past the back gates of colleges where bored professors types made sure I didn't try to sneak into their schools without paying admission. I walked past a huge crowd of tourists rubbernecking at a swan and cygnet. I walked past school walls and suburban homes.

I walked past a cement hole-cover in the ground marked "Post Office". I wondered if the acronym POTS originally stood for "Post Office Telephone System" rather than "Plain Old Telephone System."

Row Not Gently

This guy seemed to be some kind of race official. What does it say about England that a guy dressed like this expects the respect of many people armed with heavy oars?

As I continued clockwise around the Cam, I encountered many crews of rowers rowing. Since this seemed very un-San Franciscan, I preserved the moment with photos.

Who is saddest:
(a) Rowing crews,
(b) People watching rowing crews, or
(c) Me photographing people watching rowing crews?

Spectators: no spitting, please.

Yes, Another One

One section of this analog computer was labelled "voltmeter". Did it include a voltmeter to allow users to check the values of its inputs and outputs?

The Cambridge Museum of Technology didn't appear on my Cambridge map, but I was able to find it with no problem: it was, of course, housed in a Victorian pumping station. I just looked for a chimney and went.

I don't know what this thing is (an oscilloscope?). Nevertheless, if I lived in a bigger apartment, I'd surround myself with things like this.

It was great. How many times have you seen a sign saying "GO DOWN THE STEPS TO VIEW THE DESTRUCTOR FLUE"?

It's a permeameter, meant to test how fast gasses can pass through fabric. It's not a waffle iron.

Engine 'Ere, Engineer

I'm not especially into engines, but my favorite part of the Cambridge Museum of Technology was watching the engineers getting an old engine running. Most of these Museums of Technology have "steam days" in which they get the engines running. I'd missed most of these. The Sheffield museum had a running engine, but no-one tending that engine. Engines don't interest me, so that hadn't interested me. But the Cambridge museum had an engine and it was interesting--because there were also engineers.

The engineer who had (in modern times) got the engine running explained that he had tacked on a modern carburetor. He hadn't been able to get the engine started until he did that. There's still one unaltered engine left, in case someone wants to figure out how it ever started.

And there were new, fresh-faced engineers on hand, learning how to oil the engine, start it (not with the barring gear engaged), keep it running. They learned how to shut it down without setting anything on fire. They learned how to check the exhaust to make sure it was going where it was supposed to. It cheered me to watch them paying so much attention.

Do Not Deviate From Your Obsessions

I skipped the guided tour of the Technology Museum so that I could catch half an hour at the Fitzwilliam Museum. This was a mistake.

Back at the Lock

The museums were closed and I was back by the punts, loitering. A nuclear family walked up, stood nearby. The little girl was blowing bubbles, but not doing a great job at it. Perhaps she was putting the bubble-ring-thing in her mouth. That conjecture is based on the fact that the mom said, "If you put that in your mouth one more time, I'm going to smack you." A while later, mom did smack her. I decided that this spot wasn't so relaxing after all, and left.

Sailing the Seas of Ghees

When my dinner came, it was awash in butter. I piled each entree up into a corner of its respective serving dish to let the majority of the grease drain off.

Let Him Eat Cake

None of my planned tourist sites opened early in the morning, so I dropped by Fitzbillies to pick up some pastries. I had, much to my surprise, two independent recommendations of this place from people that I knew.

And thus I ate yummy pastries while sitting and watching the Cam on a gray morning.

Old Bones

To imagine the Sedgwick museum, multiply this by a thousand.

At the Sedgwick Museum of Geology, I expected to see pretty rocks. The pretty rocks, as it turned out, were all in an area under renovation, but that wasn't the main thing that this museum had to offer. It was mostly full of fossils.

There were a lot of fossils. There were cabinets chock-full of fossils, with more fossils piled on top. There were assembled skeletons. There were unassembled displays. There were stacks. I never saw so many fossils in one place before.

Strolling

No matter how you look at it, it's a sundial.

Cambridge has many tourists, but it's not overflowing in the Oxford manner. Not yet, anyhow.

Why the ornate tower for this sundial? Why not?

Too bad I didn't do a better job stitching together these photos of a whale skeleton.

Tome Time

The first thing I remember about the Wren Library at Trinity was seeing some historical copy of Tennyson's "Maud"--I forgot everything else.

The library had alcoves made of shelves holding old books. The alcoves were workspaces--each held a table. One table was piled high with books. One had an old PC. One had a new Mac. No doubt each was the domain of some scholar.

Tourists weren't supposed to enter the alcove. We stayed in the central hall, where there were cloth-covered glass tables with old books protected within. One table held Newton-iana. Another held letters by Lord Byron, including one written at age 10 when he had wonderful penmanship, but an unfortunate tendency to write about potatoes.

There were some letters between Faraday and William Whewell in which they settled on some jargon for some of the electrical concepts they were developing. I hoped to find out some jargon-that-never-came-to-be but was thwarted by Faraday's poor penmanship. I thought, Is this "stechion" or "stichion"? Normally, I'd wait until I got to a dictionary and look them up but, of course, since we don't use this "st[ei]chion" word, it's not in the dictionary.

The glass-table-document I found most interesting was Otto Robert Frisch's eye-witness account of the the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo. This test is generally known by its code name "trinity". And here we were in Trinity College. The document didn't mention the word "trinity," which was understandable. But the interpretive text by the document didn't mention "trinity" either, which seemed unhelpful to people who might want to follow up. Were the curators worried that people might think that Trinity College was behind the development of the Trinity test?

Exotic Foreign Foreign Foods

The Rainbow Café made a good three-bean chili. Unfortunately, I ordered the enchilada, which turned out to be just three-bean chili wrapped up in a tortilla. Maybe, maybe you could get away with calling that a burrito, but how could they call it an enchilada?

But the chili was good. I think if I'd just ordered the chili, I would have emerged with a feeling of great contentment instead of mild contentment and annoyed confusion.

Best Interpretive Text I've Ever Seen

There was no explanation for this optical-looking gizmo attached to the end of a slide rule. Perhaps it was for surveying?

The Whipple Museum of the History of Science was a good thing. Cambridge had a department of the history of science. As near as I can tell, each student in the department had to write a report on some item in the museum. These reports, a few pages each, then ended up in the museum where tourists could read them. Thus, there were a few dozen items that had really good interpretive text, in-depth with bibliography. If you wanted to learn more about the astronomical charts of 18th century Japan and how they adapted the notation of similar charts from China, you could (thanks to Hilary Smith's report). Students also put together displays. There was a phrenology display by Ayesha Nathoo which had me chuckling. I had a fun time. I learned. I saw some interesting things. My list of books to read grew.

Pretty mechanical calculator.

Intimations of Mortality

The invigilator figured out that I was an American, which didn't impress me. She also figured out that I was an only child, which impressed me.

She pointed out a drawback of being an only child: when one's parents were dying, there were no siblings to help bear the strain. When her mother had cancer, this invigilator had made weekly trips to London. The cancer had lasted for three months, and had ended only with the mother's death. I lived only about a mile away from my parents' house. The further I got into this conversation, the more that seemed like the perfect distance.

Not all the talk was doom and gloom. She also told me that she'd been to San Francisco back in 1975. She remembered that it was misty, and regretted that she hadn't made it to Sausalito. I said that I'd heard that it was just like St. Ives. She pointed out that St. Ives didn't have any giant sequoias. I allowed that that was true, privately wracking my brain, trying to remember if Sausalito had any giant sequoias.

Braving the Elements

I stepped out of the Science-History department building and into the rain. I was tempted to go back inside the museum to wait out the rain. But if I didn't set out soon, I'd miss the Scott Polar Research Institute. I decided to brave the weather.

As rain blew into my face, wriggled under my hood, and down my chest, I reflected that Scott had braved the weather, and was now dead.

SPRI

I have no idea what this "timinology" bag was for. It seems to involve pencil stubs.

I wasn't in the Scott Polar Research Institute for very long--not long enough for the rain to stop dripping off of my rain jacket. But before they tossed me out so that they could close up, I noticed some stereoscopic photographs of some relics of the Franklin Expedition collected by Francis Leopold McClintock during the voyage of the Fox (1857-1859). The thing that caught my eye: these were stereoscopic photos, meant to show depth. But they were photos of relics laid out in flat display cases. Why bother with stereo photos? Perhaps that had made it seem more science-y in that day.

Departures: England Plus Paris: Part 14

Good Enough

Punts sub Pontem