science science science
Verity and I spent the day at the Science Museum, which was fantastic.
- There was a staff member operating a remote-control inflatable Dalek and chasing children with it, which V thought was great.
- They had some great stuff about computing history - the Jacquard loom (first punch-card machine, from the 1700s), Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2 (never built during his lifetime, but built by the Science Museum between 1980 and 2002 using Victorian techniques, to prove that it was technically possible and Babbage was just too difficult to work with) and an exhibition on Turing.
- I did not know that J. R. R. Tolkien was invited to do war duty at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker! (He declined.) I guess it makes sense, as a linguist.
- Verity bought astronaut ice-cream in the gift shop (having read "Packing for Mars"). It's completely dehydrated but apparently your saliva rehydrates it and it tastes just like ordinary ice-cream, so we're going to try it.
- ERNIE 1 is amazingly cool: it's the Post Office computer used to generate random numbers for Premium Bonds, and was the first computer most of the UK public became aware of in 1957. People wrote really creepy letters to the increasingly-personified ERNIE to try and get it to pick them, including this letter with a constipation cure to go in ERNIE's morning tea:
- Robotic turtles! That respond to light! Apparently Alan Turing was also impressed with them.