Two Museums in the Rain

The weather this weekend has been awful and there has been more rain here this weekend than the total of the last few months. It is however very welcome and the reservoirs will fill up a little. We decided to visit the Museum of Computing on Saturday and this brought back some very happy memories for me from my early days in Reid & Taylor & R.G.Neill's when I used a teleprinter and an electronic calculator for the first time. This photo above is from the display of Google Earth and shows a 3D map of Langholm that is over 6 feet tall.

This is Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No 2 dating from 1849. It consists of 8000 parts and can calculate to 31 digits of precision.

This is a ZX Spectrum and was the first computer we bought for Fraser in the early 80s when he expressed an interest in computers. The rest as they say is history. We used to get so cross when he spent hours on this and later computers but it has proved to be very worthwhile and has led to an interesting career with him working for Motorola, Microsoft, Disney, and now Apple.

On Sunday we headed for Golden Gate Park in San Francisco to visit the California Academy of Sciences. This is a Foucault Pendulum which is a simple device to demonstrate the rotation of the earth. These pegs in the circle take 39 hours to be knocked over due to the position of the museum in California.

This is a Butterfly in the Rain Forest Biosphere.

The Aquarium in the basement of the building. We also visited the worlds largest Planetarium to see a fantastic digital film. The museum was great but very expensive and Fraser said it just as good as the National Science Museum in Edinburgh which the family visited last summer and was FREE. We are very lucky in the UK to have so many fantastic museums that are all free. Anyway the weather is set to get back to normal from tomorrow so it will be outdoor activities again and a visit to various places in the san Francisco Bay area.