Amanda's perspective on some of our time in London: aka someone other than James posting....

So much has happened since my last post, so bear with me if this gets a little long. On Friday, the 29th, we took a day trip to Cambridge. There was a little bit of a mix up on the way there, where half of the seminar group got on a underground train, called the Tube, and the half I was in did not make it in time. We thought we were going to all meet up at the next stop, but apparently they wandered off to look into getting discount rail passes. About 45 minutes later we all managed to meet up at King’s Cross Station. From there we got on a non-stop express train up to Cambridge. It only took about 45 minutes, which wasn’t that bad. Once we got there, we walked into town, past some of the college of Cambridge. The University system in different in England than how it is in America. Each university is composed of many different colleges. When you apply, you apply to a college, not to the university as a whole. All of the colleges have their own characters, financial support, chapel, housing, and dining hall. Classes are handled by the university though, so there could be students from many different colleges in the classes. One of the colleges on the outskirts of the Cambridge University grounds, Pembroke, was open for visitors, so we walked around and looked at the chapel and the grounds. After that we headed into the main center of the city of Cambridge. We found a market there that has been in that exact same spot since the time that the Romans occupied the city, about 2000 years ago. We got lunch at the market and then went down along the Cam, which is the name of the river. There are flat boats that they run along the river, called punts. Two groups of my classmates decided they wanted to try punting down the river themselves. I quite enjoyed watching them try to figure out how to get the boat to go in the right direction. I opted for the guided punt tour of the river along the part that runs behind and through a bunch of the colleges of Cambridge. It was really pretty and I took a lot of pictures that I now have to go back through and try to remember what all we saw. When we were all back on dry land, we went back into to town to meet our tour guide. He was an American who had been living in England for many years. We walked through the complex of the Cavendish Laboratory and passed by the spot where Watson and Crick had their lab where they discovered the structure of DNA. We also went into the display where they have some of Darwin’s collection of animals that he collected on the voyage of the Beagle which helped him develop the theory of evolution. We also got more information on some of the better-know colleges at Cambridge, including Trinity College where Isaac Newton lived, worked, and studied for most of the time he was developing his theories. After the tour we went to a local pub called The Eagle, where Watson and Crick first told people about their DNA discovery. We had traditional fish and chips, with, basically an entire fish, minus the scales, eyes, and bones. We then hopped on the train back to London and had fun playing with the sign for Platform 9 ¾ from the Harry Potter books.
Saturday we got up early and went down to a farmer’s market that they have every Saturday morning in one of the parks near our residence hall. We found a bunch of fresh stuff, for good prices and found food for the rest of the day. Later, we went to the Tower of London, which was ridiculously awesome. We stood outside and watched a demonstration of a catapult. We went into the tower and joined a tour of the Tower and heard a bunch of really cool stories that happened there. We also got to see the memorial near the spot where the 6 people who were killed inside the tower, including Anne Boleyn. We also go to see the crown jewels, which was pretty amazing. After that we went through the White Tower, which is the oldest part of the Tower, which was used as a torture chamber and arms warehouse in the many years since its construction. All in all it was pretty cool and I basically went into history major overload.
Sunday we went to this fun Chinese place that serves something called din sum, which is where they bring all kinds of food around on trolleys and you sit at a table and pick what you want as they come around. It was in the China town section of London, which was pretty cool to see. After that James, Ryan, Zoe and I went off to see the National Portrait Gallery. They had a good collection of portraits from different periods of England’s history, starting mostly with the Tudors.
Monday, after class, we went to the British Library. They had a really awesome collection of different books, including a working copy of Persuasion by Jane Austen and her writing desk. They also had several copies of the Magna Carta and different pieces from many different religions, including Taoism and Buddhism. They also had a copy of the Guttenberg Bible, which was the fist book mass produced on the first printing press that was invented. After that we went up to Knotting Hill and had dinner at a really cool pub. We were looking for a Jamaican festival, but figured out that it had probably happened the week before.
Tuesday we had another seminar session in the morning, followed by a scientific walking tour of London. We got to see the homes of a couple of people we’re talking about in our seminar. When we were done with the tour, a couple of us went up to Abby Road and saw the recording studio where the Beatles worked. I also stood by and watched four of my friends from the seminar attempt (rather badly) to recreate the photo on the cover of their album.
I’ve been having a really awesome time so far. I love London. It doesn’t really have the feel of a city that I’m used to from visiting New York City. Where cities in the United States expanded up because of the restrictions for how far out they could to, London seems to have expanded outward, with some of the buildings constructed in the 1600’s being among the tallest in the skyline. I’ve really started to enjoy the Tube, now that I know how to navigate my way through it. The seminar is a little boring at the moment. The professor doesn’t really know how to teach history, seeing as he normally teaches physics. That should get better next week, when our presentations start. Although, the one really cool thing that Professor Marschall has done is ask about getting cookies from the dinning hall at Gettysburg, sent over to us. We still have a lot coming up this weekend, including a trip to Greenwich all day Friday. James, Ryan, Zoe and I are thinking about going up to check out Stonehenge on Saturday, or possibly checking out a much bigger farmers market back up in Knotting Hill. Friday is also my birthday, so we’ll see what kind of craziness we can get into, which should be fun.

Picture Issues

I'm reorganizing my pictures so they might be down for a little while. Hopefully they wont be down long and when they go back up they will be much easier to find.

More Pictures.

The second album includes pictures from our visit to...

The Tate Museum

Greenwich Observatory

and Stonehenge

I've got more. I'll upload them later tonight hopefully.

Pictures Album 2

All The Stage is a Stage

Today we were treated to see a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe Theater. This was probably one of the most amazing productions that I have ever seen. Unfortunately we didn't show up early enough to visit the museum of the Globe Theater which follows the recreation process and is a lot of fun. We were ushered into the theater grounds and left to wait outside. When the doors finally opened we were allowed into the theater. We had standing room tickets so we were pooled into the circle floor. We were groundlings. Luckily one of my group had the good idea to stand in front of a ramp that came off of the stage so that we could lean against it to make the standing for the three hours a little more bearable.

Ryan and I, being theater people, noticed quickly that there was little to no stage lighting. Amazingly the main source of lighting in the theater was an electrical light inside of a floating fabric orb suspending by ropes above the theater. It served as a fake sun/moon as the actual light of the day faded away. Surprisingly it actually cast a good deal of light.

Midsummer Night's Dream is an amazing play. One of my personal favorites. The casting of Puck is crucial to any production of the show, in my opinion, and also in my opinion this casting was amazing. In fact all of the actors in the show we saw were amazing. For having little set, no lighting, and only a few actors the show was amazing. Long as it was the show was so funny that I rarely noticed how long it was going.

As a side note before we entered the actual theater grounds we saw a group of people with telescopes looking up at a building. Apparently one of the buildings next to the Globe Theater is the nesting place for Peregrine Falcons. I got to look through the telescope and see one. Awesome animals. Overall the night was legendary.

Science!

Today we had our second day of presentation. Most are actually pretty good, but an hour is a long time to focus on something like this.

For the second part of the day we visited the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum. The Natural History Museum was actually not that much fun. There was a really cool couple of rooms on dinosaurs. We saw some really interesting dinosaurs and the entire collection was really interesting. They even had small robotic raptors on top of some random ledges around the building that would jump forward and scare children.

The Science museum on the other hand was amazing. There was a great exhibit about Babbage. They had a model of the Difference Engine One and Two. Also they had a model of the Mill part of the Analytic engine. The Difference Engine One and the Mill didn't really work, but apparently the Difference Engine Two was fully functional. Not only that but it was built by members of the Museum and Cambridge using only technology that Babbage could have had access to at the time. They amazingly proved that had he had enough money and the right people working for him he could have created his engine. They had some amazing videos of the engine functioning. As well as the engines they also had most of Babbage's actual brain. The entire Beginning of Computing section was amazing.

The most fun, of course, was the Launchpad section. The area was essentially a science playground designed for little children, but my friends and I had a lot of fun regardless. There were huge bubble wand, a huge echo tube, a toy sailboat on wheels with fans, and lots of magnets. My three favorite parts were a spinning circle. You could stand on the circle and hang onto a post and then spin yourself. You would pull yourself more upright and eventually you would start spinning very quickly. Very quickly. Needless to say I got really dizzy and walked into a few walls. There was a huge system of tubes and funnels with what was essentially rice in it. You could lift buckets, spin wheels, and turn a Archimedes Screw to move the rice around the system. Lastly there were a series of blocks that you could use to build a freestanding arch. Ryan and I did that with ease. All said the day was a lot of fun.

The Royal Society

Today we paid a visit to the Royal Society of London. It was a pretty cool trip because the Royal Society basically had it's fingers in everything we have learned about so far in our trip. For those reading who are not familiar with the Royal Society I will explain. The Royal Society of London was a social group of men in the 19th Century that started to meet casually to share their ideas on science and the world. Eventually they were given a formal mandate and charter from the King. Their job was to remain on the pinnacle of science. They would hold meetings and different famous scientists of the time. They started printing a transcript of the presentations. These Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society have become the longest continually printed scientific journal ever.

My Ingenious Person Charles Babbage was a member of the Royal Society. He would play a major role in the reformation of the society. They Royal Society today serves generally the same role it did back in the 18th Century. Though the number of fellows is in the tens of thousands rather than just the thousands and the meetings are far fewer and further between they still are very similar. The building of the Royal Society serves less as a meeting place and more as a library. The Royal Society has a huge library of books published by their fellows. I spent a good time reading a book of writings published by Babbage. I particularly enjoyed a paper he wrote about "Street Nuisances." He had an incredible hatred of organ grinders and other street musicals. I and a few others signed up to be readers of the Royal Society Library so I might find time to go back.

Unfortunately the Royal Society is not in it's traditional building. They moved out of that building and into their current building in the 1950s. They are actually in a building that was the former German embassy during the second world War. The Archivist, who gave us the tour, told us that there are rumors that under all of the carpets there are tilled swastikas all over the floor.

Pubs, Bars, and Odd Bins

Because my friend Morghan specifically asked for more juicy Londony stuff I'll try to ablige.

For those that don't know the drinking age in England is 18. So of course one of the first things that we did was go looking around for some place to get some alcohol. A few of our interesting finds were Pimms and Ale. When we visited Cambridge we stopped for dinner at a local pub. The pub itself was amazing. It had writing all over the ceiling from RAF boys who would stop at the pub before going to the local shipping out station. The ceiling and walls have become a memorial to the RAF boys from the area who died defending England against the German airforce. The writing includes even the sketch of a woman. The story goes that the RAF boys lifted the owner of the bar up to the ceiling and traced her "naughty bits and all." My friend and roomate Ryan decided to try Ale, which is an English classic drink. It is apparently a very strong flat beer that has been brewed in England for years. I wasn't really a fan. On the other hand we were first introduced to Pimms. Pimms, we later learned, is a Gin based spirit that when mixed with lemonade tastes remarkeably like iced tea. It goes great with fruit. We've tried to visit a pub a few evenings but found that most pubs close around 11pm.

Pictures Part 1

I'll be posting pictures from my trip. I might end up trying different hosts for pictures, but to allow friends and family to see them if they don't have Facebook I'll be trying to avoid using that. So far I'm going to try to use Picasa. The program manages all my pictures and uploads them from my camera and puts them online all automatically.

I'll repost the link in a blog anytime I post new pictures but here is the basic link to my albums.

Picasa Picture Albums

Tate Museum and More

Today we made a trek to the Tate British. It was a fairly standard painting museum. I'm not a huge fan of painting but it was interesting to see what the art of the time was doing. Also I have a good deal of problem placing the people that we are researching into the correct time period. There are a few time periods that I just simply cannot imagine what they looked like, how they dressed, and how they acted. Seeing pictures of the people from these time periods really helps place people into their world. The tour guide was excellent in that she knew exactly what she was talking about. Although she did tend to not show us a lot of pictures and rather picked a few that she liked and would spend a long time talking to us about them. I much rather like to enjoy pictures quickly and view more than 8 pictures in an entire museum.

My personal art interest rests more with sculpture and photography. Unfortunately we didn't really see any photography but there were a few really cool sculptures. The first that we saw was a statue of Jacob hugging an angel. It was really good, if a little blocky. Right at the end there were a lot of really cool abstract sculptures. I forget the name of the artist but they were a lot of three dimensional paintings. Pieces of colored wood mounted onto a canvas. My personal favorite were the colored blocks of wood that were mounted onto a hanging clear piece of glass. When you circled around it the view changed in a really cool way.

After we parted ways from the class when leaving the museum my friends and I walked back to the tube station. Half of us went back to cook dinner and the other half went with me to Piccadilly Circus to attempt to find the RailEurope office to buy the tickets for our last remaining leg of our week long trip to get us from Paris to Berlin. It took us a long time to find the office, mostly because I forgot to write down the actual location of the building. We found out that most people in the region didn't know that the building even existed, surprisingly including the local Police. Finally we did find the building and buy our tickets. It's rather relaxing knowing that our trip is planned out and payed for. I'll post more on that later.

Cambridge Trip

We visited Cambridge today. It was amazing. The college is simply huge and imposing. The University is actually broken up into a series of colleges. There are academic buildings tht are shared, but the dorms are owned by the colleges. An interesting difference in society between the British and Americans is that rather than saying that they are "studying philosophy" they say that they are "Reading philosophy." As the guide at Cambridge put it, everyone assumes you are going to study so they call it reading. When someone applies to read at Cambridge you actually apply to the college. Each college was founded by various Kings or Princes or other famous people so they have a legecy to hold up. When you apply they have you come in and have an interview. The interview is less to test your knowledge, because they already know you're practically a genius if you've even been considered, and more to test the type of person you are. They want to keep the standard high. Although the tour guide did point out that when his son applied they did ask him a difficult math problem and expect him to solve it without anything besides his head. 

Cambridge is the science and mathematical center of England and perhaps even the world. My ingenious person, Charles Babbage the inventor of the computer, studied at Cambridge. He eventually become a Lucasian chair in the mathematics department, though he never actually taught. 

The school and town, we learned, is called Cambridge because it stradles the river Cam. Originally there was only one bridge over the river cam which became the center for the college and town that built up around it. This bridge and the town became known as the Cambridge One amazingly fun part of our trip was punting. 

Punts are small flat bottom boats that you can ride up and down the river. They are driven by punters who stand on the back of the boat with large pole that look more like polevaulting polls than oars of any sort. You drive the pole into the ground and push. Half our group took a guided Punt tour where a professional takes you up and down the river and talks about the college. The other half attempted to punt themselves, some with more success than others. 

I've got pictures of this that I will upload and post later.

Adjusting To London

One of the first days that we got to England we took a realy cool walking tour of London. We got to see a lot of the interesting parts of London. We saw the Abby at Westminster, the Clock tower with Big Ben, the House of Lords and the House of Commons.

At first he didn't look very official, but surprisingly he knew everything and anything you could want to know. He knew a lot of interesting stories about the places that we saw. He was quite candid and often a little off color which lead to hilarity.

There are a series of two buildings designed by the same architect in the middle of the city. One is a bank I believe and the other is the Mayor's office. The bank is a rounded off tower and the Mayor's office is a round dome. Most of the other tour guide have refered to them with a more polite food metaphor. The first tour guide used a much more hilarious and off color pet name for the buildings.

The most interesting thing that I learned was that the city of London is really two cities. There is the area called simlpy "The City" and the section called "Westminster." Westminster is the older royal section of town that is much older and typically what people think of when they think of London. The City is the business district of London. The two parts literally have two different governments.

Darwin: The man who understood so much and was so misunderstood himself

With possibly Longitude being the only other exception Darwin is probably the best book I've read this summer. Unlike Longitude who's narrative followed many people and was only there to provide a loose association for all of the scientific topics that it wanted to cover, Darwin had a great plot, following the life of Charles Darwin.

Darwin was a very interesting figure himself. I am constantly amazed at how little "work" people in the 18th century did. Most of the great scientific people that the books I've read for this class so far have covered, Darwin included, never seemed to actually hold down a steady job for money. Rather they would subsist off of money from their parent's or dowry from marriage. It seems, I suppose, that the family association and financial support was a lot stronger in Darwin's time. I am expected, by my parents, to move out and live off of my own money.

This financial freedom allowed Darwin to participate in fantastic journeys over sea on the Beagle, that would later affect his life so much.


More Later.

Ingenious Pursuits

I’m not sure how I feel about the way the material is presented. I can’t decide if it would have been better to go through the material chronologically across time or by subject, as Jardin did. It seemed like it got confusing and jumbled because the same people kept showing up in different chapters and it was a little unclear as to who was doing what at what time. Although, writing it chronologically could have been just as confusing because you would be jumping around in topic instead of by people. There really doesn’t seem to be any perfect way of presenting the material because there is so much of it to discuss. It would be very difficult to write it without getting confusing at all. I did appreciate the “cast of character’s” section in the back of the book. That seemed to point to Jardin realizing that the book could get confusing so she used that to sum up to book incase the reader missed something.

I was shocked that Hooke tried to put himself in the air pump. I’m not sure if they had realized that humans needed air to survive or not, but if they had I’m not sure why he would have put himself in something that they designed to evacuate air for the chamber. He was lucky that it didn’t work properly when he was in it.

I’m also surprised there weren’t more fatalities associated with the blood transfusion experiments, mostly because they were transferring blood from sheep to humans. I was impressed that they were able to develop techniques for it. With everything we know now about having to match blood types in humans the fact they were able to cross blood in different species without killing anyone really, is impressive…or just lucky. I’m also intrigued by the fact that the people who were experimented on reported feeling better after their transfusions. I wonder if this might have been more of their minds playing tricks on them, having them convinced that the transfusion would cure them of their issues, while in realty it probably should have had some pretty negative side effects.

Longitude: Another Look

I really enjoyed the way Dava Sobel wrote Longitude. It was a relatively easy read with it feeling more like a narrative story than a history text. This made it more enjoyable to read and easier to gain knowledge and information from. The thing I found the most upsetting about the Harrison’s story is the actions of Nevil Maskelyne, Astronomer Royal and member of the Board of Longitude. For a scientist, his inability to accept that a method other than his own could solve the problem of trying to find longitude at sea is very upsetting and frustrating. Even though he had a vested, personal interest in an astronomical solution, he still should have accepted the fact that someone else, using a different method could also arrive at solution to the problem. The fact he was so careless with his experiments involving H4 and the rest of Harrison’s clocks shows a lack of appreciation for scientific progress and his own selfishness at putting his interests above the lives of the sailors that could have been saved by a reliable method of determining longitude. Despite the obvious disadvantages of trying to use the stars to determine longitude, such as the fact the sky is prone to clouds and that the stars changed based on position in the world, Nevil Maskelyne still was dead-set on using astronomy to solve the problem. Another problem I have with Maskelyne was the fact that his actions held Harrison back. If Maskelyne had been able to accept a mechanical solution to the longitude question and awarded Harrison the prize and money, there is no telling what further improvements Harrison could have made to his watches with the benefit of the prize money and time not being spent trying to defend H4 and claim the prize. He could have continued working on an even better solution to the problem and made many more advancements. Dava Sobel paints a very compelling picture of exactly what the Harrison’s went through and it is very easy to empathize with them. It took the intervention of the King to be able to claim as much of the prize as possible for them, which luckily occurred before William’s death.

Ingenious Persuits Notes

Ingenious Persuits was a poorly arranged book. When I started reading the book I imagined that it would be a rather dull British textbook about the history of British Science. Once I got into the book though I found that I enjoyed many parts of it. There were a lot of very strange things that science did in the past. The worst part of the book was simply the way that it was arranged and written. There was no logical order to the book configuration. There was a rough topical structure where ideas were mentioned in groups, but even this did not always hold true. Chapter to chapter the book would trade topics and styles in a seemly random way that could have only been designed to actually confuse the reader.

Though this chaos almost the entire book Longitude was actually repeated in the first few chapters. After that the reader is plunged into the world of botany, opium, and geography that made up British Science through the 17th and 18th centuries.

My favorite parts of the book where the really strange bits of science that were explained in the most mundane way.

For example when Boyle essentially tied his dog down, opened him up, and shot him up with opium because he thought that would help him understand the inner workings of the lungs.

Also when Leeuwenhoek, a minor city official, who spoke only Low Dutch and had absolutely no scientific schooling at all, did things with microscopes that baffled the Royal Society and were for a long time unreproducible.

On the upside the book will make a great reference. It has an amazing index. Also even more important it has a really great cast of characters section in the back. It lists all of the major players through out the time period with a bio of when they were born and what they were famous for.

Longitude Notes

It seems to me that the basic point and purpose for the book Longitude is to show all of the effort that went into the search for an effective way to find longitude. The book follows, in a mostly chronological way, the flow of knowledge towards the winner of the Longitude Prize. Originally there were a few creative ideas. The chronometer method and the astronomical observation methods were the two most promising, but there were also a few other more crazy methods like shooting cannons up into the air every few hours on stationary ships. These other more radical ideas quickly dropped out and the two main players came into view. Most of the book follows the story of John Harrison the father of the modern Chronometer and in fact the modern pocket watch.

Harrison is an incredibly interesting person to me because of how little formal training he actually had. He was a simple craftsman mostly working with wood who suddenly developed an interest in making clocks. Most of his innovations were seemed to be less planned out and more the result of simple trial and error. He had a great deal of common sense and was able to simply point himself in the right direction and go. It took him years between creating his clocks and as they got more complex and more accurate the longer it took him to perfect the techniques that he used to make them thus.

On the other hand you have most of the Royal Society of London. A group mostly of astronomers they greatly favored the astronomy method. Although it was eventually found impractical to try to measure the stars on the rough sea or when there are any clouds in the sky the iconic image of the sea captain measuring his location using a sextant still lingers in every young boy's heart.

The book actually got better as it went on. The rivalry between Harrison and Maskelyne was crazy. Some of the things that Maskelyne did to stop Harrison from winning when he had clearly already met all of the requirements and done them much better.

On a humorous side note, I really want to see the movie version of the book starring Jeremy Irons and Michael Gambon.

Current Status

This is mostly a test post.

I've currently finished Longitude, Ingenious Persuits, and roughly 40 pages into Darwin.

I've taken the two posted tests.

I've read a little into my Babbage book.

I've written no Journals. Hopefully this will change tomorrow.

Amanda, Ryan, and Zoe have all been invited to join the journal/blog.

I wish the width of the text area was wider. I might have to see if I can't rescript the HTML to fix this.