I’ve allegedly been on holiday this week. It was enforced: not only is it half term and the Pawns require a bit of childcare, I also found myself with rather a lot of annual leave that I have to use up, or lose, before the end of the year. Just before we go beta, too. Of course, I haven’t actually been able to treat it as a holiday, what with certain things too boring to go into here, so I think I’ll have to have another holiday real soon now. I have one day in the office next week and then I’m off to Charleston to speak at a conference, and back as soon as I get off the podium so I don’t miss too much of the Younger Pawn’s birthday celebrations.
Karen gets peer-reviewed
Despite various things that I really could have done without, alluded to above, I was able to take the Pawns into the Natural History Museum on Tuesday, there to meet with the incomparable Dr James of Beagle Project fame. Karen took us backstage, to gasps of awe and astonishment.
In a pickle
Sophie enjoyed the Tank Room, and loved the Cocoon, so we went back again today. As it’s half term, and it was totally packed out on Tuesday, we planned to get there just after opening time today. This tactic paid off, and we were able to walk straight into the Cocoon without tickets. (They have this really neat system where you get a card with a bar code and when you get home, you can enter a unique code and access more information about the things you were interested in while you were there, thanks to the awesome power of the internets.)
One big egg
One of the things that is not immediately apparent about the NHM, and something that sets it aside from a lot of other collections of things in London and around the world, is that it is a research museum. Karen told us that there are ~350 scientists working at the NHM, in five departments. With over 70 million specimens, they should be kept busy.
There’s another 69,999,999 to see
Strangely, for the first time since leaving the lab, I got a slight pang about bench science. It must have been the videos of scientists talking about phylogenetics and the pictures of Gilsons. I stood back and watched other people, and was amazed by the number of mothers, in particular (don’t ask me where the dads were) telling their charges about the science being done there. It gave me quite a thrill to hear ordinary people, in a public place, use words like ‘DNA’ in cold blood.
And yet… in the main part of the Museum, the displays are incredibly old-fashioned. Plastic models in the Human Biology section, strangely Victorian exhibits in the Arthropod room. I guess there’s only so much you can do with stuff that doesn’t move, but the Darwin Centre at least is a step along the evolutionary ladder.
What it’s all about
(More photos on Flickr)
Hey thanks, Richard! What a nice surprise on a Friday evening!
We really appreciated it, Karen—our thanks to you. And I’ll chase down that bottle of wine for you…
That caption in the second photo needs changing.
Hmmm…..
Yes Bob. If it is too, too much, very much ….. is necessary fundamental changes.
OK, let’s see what you can all do.
Richard> It sounds interesting! I recently went to the California Academy of Science where they had some pretty new exhibitions with computers and getting interactive with looking for different species (granted, it was mainly aimed for children but some of us older people like it too 😉 ) I admit though, I never went to the 3D bugs showing. There is just that much of insects i can take when they are magnified… adn 3D is not my thing…
The Royal Ontario Museum also does research . They’re affiliated with UofT, though, I think. At least the people I’ve contacted there who did evolution stuff were also part of a UofT department. ROM is not just natural history, though, and they also have anthropologists and archeologists and historians doing research there.
If you walk past the ROM at the back/side, you can even see people do research through the basement windows.
Hah, yeah: there’s a bit of a fishtank feel to the Cocoon, too, as you can see into the labs. One of the photos I didn’t upload is of some desks with Macs on them and various textbooks scattered around, I’m sure it’s posed deliberately like that. And I saw someone in a white coat (in a different part of the building) pipetting colourless drops of liquid from one place to another.
The third photo looks like a still from Alien. Note the large ovipositor in the foreground.
The entire room felt a bit like a film set, to be honest. The photos don’t really capture it.
If Sophie likes pickled things, she might meet her match the Vrolik Museum in Amsterdam. I’ve got a pretty strong stomach but I still felt a bit queasy after 20 minutes in there.
Well, I’ve heard rollmops have that effect on people.
I must confess that the NHM and Science museum were my least favourite of all those I visited in London. I thought the Wellcome gallery had plenty of scientific oddities though, and was more to my taste.
Ah, Beta Gal, a space oddity.