Our third full day in Edinburgh was miraculously free of rain, despite all the locals' warnings that Saturday's sunshine would quickly disappear. OK, it wasn't bright and sunny today, but after a fair amount of rain in London, just staying dry was a pleasure.
On Sunday we toured Edinburgh Castle, which was well worth the time, but today we went to the National Museum of Scotland, and the Castle loses its blog spot in comparison. The Museum is very large and very contemporary in its layout, signage, and interactivity. If you have any interest at all in Scottish history, you can't cover it in one day. And the history is hardly everything there is to see -- there's also science and mechanics and biology and Egyptology and Pacific Island culture and much more that we didn't even touch.
The building itself consists of a thoroughly renovated old gallery, illustrated by this:
. . . except that there are at least three similar huge gallery rooms, so full of exhibits (some of them reaching up to the third level) that my photos are unreadably full of stuff. In one room there's a 20-foot high steam engine, a couple of rockets, an old propeller plane hanging from the ceiling, a train engine, and Jackie Stewart's Formula One race car. Plus a bunch of hands-on exhibits for kids to try out, a bit like the Exploratorium.
I always like juxtapositions showing Land Of Old And New. Here's what I assume is clever renovation -- retaining the steam radiators at the base of the slender columns -- against a component of a particle accelerator in the background:
I asked Dan to stand beside the sperm whale jaw to be sure that the scale was clear:
But wait; there's more. The other side of the Museum is a very new modern stone building whose content (I think) is all about The Kingdom of the Scots, from distant prehistory to modern times. Partly because of some great exhibits at the British Museum, we wanted to start at the beginning with ancient ancient Scotland. One striking exhibit showed jewelry and other personal accoutrements dating back to 3000 BC, with the artifacts mounted on contemporary sculptures like this:
This represents a tiny part of the Museum's information on Very Early Times, and I had to skip many centuries ahead to learn more about Mary Queen of Scots. Though she reigned as Queen for only six years before she was forced to abdicate in favor of her son, she had a big influence in bringing the arts, philosophy, and science of the Renaissance to Scotland. As you may know, her cousin Elizabeth did not protect her from her enemies when Mary fled to England in 1567, and finally had her condemned as a traitor and executed twenty years later. [Memo to self: learn more about all that intrigue.]
Nerd Alert
Not much later, a mathematician named John Napier (who also defined logarithms, which I can barely spell) produced a tool to make multiplication and division easier. It's called "Napier's Bones," and I was excited to realize that it uses a method that we now teach in the Sanchez School third grade, where I learned it a few years ago. The "bones" are ivory rods that you align to show you multiplication tables, and you use the diagonals to get partial products, then add to get the total. (I can teach you if you're interested.
According to Wikipedia, Napier modeled the bones after an Arabic process of "lattice multiplication," which is what today's math text calls it. Hah! My third-graders are using a very old method, made more popular by John Napier in 1617!
No comments:
Post a Comment