Wednesday night – London Day 1

Preface:
Those of you reading this (if anyone does 🙂   will realize by now that I can get quite a few days behind before writing. I really enjoy looking back over the previous days (or weeks) and reflecting on what happened. I’m sitting down now trying to capture our first day in London and realize that even with a half day I’m sorting through 259 pictures.. It’s gonna take soem time catching up.. but I love doing it !

We got to London about 6:30 AM after a great sleep on the plane (how often does that really happen ? ) … Gabe’s plane landed just a few minutes later and we met up in Baggage.. so far so good !

 

We took the Tube to town  , grabbed a bite in Regents park.. then wandered over to the Natural History Museum and checked our bags. This was stop 1 on our ‘Science Obscura’ trip. It was an idea Gabe had come up with to visit places of scientific interest between his field (biochemistry) and  DIane and my fields (Physics and Engineering). With eh help of a zillion google searches, webstes, youtube and eventually ChaptGPT we came up with he following Itinerary.. (which in hindsight worked very. very well !)

Anyway.. Where was I ? … Oh.. Regents park and the Natural History museum  by way of Albert Hall and the Albert Statue

We dropped our bags at the Natural History Museum because they had a bag drop.. but headed straight  to the London Science Museum.. We could have spent 2 days just there.. Daleks, Huge steam engines, Medical oddities..   SOem great Watson and Crick Memorobilia !




Here’s the setup liek the one she used

The medical stuff  in the Welcomme Collection was really interesting… Old emdicual devices, medical fakes, patent medicines

 

This one  is a primitive blood pressure measurement device that looks s strangely like something billy and I worked on during the pandemic.. (You’ll hear about that soon here )

They even had one of Van Loevenhoek’s original microscopes !

From there it was time  to uber to our sweet Airbnb down in Chelsea.. We got there , dropped our stuff.. then walked back to the museums.. We went by ROsiland Franklins old home

Then stopped into a sweet tea shop for a ‘sceince cream tea’.. They gave us little vials and eyedroppers to do a yummy’ experiment along with the cream tea fixings.. very vute !

Then back to the Science Museum to see clocks, computing machines and more medical gizmos


We saw one of the German Enigma encoding machines.. a prelude ot our visit to Blechlyw On Friday


The museum closed at 5:30.. so we headed out to meet our good  friend Ian who’s doing his MBA here. We went to a toney Indian place.. yummy and good fun !



then a nice long walk around Regents park around sunset

Then a long walk back home for much needed sleep.. 

A great first day to our London Sceince Safari !

 

nite all, nite sam

-me

Tuesday night – taking off !

Today was a travel day .. diane and I left home about 11 for our trip to meet Gabe in England then on to Portugal for Brit and Brans wedding .. It was nice to be on vacation..   Good Bye VT for a little while !

Pretty nice travel day.. 

nite all, nite sam

-me

Monday night – Wake Robin

Busy day at work as I get ready to be out for almost two weeks. Shannon was dog sitting our coworker Chips dog.. nice to have a dog around work !

This evening I gave a long postponed talk on AI to a group from Wake Robin Community. Wake Robin is a ‘life plan’ community where folks can live out the rest of your lives. Its an amazing place with many very active seniors… they host tons of talk and outings… and I was honored to be asked to lead a conversation on AI.. AI’s a topic on everyones mind these days. I had a nice dinner with my host Joyce and some of her friends before the talk.

 

The talk was well attended (maybe 160 people) and was really fun.. lots of good questions and comments.  Many of the folks in the room had been experimenting with ChatGPT . which seems to be a very good gateway for people to learn both the power and potential concerns associated with AI. 

here are a few demo pics I took from the talk.

The talk was well received…. had to zip home because we’re leaving for our trip tomorrow !

Nite all, nite sam

-me