Brown Girl in London

An afternoon of science

Yesterday was HD's 27th birthday and since we're both on a tight budget for the next few weeks we wanted to do something that was both fun and cheap. Naturally that led us to decide on a visit to the Science Museum. Hmm!

Well, initially we wanted to go because there was an exhibition about 20 years of Pixar animation and that sounded pretty cool and the museum is free. But, of course when we get there, down the Picadilly Line to South Kensington tube stop, there's a 9GBP fee to get into the Pixar exhibit so we said forget it and just walked around the rest of the museum.

But not quite, most like just half the museum, because really, neither of us are science-inclined. The first room we entered was about engines and I remember seeing some rockets, rudders, and other things, oh yeah and a couple practically making out in front of a 1670 copy of Cyrano de Bergerac's adventure story about travelling to the sun and moon.

However, we kept going, we're troopers after all! There were some neat things to check out - here's a few pics. First is a brain scan machine.

And a train.

And a Formula One racing care that we weren't supposed to take a picture of, (you can see the no picture sign), but oh well.

The most interesting part of the museum was the Who am I?installation. It was all about identity and what makes you you or me me. There were brains, DNA machines, info about the human genome and other interesting facts. Did you know that a fear of air is called Anemaphobia? Or fear of things English is Anglophobia? Or that for female athletes who want to compete in the Olympics they have to undergo a sex test to confirm their gender so that they can't masquerade as a female when they're really male - this is determined by swabbing the cheek of the athlete & then checking the DNA to make sure there's no Y chromosome. Neat, eh? I thought so.

Anyway, after that we left and went to a cafe somewhere down the street for a latte.

posted by RC @ 7:37 AM