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Tagged with “science museum” (2) activity chart

  1. David Rooney: Navigating experimental invention, survival and destruction: the Royal Observatory and GMT

    Curator and historian David Rooney talked about the long-term experiment of Greenwich Mean Time.

    > On reaching the corner of Greenwich Park, a quiet suburban district, the police had found, amid a motley debris of trees, bushes and railings, the charred and shattered remains of a man.

    Newspaper report, 1894.

    > Wait till they start on the Greenwich Observatory. London without time will cause them to wake up.

    Suffragette conversation, 1913.

    David Rooney is currently a curator at the Science Museum and formerly curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory, and was involved in the installation of Longplayer listening posts at both museums. He is interested in the roles played by material artefacts in long-term institutional survival strategies, and the ways people can seek to destabilise experiments in normalisation.

    http://longplayer.org/what/whatelse/events.php

    —Huffduffed by adactio 4 months ago

  2. A 19th-Century Mathematician Finally Proves Himself

    Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life’s work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn’t very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren’t certain whether his computing machines would have worked.

    From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121206408

    —Huffduffed by adactio 3 years ago