2014 Scrapbook, Part 2: That Belongs In A Museum

2014 Scrapbook, Part 1 Conceptual Crossovers

2014 Scrapbook, Part 2: That Belongs In A Museum

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Welcome back, let's check out some cool stuff I can't afford.

Providence

In March, before starting my job at NYPL, I took a trip to Providence to hang
out with Jake (still an awesome guy after nearly twenty years of friendship). Jake introduced me to
the Retro-Computing Society of Rhode
Island, who have an amazing museum. I say "museum", it's just
one big room, and it looks like this:

I believe that all museums have a room that looks like this; it's just that at RCSRI that room is coextant with the display portion of the museum.

RCSRI has an open house once a month, but we got a private tour
because Jake is a close personal friend of the proprietor.

The said proprietor, seen holding a Singer paper tape.
Just one of the incredible sights.
Good advice.
The front of a specialized tablet peripheral for CAD (?), about four feet square.
I can DIAL-A-VUP from the briny deep.

I took several detailed photos of the famous "space cadet"
keyboard for the Symbolics LISP machine, because although this
computer is famous in hacker lore, at the time there were no good
close-ups online. (I dunno about now. Well, there are now,
because I'm putting these up, but as I'm writing this draft, I don't
know.)

Overview.

RUB OUT

Note the four directional buttons with thumbs-up and thumbs-down.

Los Angeles

Museum of my youth, the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History.
Dino kids.

London

Along with my uncle Leonard I visited
the Worshipful Company of
Clockmakers, who have a museum of clockmaking in the back of
the London Guild Hall. The Guild Hall is still an active
government building, so make sure you go all the way round the
back for the museum, though I'm not sure why I'm even giving this
advice because apparently the Clockmakers' Museum has all been
packed up to be moved to the Science Museum. Anyway, I'm really
glad I got to see this little museum because it was full of tons
of amazing old clocks (many of which still run), and equipment for
building and repairing them.

Like this toolchest.

Another new favorite: the Tring tiles from the British
Museum. Two-panel comic strips show Jesus as a little kid getting
into trouble. "Left: A boy playfully leaps onto Jesus's back
and then falls dead. Right: Two women complain to
Joseph... while Jesus restores the boy to life."

And the parents
don't take this lying down! On another tile, "Parents shut their
children in an oven, to prevent them playing with Jesus." A
well-thought-out plan.

New York

From the Sidewalk Museum of Discarded Art, a picture of the New
York skyline made of Cheetos.

The Met had a fabulous exhibit with a lot of Xu Bing. I got my
chance to get some good photos of An Introduction to Square Word
Calligraphy, a set of rules for writing English words like they're
Chinese characters.

[image error]"Rain, rain, go away"
The alphabet.

And of course there was his masterpiece of eaten meaning, Book
From The Sky.

Man, I wish this had been the inspiration for Smooth Unicode instead of Allison's thing. Bring some class to my bots for once.