Fireworks in the Fog
Saturday, July 19th, 2008Mary and I spent the 4th of July weekend in San Francisco, where we saw a fireworks show unlike any I’d ever seen: Fireworks through fog. Actually, we couldn’t even see most of the good stuff. But when it got really loud and the clouds got really bright, you knew it was a good part. The crowd didn’t seem too put off. Neither were we. San Francisco is an awesome city! We rented bikes on Saturday and went on a nice long ride around the city, going over the Golden Gate Bridge, and riding through Golden Gate Park.

On the way out Sunday, we stopped by the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Unfortunately, I didn’t bring in the camera, but this place was cool. And free! We got to see a working demonstration of the Babbage Difference Engine #2 which was built a few years ago by a guy from the London Science Museum. I saw an older version of the Babbage difference engine in London when I was there, but it was in a glass case and I didn’t really understand how it worked. In mountain view they give demonstrations regularly where they go through how it works and actually crank out the first 30 values of a polynomial. In the demo we saw, the machine got jammed and the terms after that ended wrong. I think I’ll stick to my silicon-based computing. But it was cool to see none-the-less. They also had all kinds of old computer hardware, including a 2ft diameter hard disk platter (it stored 10MB, I believe it was)! They have a video about the museum on youtube.
A few more pictures after the jump…

