Category Archives: Museums
Whoa, That’s a Wolverine
I knew of wolverines as a North American animal, and an animal of northern places, but only because I knew they were the mascot of a university somewhere in the northern half of the U.S. Well, now I know they … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Cité de l’Espace
Toulouse is a lovely city in Southwestern France, known for its pink-tinged bricks, violets, and art museums. But it’s also a major center for air and space business and science. Airbus has its headquarters there. It was space science that … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Musée Saint-Raymond
People have been living in Toulouse for thousands of years. To learn about the slice of that history from a bit before the year 1 to a few hundred years after, I heartily recommend a stop at the Musée Saint-Raymond, … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Zeppelin Museum
A little earlier this year, I was in Switzerland for a couple of weeks. It wasn’t totally planned. Long story. Sometimes, in one’s life, one just ends up in Switzerland. (This was my sixth time there. Doesn’t that seem like … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Muséum de Toulouse
On Saturday I went to the Museum of Toulouse. The name might lead you to expect a museum about Toulouse, but you’d be wrong–it’s the natural history museum. It’s got lots of taxidermied animals and some rocks. It proves it … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Postmuseum Liechtenstein
The museum is about the size of a postage stamp. (Sorry, couldn’t help myself.) It’s so tiny, it closes for an hour at lunchtime. The permanent exhibit has, as you’d imagine, a lot of stamps, mounted on vertical drawers that you can pull out to survey all of Liechtenstein’s 101-year postal history, from the stamps of the 1910s that just had the head of the prince, to later ones with beautiful portraits of local wildlife. Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Conestoga Edition
If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I would have thought that a Conestoga wagon was what the settlers took out West. Well, now I know that I would have been wrong. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Computer History Museum, cont.: Babbage Difference Engine
One of the coolest things in the Computer History Museum is from the depths of the past–or what passes for it, in computer history: the first half of the 19th century. Today regular old calculators can do logarithms. Then, if … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: Computer History Museum
It’s so easy to imagine the wrong kind of computer history museum. I imagine a warehouse of old computers, each with a label giving its technical specifications and production date, where aged computer users can gather to reminisce about that … Continue reading
Museum Tourist: SFO Museum, Hindu Sculpture
Last week my travels took me through the San Francisco International Airport again. When I flew out of the United terminal last summer, they had an exhibit from the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe. This time, the … Continue reading