Helen FieldsScience Writer

Here’s my conclusion after visiting the Mayflower II and Plimoth Plantation: Living history is not an efficient way to get information across.

I started my exploration of the big tourist attraction in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the Mayflower II. It’s a replica of the Mayflower that was built in the 50s and sailed across the ocean from England to here. On the ship, it’s some day in March, and this guy – some kind of officer – is waiting to tell you about the ship.

This guy was great. He told us about conditions on the ship, about where people stayed, about how he was ready to go back home and he was supposed to be back in England last fall, but then they got stuck here over the winter, and so on. Another guy was belowdecks, telling us why he’d come over. (To teach the pilgrims, who were not actually called pilgrims, something useful. Maybe fishing? I don’t remember.)

The Mayflower II was kind of museumlike. There were displays on the dock about the pilgrims – what do you call them if you don’t call them pilgrims? Emigrants? There were displays on the docks about the emigrants, where they came from in England, why they’d been in the Netherlands before they emigrated, what they ate on board, and so on. That was pretty informative.

But over at the main museum, the Plimoth Plantation, the informativeness level tanked. Plimoth Plantation is a recreation of the first settlement, a few miles away. The year is 1627, seven years after the emigrants – colonists? Let’s call them colonists.  Seven years after the colonists landed. So they’ve settled in and they’re raking hay and hanging about in houses telling you things.

Here’s the thing. I am curious about the colonists. Like, you know, what crops they grew. What they died of. How many children they had. I don’t know, whatever. But the only way to learn anything is to seek out one of the costumed living history people – which was kind of hard – and ask them questions.

I don’t want to have to interview people in a museum. It’s awkward. If you asked a person a question, we learned, he might talk at you for 10 minutes on vaguely related topics, or he might look at you like you were crazy because you’d used some word his character didn’t understand.

So from one of the living history guys we came across, we learned about their theology, in more detail than I could handle, and from another, I got condescended to for my ignorance.

I’m not really sure what I wanted to know. I wanted the museum to decide that for me. It was like playing a game where there was information I was supposed to find out, but I didn’t know what it was or how to get it. Like Myst.

There were some signs, to tell you what part of the plantation you were entering. The largest section of Plimoth Plantation is the 1627 English Village. There’s also the Wampanoag Homesite, which represents the native people who lived in the area before the colonists arrived. The  people who work there are Native Americans who aren’t playing historical characters. Instead, they talk from a modern perspective. Before you go into the Wampanoag Homesite, you see this sign:

It’s pretty depressing that in the 21st century, you have to tell people not to use the word “squaws.” Also, the sign says to avoid “Native American” and “Indian” and instead say “Native People.” I would like to note that the only Wampanoag Homesite staffer we heard talk at length referred to Native People as “Indians.”

He and the other people working in the Wampanoag Homesite didn’t appear to be offended by us. They appeared to be bored. One guy did a little introduction to the house he was sitting in, which was informative but bored-sounding, and when people asked questions, his answers sounded not only bored, but also dismissive. We kept going up to different staffers and hoping that one would not be bored, and being disappointed.

So, to sum up, for $30, I got the sort of amusing experience of hearing bored people answering questions and chatty people going off on long tangents, when what I really wanted was some nice informative signs.

But then I enjoy clunky old natural history museums – if your primary goal is to learn things, you probably should skip the one in Prague, which I adored – so maybe there are tourists who similarly enjoy having awkward conversations with people in historical costumes?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Starting at the Pacific, ships in the Panama Canal go into the Miraflores locks, then the Pedro Miguel locks. That gets them up to the level of most of the canal. On the Caribbean side, they go down through the Gatun locks.

The Miraflores locks are the coolest – they raise ships by two steps, not just one – and also the closest to Panama City. They also score a huge visitors center.

The museum inside has four levels. You start at the bottom with the history of the canal. It started with a totally doomed French effort to build a sea-level canal, with no locks. Here are some French surveyors:

There were a lot of reasons why the French effort was doomed. For example, building a sea-level canal here was a really bad idea. (I believe the reasoning was along the lines of “Well, it worked for the Suez.”) One of the other reasons was that nobody had figured out how to fight yellow fever, which killed thousands of workers.

By the time the American effort started in 1904, about 15 years after the French gave up, Walter Reed had figured out that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. That means people were finally able to fight the disease. They did it in part by getting rid of places mosquitoes could breed, like puddles in dirt roads. These are some of the bricks that were used to pave roads:

You know the problem with most museums these days? They just don’t have enough piles of bricks.

After the floor about history, there’s a floor about water. Much of the canal follows the track of the Chagres River, but then it also crosses the continental divide and brings together water that was not originally joined. So building the canal created a new watershed, and all that water and wildlife and whatnot has to be managed.

The next floor has a cool section on how the Panama Canal operates, including a sped-up video of a container ship going through a lock, projected behind the windows of a mocked-up bridge. This was so realistic, I felt the need to adjust my balance when the ship was rocking from side to side.

There are also tons of ship models scattered through the visitors center, which I think I’ll save for another blog post.

The visitor center experience ends up on the top floor, which has one of several observation areas for watching ships go through the locks:

More on the locks later.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Here’s a weird fact. The “Panama Canal Museum” is in Seminole, Florida, and it’s just about the U.S. involvement in the canal.

The museum in Panama City is the “Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá.” That is something along the lines of “Interoceanic Canal Museum of Panama.” Or “Interoceanic Panama Canal Museum.” Or “Panama Interoceanic Canal Museum.”

This museum is about the whole canal, from when it was but a twinkle in the eye of…um, somebody famous in olden times, to the 1880’s, when it was a totally messed-up French project, to when the U.S. picked it up in 1903 and finished it in 1914, to the handover when Panama took control of the canal in 1999.

I’m a little hazy on some of the details because there was no text in English. Which is fine – it’s not like most U.S. museums are falling over themselves to put writing on the walls in foreign languages, so I can’t really complain. (Notable exception.) They do provide a decent audio guide in English.

Unfortunately, most of the actual facts kind of went in one ear and out the other. Also, they don’t allow photos inside, so even if there had been English wall text, I couldn’t have taken pictures of it to remind myself.

So I present you with the one artifact you can take pictures of.

I bet every vaguely maritime-themed museum in the world has at least one of these on display. They’re really pretty. This one is made from brass and crystal. I think the audio guide said it was designed by the guy who made the Eiffel Tower, but now I’m not so sure, because I don’t think the Spanish label says that. It’s certainly connected to him somehow, and Mr. Eiffel was involved with the failed French attempt to build the canal – he was supposed to design the locks.

Oh, if you haven’t seen one of these, it’s a lighthouse light. Impressive, n’est-ce pas?

One of the things that most amused me was a reference to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Eh? Pirate? I thought he was, you know, a Sir of some sort, and didn’t he hang around with Elizabeth I? So I pulled out my handy Kindle with 3G and looked him up on Wikipedia. Answer: One man’s pirate is another man’s privateer. England and Spain were at war, so he could totally get away with pirating Spanish ships. Also, he was a slave trader. Ugh.

Later I used the handy Kindle to find out what the Spanish Main was. If you’d forced me to come up with a definition, I think I would’ve gone for, like, a fleet of ships. (Apparently I thought the Spanish Main was the Spanish Armada.) It turns out it was actually Spain’s mainland colonies around the Caribbean, particularly the Central American coastline. Am I the only one who didn’t know that?

They do have one other artifact you can take pictures of: the museum itself. It was built as the Grand Hotel in, uh, sometime in the 19th century, and later served as the headquarters for the French canal project, then the U.S. one. Those headquarters later moved, but when they were looking around for a place to put the museum, they came up with this building.

It’s quite grand, and it sits in the middle of a neighborhood with quite a grand past, Casco Viejo. (Here’s the UNESCO page about the area – it’s the Historic District, not “Panama Viejo,” which is the ruins of an earlier city near here.)

Keep an eye out for more canal-related blog posts in the near future. There are plenty of canal-related museums to go around. There’s even a website called canalmuseum.com. I don’t know what/where/who that is.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Of course, Prague has lots of museums that aren’t natural history museums. We also stopped in on the Museum of Communism. I had been led to believe by the guidebook that this would be interesting. It has great posters all over town, like this:

It turns out the graphic design of the posters is the best thing it’s got going for it. The museum itself falls into a category I’ve seen before: lots of stuff and lots of ideology.

The people who started this museum clearly have a thing against Communism. I understand that. People had it tough behind the Iron Curtain. But the point of the museum appears to be to go on and on about how bad Communism is, and I prefer my museums more objective and less ranty. And it would have been nice if they’d spent some of that graphic design budget on a writer. Seriously, try to read this:

Huh? Try to summarize that in your own words. Now imagine reading it standing up after reading many other similarly dense texts. Ouch. Also, Brezhnev may have been an apathetic wreck, but let’s try to support that with examples or at least attribute the opinion to someone rather than just throwing it up there.

The museum does have a lot of cool stuff, although I would have appreciated more labels telling me what the cool stuff was or why I was looking at it.

This sort of thing may well be a fun trip down memory lane for someone who lived in Communist Czechoslovakia, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit mystifying.

Our favorite such scene was the classroom, complete with good Communist child and, one presumes, good Communist badger.

One thing I did learn at the museum was the story of the Stalin Monument in Prague, which is just the sort of story one wants when one is demonstrating the absolute absurdity of the Soviets.

This monument was big. Seriously big. It was the biggest monument ever made to Stalin, and I think he was a guy with no shortage of big monuments. This one was 50 feet tall and more than 70 feet long and stood on a hill above the Moldau. Here’s what it looked like:

You may note that I’m referring to it in the past tense. That’s because it didn’t survive long. It was unveiled in 1955, just as Stalin was falling out of favor. Seven years later, the statue was blown up. That’s right, with explosives. I hear the plinth is great for skateboarding.

I said the coolest thing about the museum is the posters – I was tempted to buy a t-shirt, even though I didn’t like the museum – but there were actually two other neat features. First, this is the stairway that leads up to get to the museum’s entrance (which it shares with a casino):

And, second, it’s right next to a McDonald’s. Yay for capitalism?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

A story in today’s New York Times looks at the trouble inherent in making a museum of the African American experience. Is it going to be mostly about struggle and oppression? About African American achievement? Will it show us all moving toward living in harmony, or the continuing legacy of racism?

Every topic — the role of African-Americans in the military, or the fight for access to public education in the South — will be examined for how it affected society as a whole, and what it says about America’s evolving definitions of citizenship and equality.

The goal is “to make sure people see this is not an ancillary story, but it’s really the central story of the American experience,” Mr. Bunch[the director] said. (The fact that it will be a separate museum, next door to the National Museum of American History, might seem to complicate that message, but Mr. Bunch doesn’t seem bothered by that.)

As the writer points out, there’s already a museum of American history. I’m confused. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a museum of African American history and culture. I just want him to explain why he’s not bothered, I guess.

The article says they’ve learned the lessons of the National Museum of the American Indian, which is good – I’m one of the people who finds that museum incoherent. I hope the NMAAHC also adopts the other lesson of NMAI, which is to have an awesome cafeteria.

It sounds like they’ll have a lot of cool stuff. And I love museums! I look forward to seeing it in when it opens in 2015.

At the beginning of Thanksgiving week, a group of scientists were gathering in Prague to do something a little odder than buying a turkey: exhuming a 15th-century astronomer. The astronomer was Tycho Brahe. He was a weird guy. He lost a chunk of his nose in a duel in 1546 and wore a thin metal plate to cover it. He convinced Denmark’s king to pay for a palace-slash-observatory on a private island, where he made precise measurements of the skies and hung out with a dwarf. I’m not kidding. He was weird.

He’s most famous among non-astronomy-historians for the story of how he died: supposedly he was too polite to leave a royal banquet to pee and his bladder burst. Ok, I don’t even know if it’s possible to die from that. His assistant, Johannes Kepler, did record that Brahe came home from a banquet with abdominal pain and died 10 days later, but that could’ve been anything.

Brahe has been exhumed once before, in 1901, and analysis of a bit of hair from that exhumation found mercury. Part of the reason for exhuming him again is to figure out what medicines he was taking when he died. He liked to mix his own, and mercury would have been an ingredient. So it’s possible he poisoned himself. Or maybe someone else poisoned him. There’s a historian with a theory about how someone poisoned Brahe, and there was royal intrigue involved, and somehow it inspired Hamlet. They also planned to inspect the remains of the red silk suit he was buried in, to see what fancy noblemen wore in the Renaissance. (The thin metal nose-plate, unfortunately, disintegrated over the centuries.)

I wrote a brief item about the exhumation for Science magazine. You have to be a subscriber to read it. Here’s the link. And here’s a New York Times story about how Tycho Brahe’s story would make a great movie.

I don’t know a ton about birds, but I do know this: Bluebirds like to perch on posts. If you see something cute and feathered perching on a fencepost in an open piece of land, “bluebird” should at least cross your mind. (Blue feathers should make you a little more sure, although you won’t necessarily be able to make them out, depending on the angle you’re looking at and the bird’s sex.) A few weeks ago I stopped at Manassas National Battlefield on the way back from Richmond and was delighted to see a ton of Eastern bluebirds, many of them on fenceposts.

See that thing on the post near the bottom of the picture? That’s a bluebird. It’s on a fence around a monument commemorating the first battle of Bull Run.

Then a little bit later we were walking down a path and alarmed a bluebird that had just been sitting on a sign – and I was amused by this graphic proof that, indeed, birds hang out here a lot.

I wonder if park employees have to go around scrubbing the signs all the time?

Cool story I just learned from the USGS: In the mid-1800s, as settlers pushed westward and cut down all the trees, Eastern bluebirds proliferated. Clearing out old-growth forests and producing nice open fields and orchards suited them just fine. Also, they liked that farmers fenced their fields with wooden fenceposts.

photos: me

The National Geographic Museum used to have a permanent collection. I remember going in high school, looking at the nifty globe and various exploration-related things. (Ok, I admit, my memory is pretty shaky on what was actually in it. But it was cool.) A while back they took all that stuff out and switched to only doing special exhibits. Right now, there’s a fabulous display of Joel Sartore’s photographs of rare animals around the outside of the building, but I really don’t think my pictures of someone else’ pictures would add up to a very good blog post. See some of them here or – hey, Joel is a good guy – buy the book.

Anyway. The other day I stopped in to see a traveling exhibit called “Da Vinci-The Genius.” It consisted mostly of models of devices Leonardo da Vinci sketched in his notebooks. He was a creative guy.

Like this one, the aerial screw:

The idea is that four guys would stand on the platform and push on the bars to make the screw turn and lift you through the air. (An actual one would have been much larger.) This is the thing that led to the stories that Leonardo da Vinci invented the helicopter.

I think “invented” is a pretty strong term, considering this would never have worked and was also, as far as anyone knows, never built. “Dreamed up something helicopter-like” is more like it.

Here’s a diving suit he dreamed up:

And a tank – one of many, many military machines in his notebooks:

Yes, a real one would be a lot bigger – presumably there’d be guys inside, firing those guns that stick out in every direction. He also came up with that bridge in the background. The idea was that soldiers could put it together in the field; the logs are notched in such a way that it doesn’t need any nails or pegs or rope or anything. So they could build it with logs, cross a stream, and dismantle it again.

One of the irritating things about the exhibit was the absence of actual artifacts…and presence of fake artifacts. I’m not talking about the models, which are obviously modern, and the point of the show. But right near the entrance, they had glass cases with reproductions of a couple of his notebooks, only you’d have to read the entire text next to them to realize they were reproductions. Yes, logic suggests they would be reproductions, since an actual Leonardo notebook would require a major security force, but still. I thought it was a little tacky.

Then there were also reproductions of paintings. It’s fine that they didn’t have any – he didn’t do very many, and it’s hard to get hold of them. But the wall text tells you, “Leonardo’s original works are considered too priceless to move from their permanent locations.” Right. So, explain to me why I saw the Lady with an Ermine, which belongs in Krakow, in San Francisco in 2003? It’s fine not to have them, but don’t make up reasons.

Also, having seen the Lady with an Ermine in person – in San Francisco and then, five years later, in Krakow – the digital reproduction is so lame as to not really be worth displaying. The original practically glows. It’s stunning. That Leonardo knew how to handle paint. The digital version? Not so much. It’s just, you know, a flat copy of a painting.

So, I’d say the exhibit is worth dropping by if you’re in the neighborhood, because the models are neat, and you can play with some of them, but not worth a special trip to D.C. The exhibit is created by “Grande Exhibitions – Creators of museum quality traveling exhibitions.” Here’s their website for this exhibit.

I actually was much more excited about the exhibit across the hall, Design for the Other 90%. It’s about products designed to solve problems for poor people, mostly in the developing world. Like a cheap water pump that brings up clean water from the aquifer, or an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble shelter. One of my favorites was a water barrel shaped like a very wide tire, so you could put a rope through the center and roll it home instead of having to lug it. But the exhibit didn’t allow photography, and I am a rule-follower, so you’ll have to go see these things yourself. It’s put together by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

When I was in Kansas last weekend, we skipped over the border to Missouri to see a nice exhibit of rare books from the History of Science Collection at the Linda Hall Library. This library is kind of a surprise – when we were there, I assumed it was part of a university, but it’s actually an independent public library of science, engineering and technology. Herbert and Linda Hall had a lot of money, and this is what they left it to: a public library.

The exhibit shows the tradition of natural history that Darwin came from. His theory of natural selection was based on years of careful study of different kinds of animals – he knew more than anyone about barnacles, for example, and of course there were his famous Galápagos finches. Natural history is a darn good way to learn about nature.

Most of the displays were illustrations from books back to the 15th century. Back then, people were sort of conflicted between relying on classical texts – it was the Renaissance, they were really into that stuff – and observing plants and animals in nature.Some of the pictures had clearly been done by people who had never seen the animal in question, and the texts often came from the ancient Greeks. But eventually they started figuring out that they should actually be observing the animals they were writing about. (Whoa! Crazy talk!)

This adorable hedgehog was in a 1551 book, Historia Animalium:

Isn’t it spunky? (The label says “bristling with charm.”)

Here are some copepods from a book published in 1820 in Geneva. Copepods are teeny crustaceans – relatives of crabs and shrimp.

I was excited to see these guys because I saw a lot of copepods in the Bering Sea last spring. I wrote stories about copepods on at least four days, but see this day for some really nice copepod portraits. (My fingers got really, really cold while Chris was taking the pictures of the glow-in-the-dark copepods, so be sure to go appreciate the beauty.)

This Portuguese Man O’ War was collected in the deep sea in the 1820s.

That is one pretty jellyfish.

From a book published around 1860, a gorilla:

The gorilla was only scientifically described in 1847. Doesn’t that seem late? I mean, gorillas are really big! And that scientific description was just based on bones; apparently no Westerner saw a live gorilla until the 1850s. Chimps and orangutans were already pretty well known by then. (You can read a little gorilla history in this 1988 newsletter – it’s the first story.)

The library had a copy of On the Origin of Species on display, but I failed to take a picture of it because, um, it was just words, see. There were no pretty pictures of animals. Oops.

So, instead, I will leave you with a picture of my best Scrabble play ever, that night at my aunt and uncle’s house:

I played “EQUINELY” for 239 points. This was made possible by two factors: (1) my uncle doesn’t play defensively, so he put that Q right up there by that triple word score, and (2) in our rules, you can look up words before you play them. I wouldn’t have taken a chance on “equinely” if this had been a challenge game, but I thought it might be a word, and I checked the scrabble dictionary, and it was. Woo. Hoo.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me, and they aren’t that good, are they? books behind glass. kind of a rough subject.

This weekend I was in Lawrence, Kansas, where my dad grew up, and stopped by the University of Kansas Natural History Museum. It’s in a great old building atop a hill on the KU campus.

In olden times (the Cretaceous, if you want to get technical – late in the dinosaur times), Kansas was underwater. The west coast and the eastern U.S. were separated by the Western Interior Sea. I love that it has a name, even if it isn’t a very poetic name – like it’s got a name waiting for it, in case the Rockies decide to go back down.

All that water means Kansas is rich in fossils of wacky sea creatures like this guy:

He’s a Xiphactinus molossus, a kind of bony fish. Doesn’t he look mean?

Also awesome: crinoids.

Crinoids are echinoderms, relatives of starfish and sea urchins that leave behind a lot of hard bits. They make beautiful fossils (a couple of these have been colored to show you what you’re looking at.) There are actually still crinoids, but they’re not nearly as diverse as they used to be.

One of the prized possessions of the museum is Comanche the horse. Dead horse! In a glass case!

Comanche survived the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876, with several arrow and bullet wounds. After he recovered, he became a mascot for the Seventh Cavalry. He did parades and wandered around Fort Riley, about 100 miles west of Lawrence. When he died in 1891, he was sent off to the University of Kansas to be preserved. In 1893 he – or his skin, anyway – helped represent Kansas at the Chicago World’s Fair.

Here’s a great slide show on his restoration a few years ago. They had to build a full-size model to make sure he’d make the corners on the way to his new exhibit space. I love the pictures of him wrapped in plastic for the move. His head’s sticking out, which is reassuring – you wouldn’t want the dead horse to suffocate.

My dad remembered going to the museum on Cub Scout outings to see the snakes. I checked and, yep, they’ve still got snakes. (Probably not the same snakes as in 1950. No word if Cub Scouts still come look at them, but I can’t imagine they’d miss the chance.) They have fifteen species that are found in Kansas, each in its own cheerfully painted case.

I feel like the common garter snake, at right, got the nicest room. All those cheerful Kansas sunflowers.

The cottonmouth seemed particularly mean.

For one thing, it’s got the triangular head that screams, “I AM VENOMOUS.” Also, there were little furry gray things floating in the water that looked a heck of a lot like bits of mouse. I thought snakes swallowed their food whole, but I don’t know, maybe that one put up a fight.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me, of course