September 26th: On our way to the Schwarzwald, we stopped at a wine museum in Meersburg. It also had a traveling exhibit about concepts of death.
Totentanz figurines: in each one a living human is paired with a skeleton.Now we know what my cartoon avatar look like.Lunch. Carol had a spaetzel & salad, I went for a stuffed pork roll on ratatouille with potatoes.
Then we drove to Todtmoos, which we referred to as “Dead Moose” even though it actually means “Dead Moss”
My Chaoren Ratchet Belt was getting too long, so I had to shorten it by an inch for the 2nd time this trip. (1st time was in Iceland.) EMT scissors to the rescue.
September 27th: Found a nice fruit mix at the store, so …
breakfast
Carol took a morning hike while I tried to catch up on blogging.
A carved wood fox statue representing some local fairy tale.All roads lead to Todtmoos.We made our own lunch of pasta (with a jar of basil pesto), salad, and sauteed chicken.
September 28th:
For dinner, Carol had local trout with a Radler (mixture of beer and fruit cider), while I went for a tuna salad. I think we also got a quest point for having Black Forest Cake in the Black Forest, but sadly there doesn’t seem to be any photographic evidence.
September 25th: The hostel breakfast was uninspired, so I will spare you a boring photo. Main target for the day was the Deutsches Museum. It had a surprising number of technical exhibits on ships, planes, and electricity.
600V 500A (300 kW) mercury-vapor arc rectifier (AEG, 1936). This reminded me of Jeri Ellsworth, whose roller-derby moniker was The Rectifier. Anyway, this huge beast is the logical equivalent of one diode, albeit a high-power one.Original 1879 Edison dynamo, shipped to Europe in 1881 for an exhibition in Paris. 110V 45A, so could power about 3 modern hair dryers if it wasn’t DC.Very early 3-phase generator by Friedrich August Haselwander (1887). 110V, around 2.7 kW, 16 Hz. Things were moving amazingly quickly back then; multi-phase electricity was first conceived of in 1885 by Galileo Ferraris, 2 years later there were prototype generators in Europe (this one!) and America (by Charles S. Bradley), by 1888 Tesla and others had patented improved designs, and in 1891 we had the first 3-phase hydroelectric power station (Lauffen am Neckar, Frankfurt).
There was a large section on Informatics / Computer Science.
Arithmometer (first commercial calculating machine) by Charles-Xavier Thomas (Paris, 1845)1962 reconstruction of the Zuse Z3 relay computer (1939-1941; original destroyed in 1944). First computer to use binary. 22-bit floating point.Zuse Z4 (1942-1950). Still relays, but 32-bit floating point.Electronic 5-digit-decimal multiplier, by W. Sprick & H. Schmidt (Kiel, 1949-51)G1a magnetic drum computer, Max Planck Institute, Göttingen (L.F.B. Biermann, 1955-56), modified from the earlier G1 (1950-52). Control was by paper tape (no loops or branches).back side of the G1aSiemens 2002 (1960)Telefunken TR 4 (1962)IBM 7074 (1962)IBM 360-20 (1967). Smallest/cheapest computer in the 360 series. First minicomputer with an operating system. First use of microprogramming (in ROM).Kenbak-1 (1971). First personal computer. No microprocessor!Apple I (1977)3-rotor (1926?) and 4-rotor (1944) Enigma machines
We needed a lunch break, so walked across the river.
“some weird vegetarian restaurant” – CarolBack side of the museum. Note the TWO observatories.Trautonium (1931), early electronic synthesizer. Emulated traditional instruments. Paul Hindemith encouraged its development and wrote a concertino for it. The score for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) used an updated version of it for both music and bird sounds.Fonosynth (1960-62?), Italian synthesizerLeft, MiniMoog (~1979) … like I have at home. 🙂 Right, early modular Moog (1960s?), below pictures of the Beatles using one in 1969.Giant (50 cm diameter) photomultiplier tube by Hamamatsu. The Super-Kamiokande experiment uses 11,200 of these at a cost of about $3,000 each, for a total cost of around $33M. In 2001, over half of the tubes imploded and had to be replaced. (For comparison, my experiment will use one 7.5 cm diameter PMT costing about $85.)Fokker Dr I triplane, similar to what was flown by the Red Baron.
We found a simple dinner of potato pancakes.
Carol got applesauce and beer, while I got the Lachs with sour cream.
Then we walked around town a little.
I’m a sucker for a good tiling. Just wait till the Alhambra.
Energy and Time 