lox – Energy and Time

Switzerland day 45: The Climbs of Grindelwald (part 3)

October 3rd: We bade farewell to Grindelwald and headed out. But our 3-day pass was still good, and we had one more mountain to climb. So we drove to Wilderswil and took the 1893 cog railway up to Schynige Platte. (On the first day, we didn’t do First. But on the second day, we did First first.)

The first part of the hike was going from the hotel to the Daube (the rocky peak) and around it to the overlook point beyond it.

The overlook point, looking back at Daube.

At that point, I suddenly discovered that my camera had a panorama feature. What can I say, I’m old and slow.

Looking down at the town of Interlaken (“between lakes”).

From the overlook, we basically followed the ridgeline to the right, towards Oberberghorn.

The ridge part of the trail, with a lake on the left, and the valley below Oberberghorn on the right.

… but the views down the Interlaken side got increasingly spectacular.

Eventually though, the ridge ended at the Oberberghorn.

Oberberghorn. We cut back right at the yellow sign, and headed back by a lower route.

But not before taking one more panorama of Interlaken.

The trail back to Daube. The rest of the hike was somewhat boring, and I was somewhat exhausted, so no pictures.

An hour later, we were back on the train.

Once we got back down, it was time to drive to Italy. The weather was overcast, but otherwise it was pretty scenic.

We stopped for lunch at a famous street-food stand called Sweet Ride, in Bönigen (near Interlaken).

I had the Lachs sandwich (foreground) with a ginger beer, while Carol went for Prosciutto. Then we had ice cream for dessert.

We got to watch swans in the lake while eating.

A bit further down the rod, we heard there was this famous waterfall near Meiringen. We drove close to the top of it, over an incredibly narrow road, only to find that there was no place to park at all, except for guests of a small hotel there. So we turned around and headed back down, without even a glimpse.

Even from the ground, you can barely see any of it.

There was a small car offering rides to the top, but we just missed one, and didn’t want to wait for the next.

So, we left it behind and continued on our journey. As we climbed out of the Swiss Alps towards the Italian Alps, there were lots of scenic views with other waterfalls.

Finally, we crossed the Sustenpass (2224 m) and could start descending.

Finally we made it into Italy. Our lodging that night was at a pizzeria, Della Torre, up on a hill overlooking Como. It was pouring rain and we had a hard time finding it, but once settled we had an excellent dinner in the restaurant.

Carol had the grilled mixed fish (sea bream, salmon, shrimp, prawn, squid, monkfish), while I had a Milanese risotto with quail breast and porcini mushrooms.

Germany day 37: München

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).

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!

3-rotor (1926?) and 4-rotor (1944) Enigma machines

We needed a lunch break, so walked across the river.

“some weird vegetarian restaurant” – Carol

Back 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 synthesizer

Left, 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.

Iceland day 6: Herring, Whales, and Magic

Another breakfast at another bakery. It wasn’t exactly lox and bagel, but it sufficed.

Then we visited the award-winning Síldarminjasafnið á Siglufirði “Herring Era Museum” in Siglufjörður. For me the most interesting stuff was the old offices with their ancient calculating machines.

We decided to try a whale-watching trip from Dalvík on the east side of the peninsula, as long as we were already there, rather than from the more popular Húsavík, which would have required more driving later. It worked out OK; we saw a pod of porpoises twice, and caught a lone humpback and watched it dive several times.

humpback dive #1

We made it down to the small town of Hauganes (population 137) for dinner.

Carol had Arctic Char with salad and sweet potato fries.

I went for pork ribs with the same sides. The ribs were nearly boneless, and deep-fried so that they were crispy on the outside.

Three young women at the next table were getting pleasantly drunk and playing cards. After they finished their game, I asked if they wanted to see a magic trick. They said YES!, so I asked for their deck of cards and performed “You Probably Buy Me A Drink”. After I fooled them, I taught them how to do the very easy trick.

We finished the peninsula and camped in Akureyri.