As I noted earlier, there have been many reports that the looting in Egypt has been carried out by agents provocateur.There have also been widespread rumors that the looting of the Cairo Museum, and the damage to several mummies, was carried out by gov…
Posts Tagged ‘Museum’
Prominent Former Egyptian MP and Presidential Candidate: The Looting of the Cairo Museum Was Carried Out by Government Employees
January 30th, 2011 |
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Computer History Museum Exhibits Cream of the IT Legacy Crop
January 14th, 2011 |
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Only about 2 percent of the hundreds of thousands of historic IT artifacts in the new CHM collection are actually on display in exhibits. – MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — To be selected as a first-string exhibit at the newly revamped Computer History Museum, you have to have a pretty significant technology to show off.
Only about 2 percent of the hundreds of thousands of historic IT
artifacts in the CHM collection are actually on display …
Woz, IT Pioneers Hail Computer History Museum Relaunch
January 14th, 2011 |
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The 11-year-old Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., which for the last two years has been raising funds and planning a grand new refurbishment that had its official debut Jan. 13, staged a media preview Jan. 11 that included some true pioneers of the computing industry. Those who met with media folks included Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, IBM Fellow Frances Allen (the first woman to earn that title for her work with compilers), PONG inventor Al Alcorn, Stanford University computer science professor Don Knuth and Spacewar creator Steve Russell, among others. The museum’s impressive $19 million renovation, called "Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing," records the gamut of computing, from the abacus to the smartphone. It includes such new items as the first PONG machine, one of the original IBM 360 mainframes, one of the first portable laptop computers and a World War II bombsight. Amazingly, only 2 percent of the museum’s entire collection is on display, so the quality of the artifacts is high. Here are some highlights from the preview event. – …
Marina Bay Sands to launch ArtScience museum
December 29th, 2010 |
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Marina Bay Sands will open the world’s first ArtScience museum in February, the latest attraction at its US$5.5 billion ($7.1 billion) gambling complex built by US casino giant Las Vegas Sands (LVS.N).
With a form reminiscent of a lotus flower designed by renowned architect Moshe Safdie, the science museum is due to open on Feb 17 at 1:18 p.m., “as advised by our feng shui master,” a Marina Bay Sands spokeswoman said.
Chip Shot: Inspiration from Inside the Intel Museum
December 2nd, 2010 |
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The Intel Museum, which attracted 136,000 visitors in 2009, is profiled in November/December 2010 issue of the American Association of Museums magazine. The article Corporate Culture? One Part Education, One Part Sales: This is the Corporate Museum by Joelle Seligson explores Intel’s world of silicon technology, including the display on the first 4004 microprocessor, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year.
Kardashians Upstage Mona Lisa
September 16th, 2010 |
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Even the French appreciate a buxom booty. Who knew? Kim Kardashian has managed to upstage the priceless Mona Lisa at the world-renowned Louvre Museum in Paris. The reality TV star and her mother Kris Jenner had to leave the museum after they were swarmed by fans anixious to take snaps of the pair during their [...]
Kim Kadarshian gets her sexy derriere measured for Madame Tussauds’
June 30th, 2010 |
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Kim Kadarshian had her famous rear measured as she joins the long list of celebrities to be immortalised at the star-studded wax museum of Madame Tussuads. The 23-year-old star posted a photo of her head cast on Tuesday, and will appear in red-carpet position in a Herve Leger dress at the New York museum. “This [...]
Computer History Museum: Safeguarding the Legacies and Lore of IT
June 1st, 2010 |
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At age 31 years, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., has established itself as a world-class repository of computing artifacts in Silicon Valley, where many of its exhibits were first created. The nonprofit organization, located for the last 10 years in a modern-looking building that once belonged to Silicon Graphics during its prime, is dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computer history and is home to the largest international collection of computing artifacts in the world, including computer hardware, software, documentation, ephemera, photographs and moving images. Permanent exhibits include "Internet History 1962-1992," "Microprocessors 1971-1996," "The Babbage Engine," "Timeline of Computer History," "Hall of Fellows," and "Visible Storage," among others. This slideshow provides an overview of what one will find at the CHM. – …
Brightest Stars to Attend the Annual Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute
May 6th, 2010 |
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The annual Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala held in New York City on Monday night was attended by all the Hollywood’s and New York’s brightest stars. Most of the Celebes were displaying their haute couture finest as they celebrated the “American Women: Fashioning a National Identity” exhibit.
Kristen Stewart came in a black channel taffeta [...]
Sarah Jessica Parker To Narrate Fashion Exhibit Metropolitan Museum Of Art
April 26th, 2010 |
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Sarah Jessica Parker has been tipped New York City’s newest museum guide!The Halston spokesmodel — who plays fashionista Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex And The City franchise –will provide voiceover narration for the Costume Institute’s annual fashion exhibition at the world-renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art (The MET) in Manhattan. The American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity [...]
New Zealand gets back Maori remains
November 19th, 2009 |
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Sweden returned human remains of Maori origin taken from New Zealand in the mid to late 19th century at a ceremony yesterday, a museum spokeswoman said. Two representatives from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa and New Zealand’s Ambassador to Sweden Barbara Bridge took part in the traditional
A cabinet of wonder
September 10th, 2009 |
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A Los Angeles museum filled with curio and mystery
THERE is something uniquely disorienting about the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Amid the gritty sprawl of Los Angeles, tucked behind a nondescript storefront on Venice Boulevard, a dark maze of rooms houses a “repository of relics and artefacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities.” This description of the museum’s collection, intoned in the scratchy film that greets visitors upon entry, captures the mix of inquiry, intrigue and anachronistic romance that defines this rare place.
The atmosphere is much like the curio library of a Victorian gentleman scholar, full of elegant glass-and-wood vitrines, dimly ornate wall coverings, velvet curtains and engagingly stuffy wall-text. The absence of windows lends the space a theatrical air. …
Unexpected beauty
August 9th, 2009 |
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Serenity prevails in a unique museum in Queens, New York
The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, New York is itself a work of art. Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), a Japanese-American sculptor, was responsible for the conversion of the low slung 1920s industrial building and its garden, as well as all of the objects on display. This section of Queens, home to stone masons when he chose it for his studio, remains ungentrified. The building, with its mysterious angles and shafts of light, staircases and even birch trees popping up in unexpected places, is visually exciting. Yet above all serenity prevails. The museum has been a place of pilgrimage for the artist’s Eastern and Western admirers pretty much since it opened in 1985. (On Sundays a minibus leaves hourly from the Asia Society in Manhattan. At $5 it is cheaper than a taxi and nicer than the subway. The only pity is that it does not take reservations.)
For the uninitiated this is a particularly good time to go. To mark the museum’s reopening after an extensive renovation, “Noguchi ReINstalled” (on until October 24th 2010) is a near exact replication of Noguchi’s original presentation of his work. The 200 pieces from the permanent collection, spaciously displayed in ten large galleries and the garden, are a lively survey of his sculpture in stone, wood, ceramics and metal. It will be a revelation to many, not least of all because there appears to be widespread confusion about exactly what it was Noguchi did. …
Follow in the footsteps of geeks
July 28th, 2009 |
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Forget visits to stately homes, what about our geek heritage, asks Bill Thompson
About ten years ago I went on a family holiday to Cornwall, and one day I dragged my unwilling kids to a delightful but otherwise undistinguished beach so I could point out to them the spot where the world’s first undersea telegraph cable came ashore in 1870.
They were about as impressed by Porthcurno beach as they had been on our trip to the fabled Saxon burial site of Sutton Hoo, which my son memorably recalls as ‘mounds in a field’, but I felt a moment of geek joy that has stayed with me since.
That first cable linked Britain to India, and helped create a communications revolution that transformed the world.
The telegraph, as Tom Standage makes clear in his excellent book, was ‘The Victorian Internet’, and undersea cables were vital to its development. The cable at Porthcurno was the precursor of the Seacom cable that has just gone live in Kenya, and is a direct antecedent of the complex web of fibre-optic cables that make today’s internet possible.
The museum was closed on the day I made it to the beach, and no amount of persuasion would convince my kids that the drive was worth making a second time. But if I’d had The Geek Atlas with me I would have been able to plan my trip properly and managed to make it into tunnels, dug during the Second World War, and explored the Porthcurno Telegraph Museum.
GPS tracker
"It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way"
Bill Thompson
Geek guide to tech treasures
John Graham-Cumming’s book The Geek Atlas is a travel guide for those interested in the history of science, mathematics and technology, and lists 128 sites around the world, including Porthcurno and nearby Polhdu from which Marconi made the first transatlantic radio transmission. And if I have to explain why there are 128 entries you shouldn’t be reading the book.
Locations range from the Jacquard Museum in Roubaix, France, where you can see the punched-card weaving technology that inspired Herman Hollerith’s tabulating machine and led to modern computers, to the Stadtfriedhof in Gottingen, Germany.
Max Planck, Friedrich Wohler and David Hilbert are among the many notable scientists and mathematicians buried there, while Carl Gauss can apparently be found just across town in the Albanifiedhof.
It’s primarily a guidebook, with details of the historic importance of each site accompanied by visitor details and, of course, the precise latitude and longitude of each place listed so you can plug in into your GPS tracker and make sure you’re on exactly the right spot. If you don’t have a GPS tracker you’re probably outside the target market.
Summer break
But each entry also has background information on the science, maths or technology itself, with entries covering complex numbers (Broom Bridge, Dublin), penicillin (Alexander Fleming Laboratory, at St Mary’s Hospital, London) and the infinite loop (Apple HQ, Cupertino, CA), so it’s worth picking up even if you’re stuck inside during a typical British summer deluge.
Geeks cover the world, and the atlas offers places to visit in Australia, Ecuador, Japan and the Ukraine, but forty-five of them are in the UK and therefore more accessible than the magnetic north pole or the White Sands missile testing range in New Mexico, USA.
So if you’re planning a summer break in the UK this year, whether because of the financial situation, your desire to reduce your C02 output or just because it’s a lovely country, you should pack The Geek Atlas along with your National Trust handbook and good hotel guide.
Modern world
First stop, of course, has to be 51° 59′ 47.44" N, 0° 44′ 33.94" W – better known as Bletchley Park, home of the British code breaking efforts during the Second World War and now also the location of the fabulous National Museum of Computing, but you might also find time to visit Manchester for the Science Walk and the Eagle pub in Cambridge.
The site of the old Mathematical Laboratory where the EDSAC computer was built doesn’t get an entry, perhaps because it’s now a modern lecture theatre with a plaque on the wall, but I’m prepared to forgive that omission and head off to discover places I hadn’t even heard of, and find out more about the places where science, mathematics and technology happened or is still happening.
It’s our geek heritage, and the more we make people aware of it the more likely it is to be preserved in some way.
After all, the work that Hooke and Boyle and Newton did during the Enlightenment has had at least as much impact on the modern world as that of the artists, architects, authors and musicians who make it into the big national museums.
Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.
This article is from the BBC News website. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.
Drunk Man Tries To Swim To The Intrepid
July 26th, 2009 |
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One 65-year-old man was apparently so eager to visit the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, however, that he didn’t want to wait for a guide. So he swam.
Oh, and he was drunk.
In the bag
July 25th, 2009 |
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A museum that takes handbags seriously
Amsterdam’s Museum of Handbags and Purses is a rare place. It offers an historical survey of Western bags and related accessories from pill boxes to luggage. On view are some 400 objects from a collection almost ten times that size. Most of the material was acquired by Hendrijke and Heinz Ivo, a married couple who began collecting in earnest 25 years ago, after he retired at 51 (he was president of the food division at Mars).
Sigrid Ivo, an art historian and daughter of the museum’s founders, directs the foundation that now owns the collection and runs the museum. But this is no mere mom and pop affair. Here, in a very glamorous setting, the matter of handbags is taken seriously, stylishly and with a light touch. The museum occupies a double-fronted 17th-century house on the city’s grandest canal, the Herengracht. Exhibits are displayed in chic, modern glass cases and lit as if each handbag or lipstick case was a jewel. A great many are. …
Patricia Zohn: Culture Zohn Off the C(H)uff: Dean Valentine sends one our way at the Hammer Museum
July 24th, 2009 |
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Valentine is impressive in many ways, not least of all because he is utterly fearless and, like a truly great collector, he does not look over his shoulder.
£100m hole threatens arts funding
July 22nd, 2009 |
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Culture department accused of ‘hopeless management’ over budget shortfall
Funding of some of the most prestigious cultural grand projects in Britain is in jeopardy because a £100m black hole has been discovered in the budgets of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Whitehall sources disclosed tonight.
The scale of the department’s spending over-commitment could derail ambitious building projects such as the British Museum’s new exhibition wing, Tate Modern’s redevelopment, the British Film Institute’s film centre on the South Bank in London and the Stonehenge visitor centre.
The shortfall has emerged in the capital budget for the financial years 2009-10 and 2010-11. Senior arts sources today variously called the funding crisis “a cock-up” and “quite astonishing”. One source said: “It’s hopeless management. Everyone will blame the DCMS for being hopeless, and they are fairly hopeless, so it’s not unjustified.”
According to another source: “Financial directors of interested bodies received a letter saying they were £100m overspent on capital and seeking contributions from unspent capital money.”
The DCMS refused to comment on why it had got into a situation in which it had overpromised funds for capital projects by approximately £100m. However, it is understood that the problem was noted several weeks ago and is being addressed by ministers. A DCMS spokesperson said: “Our capital budget is currently overcommitted. Ministers are examining the reasons for this and looking for solutions. It is possible that difficult decisions will be needed, but none has been taken yet.”
A senior arts source said: “They will solve it by scrabbling around, and delaying things here and there. But my goodness, it’s no way to run a railroad.”
However, if critical funding was held up to get the DCMS out of financial trouble, major projects may be mothballed.
Tate Modern’s redevelopment, designed by the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, would increase the size of the gallery by 60%. A £50m one-off grant from the government towards the £215m budget was announced by the then culture secretary, James Purnell, in 2007.
At the time, he said the grant would “act as a firm symbol of the government’s commitment to this amazing project”.
The plan had been to open the new building – which the Tate has described as the most important new building for culture in Britain since the British Library in 1998 and the Barbican in 1982 – in time for the London Olympics in 2012. Approximately a third of the required funding is in place, but the £50m from the government is now, like all capital projects, under review because of the DCMS’s problems. The government funding forms the bedrock on which private funds can be raised – itself an increasingly difficult task in the current economic climate.
The British Museum’s £135m north-western development, to which the government pledged £22.5m in 2007, would give it a 1,500 sq metre exhibitions space to replace the current temporary arrangement in the museum’s reading room. Today the project is due to receive a decision on planning consent. Niall FitzGerald, the British Museum chairman, said last week it would be a “catastrophe” if the museum failed to create a new exhibitions space. A spokeswoman for the museum said today that the DCMS overcommitment “doesn’t really apply to us. We secured our money in 2007 – and have only £8m outstanding.” But the urgent DCMS review is understood to encompass all capital projects, including those, such as the British Museum’s, to which the government has already made firm cash pledges.
In the longer term, the DCMS overcommitment could also affect plans to establish a base for the Royal Opera House in Manchester.
Stonehenge is due to get a £25m new visitor centre in time for the Olympics, partly funded by the DCMS, and the British Film Institute has £45m earmarked. That would go towards building a £166m film centre on the South Bank, aiming for completion in 2016, and replacing the current BFI buildings in London.
“The building we are in is no longer fit for purpose,” said a BFI spokesman. “It probably has about eight more years’ life in it. Beyond that we would be looking at no more cinemas, no more mediatheques, no more bars and restaurants … it has come to the end of its life and we cannot sustain ourselves on that site.” He called the situation with the BFI’s properties on the South Bank and elsewhere in London a “burning platform”.
The film centre, he said, would be “about giving film – the language and medium of choice for the 21st century – a proper home, helping Britain retain its competitive edge and providing a centre for the film industry”. He said the project was currently “being batted back and forth between the Treasury and DCMS. Everyone thinks it’s a great idea – but someone somewhere needs to press the button.”
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Journalism Boot Camp: Booming Islamic Antiquities Market in the Gulf Leads to Thefts in Old Cairo Mosques
July 21st, 2009 |
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Despite denials that the buying of pieces by Qatar helped fuel a black market, Egyptian officials say Gulf collectors are the reason Islamic heritage sites are being looted.