![\"20140828-231306.jpg\"](\"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/20140828-231306.jpg\")
<\/a>\nSeen in a slightly more comprehensible form here;<\/p>\n
It took me a while to get moving in the morning, and I detoured past St. Pancras Station (phone, will you please<\/strong> stop auto-correcting that? it’s not clever; everyone already knows what Pancras is spelled like)<\/em> to figure out where the Eurostar leaves from, then King’s Cross, to see whether I could see platform 9.75. (sorry for going decimal; the phone won’t let me do fraction characters)<\/em><\/p>\n Finding the National Maritime Museum & the Greenwich Observatory was a matter of following the signs, and then heading towards the big thing on the hill when the two ‘Observatory’ signs turned out to be facing each other.<\/p>\n There was also a time-travelling Astronomer Royal, Maskeldyne, or at least an impersonator, talking about the Longitude prize & the various methods, including one involving sympathetic magic & a dog. I took the precaution of starting my tourism at the top of the hill, so that everything would downhill from there, and it paid off nicely. On the way out, I spotted this, which I am at a loss to explain;<\/p>\n After all of that, I wandered back to the hotel for a bit, before heading out on a journey of great gaming significance. Along the way I spotted this, which I’m assured is a historical landmark. This sort of thing happens a fair bit; I eventually gave up on getting a photo of an official GMT clock, with helpful official distance measure devices, at the observatory, and settled instead for one in which two tourists are very pleased to be standing before this august piece of scientific history.<\/p>\n If you look carefully behind them, you’ll note that you cannot see the Greenwich Meridian. It’s OK; I took a close-up.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\nThey had, as part of an exhibition on the problem of Longitude, an artistic exhibit called Longitude Punk’d, with historical Steampunk approaches, one of which used the remarkable memory of elephants.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nThat one was real.
\nAnd didn’t work.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nDown in the museum was the rest of the Longitude exhibition, the serious bit concerning the problem, the various unworkable, unlikely, and fiendishly difficult approaches, and the sensible solutions; Lunar Observation, and an accurate Clock.
\nIncluded in there was a small part of Babbage’s Difference Engine, which would have made the calculations needed for Lunar Observation to get the time in Greenwich easier to produce, if it had been completed.
\nThere were also a number of Harrison’s clocks, carefully restored & really<\/strong> complicated, though they did get smaller & more clock-looking over time.<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nAnd this, last seen with a crashed alien spacecraft in front of it;<\/p>\n<\/a>
\nOh, and this is outside of the Maritime Museum;<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nFirst stop was to pick up a copy of the Atomic Robo RPG, which I managed, and the next was to track down this place,<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>
\n…, because it amused me to do so. (It’s part of The Kerberos Club RPG setting)<\/em>
\nHelpfully, there’s the Union Jack flying, or at least dangling, on the building in the photograph.<\/p>\n
\nPresumably it’s somewhere behind, or under, the people having their pictures taken upon said historical landmark.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n