W is for Weather-measurement devices have lost their novelty

Travel date: May 19, 2014
Location: Munich
Author: Nick John
Price paid for a load of laundry: I'm too embarrassed to even answer

James and I wandered the city this morning. We ran across a fantastic vegetarian restaurant for, well they were serving lunch by the time we got there. We then meandered through the city, strolled through an couple markets where I picked up some delicate souvenirs which have basically no chance of surviving the trek home.

Our destination for the day was the Deutsches Museum. This massive six-story complex covers all major branches of science, along with a vast array of collections like planes, ships, and ancient human artifacts. They had a large exhibit on modern uses of carbon, like building light-weight car frames, kick-ass racing bikes, and artificial limbs.

The museum's exhibits are largely just in German, which was nice because it absolved me of the obligation to read every word. Instead, we looked at ancient cave paintings and early computers and simple gear machines without learning their real names or the context they play in our world.

All the major descriptions had full translations, so we did learn quite a bit about early humans, nanotechnology and principles of lift. They had an interesting display depicting the evolution of various musical instruments, like the 7-belled trumpet and a trombone with a dragon for a bell (sackbuts FTW!) and a number of instruments that I would have thought were invented by Dr Seuss himself.

Oh, and we saw even more sundials, astrolabes, compasses, quadrants, sextants, and octants. They have arguably the largest hygrometer and barometer (the size of a bell tower, see fig. 4). I am confident that I can now calculate the circumference of the earth, predict the weather and the next eclipse, and navigate a sea vessel, all using tools invented before 1400. Go science! We stayed at the museum until they kicked us out, and we could have easily stayed for hours longer.

From there we wandered toward our hotel and found a cute fairytale-themed gourmet burger restaurant on a busy pedestrian street. We people-watched and enjoyed several half liters of helles Bier before returning to the hotel to wind down and plan our next adventure.