blog 2.0

As you can see, the blog has been ornately refurbished with photos and font changes. If you were wondering, the background photo is one that I took while on a trip to the Cotswold (specifically, Newark Park), which I will describe in detail on a later date. Here’s the picture again. I don’t know if you all are aware of this, but you can enlarge whatever photo I post by clicking on it.

This is the location of Newark Park, if anyone was curious.

a building with no guts

Good stuff. It’s a common practice in Europe to demolish all of a building except the facade and subsequently build anew behind it in order to keep the cultural and monetary value of the area up. I saw this on my way to the British Museum.

tower bridge

NOT LONDON BRIDGE. London bridge is actually a pretty boring spectacle. Here she is.

Alright, so it’s not that bad, but Tower Bridge is the one everyone goes to see.

Sarah, our friend David, and I decided to take a trip down to the Thames one Saturday afternoon to take a stroll and end up at the bridge. We took the London underground, which I really like and will probably devote a post to eventually since it is so wonderfully efficient and fast. Here we are at the station entrance.

And here is the metro stop, which follows a dizzyingly long escalator ride.

Here we have a small section of the dizzyingly long escalator ride, which has obviously gotten to Sarah.

And this is where we eventually emerged.

Here’s a better view of the bridge; I took this from a little bit further down the Thames.

On the way back from Tower Bridge Sarah and I spotted an old and still functioning double-decker bus, a picture of which you can see below. We decided to take it home.

Here’s what the inside looks like (second floor).

All public transport buses in London are still double-deckers (except the 274, a single story bus that leads to Camden Town, a topic for future posts), but they have all been replaced with super efficient and sleek hybrid buses like the one shown below. The one above is one of the few remaining good-old gas guzzlers.

The bus dropped us off at Trafalgar Square, requiring that we do a little walking to get home. We did, however, get to go up Regent Street, which is pretty enjoyable.

As you can see there are quite a few flags out and about, which were placed here for the Olympic games.

lucozade

Oh how I have missed thee. You may only be 30 percent glucose, but you are still 100 percent deliciousness. The last time I had one of these was when I went to Ireland as a teenager.

the original three dimensional model of the DNA double helix by watson and crick!

Found in the Science Museum. This exact model was used by Francis Crick and James Watson (with a lot of help by Rosalind Franklin, whose x-ray crystallography images of DNA they used) to propose the double helix model of DNA. This paved the way for modern medicine, molecular genetics, blah blah blah, exciting stuff. Apparently after Watson and Crick finished the proposal they ran over to the local pub in Cambridge and started screaming their heads off about how they had discovered “the secret of life”. Here they are with the exact model, about 60 years ago.

the british museum, pt. 1

I say part one because there are a few museums here, this one included, that take literally a week to cover. Here’s a picture of the outside, in all of its magnificence.

There it is, nice ornate columns and facade sculpture and all. When you get inside it’s not in the least bit less impressive.

This is the main lobby, which leads to a number of exhibits on all sides featuring a ludicrous amount of (practically stolen, in a lot of cases) artefacts from around the world. The two exhibits that I have covered so far are Assyrian and Egyptian empires. Probably the most famous artefact possessed by the British Museum is the Rosetta Stone, which is a large block with a carved decree in three different scripts (Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and a common form of writing at the time called Demotic) issued for one of the Ptolemaic Kings after Egypt had been invaded and subdued by Greek civilization. The Rosetta stone served as the first bridge in understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs and now usually has an unbearable amount of people surrounding it on a daily basis.

Here it is at about the closest distance I was able to get to it.

So after standing in awe for a few moments I moved on to the rest of the room, which was pretty cool and contained a few sarcophagi, a few big stone slabs with hieroglyphs, and a few giant figureheads of famous Pharaohs.

This one is of Ramses II, considered the most famous and powerful Pharaoh of the Egyptian Empire. In addition to his achievements, including conquering Canaan and Nubia, he apparently doctored himself into a lot of Egyptian historical documents to make himself appear more awesome than he already was. Oh, and if anyone was wondering why there’s a hole in the statue on the left breast, it was allegedly made by looters attempting to cut off the head of the statue to haul it away. They were probably discouraged after realizing that it’s pretty hard to cut through solid granite.

Next was Assyria.

The Assyrian civilization initially centered itself around the Tigris river before expanding quite a ways, and then being utterly destroyed by the people they had previously conquered. The section of wall you see above is from the palace of Sennacherib in Nineveh, which was one of the largest and prosperous Assyrian cities. It’s also mentioned pretty extensively in the bible.

This carving from Ashurbanipal’s palace in Nineveh depicts some Assyrian warriors having fun with the heads of their enemies after a victory.

This shows a few brave Assyrians floating on inflated pig intestines across a river into battle. A lot of these carvings, which were usually present on the inner palace walls, served as a medium to boast about the King’s exploits to those who requested his council. What would have been neatest about these palaces, however, are their doors.

These giant lions-with-man-heads would be present at the Palace of King Ashurbanipal, had they not be excavated and taken to the British Museum. They served as a ward to evil spirits and the turban placed on the head represented a symbol of royalty. The bearded man however, served as a symbol of divinity and the object he has raised was used in Assyrian mythology to “water the tree of life.”

Aside from spending their time making a cool mythology and extravagant cities and palaces, the Assyrians would sometimes enjoy a good lion hunt. during the time of Ashurbanipal’s life, the Assyrian environment became amiable enough for lions to reproduce at an accelerated rate. The amount of human and livestock deaths resulting from this caused lion hunting to become somewhat of a sport conducted by royalty.

Here you can see a sad sap being stuck with arrows as an Assyrian horseman rides by. Lions would usually be caught in the countryside and killed in an arena by the King and his men as his people would watch. It probably would have been a nice way to spend a Sunday afternoon.

Finally, the Assyrian exhibit offered a pretty extensive view (via these humongous palace wall tablets) of the Assyrian empire’s invasion of Lachish, which at the time belonged to the tribe of Judah.

 

Below are some Assyrian archers in the siege, doin’ what archers do best.

And of course, below we have the scene of surrender before the Assyrian king. If you look closely you can see that the king’s face has been obliterated. Archaeologists speculate that this was done after the fall of the Assyrian empire, by some looter or vandal that didn’t particularly like the fact that the Assyrians conducted this siege.

That’s all for now!

 

the wellcome collection

It’s not the welcome collection: it’s the Wellcome collection, named after the famous British collector and medicine enthusiast Henry Welcome. Once when I introduced myself to a Brit and informed him that I live in Orlando, he responded by saying that the one thing he and I had in common was our cities had no short supply of tourists. When it comes to the attractions, however, London has no short supply of free museums whereas Orlando has no short supply of expensive amusement parks. Sarah and I decided to spend a Sunday afternoon a few weeks ago visiting this museum. What we found there was pretty delightfully surprising. There were loads of pieces of art and scientific machinery centered around medicine, genetics, and foreign and historical medical tools.

This is Sarah listening to some sort of lecture or another but what is behind her is the point of interest in this photo. It is an artistic interpretation (done with socks, if you look closely) of a technique in Molecular Biology called “Karyotyping,” in which technicians will essentially explode your cells to view your DNA under a microscope. Here is a picture of an actual Karyotype:

This image shows (pretty much) an individuals entire genome in 23 pairs of bunched up bundles of DNA called chromosomes. Usually DNA is too small to see with a microscope, however, when your cells are in the process of dividing your chromosomes will condense themselves (It’s to make sorting them easier. Imagine trying to divide up balls of yarn versus a bunch of different tangled strands of yarn.) and at this point they become visible. So what scientists will do is blow up your cells (they’re usually taken from the inside of your cheek) when their in the process of dividing, dye the chromosomes with false colors, and voila! you can take a peak at the blueprints for your body.

Another cool little sciencey piece of art that we saw there was this:

Although this may at first seem like complete gibberish, the concept it conveys is very fundamental to Biology. Notice how this string of sentences is like a game of telephone. As we read on the sounds and letters of the words barely change, but the meaning alters drastically (or the meaning is completely lost). The consequence of changing or rearranging single letters in a sentence is very similar to the consequence or altering single nucleotides in a sequence of DNA. Nucleotides act as a single coding element within our genome. When one cell divides into two (which happens, by the way, billions of times a day in your body), the DNA content of that cell has to double to accommodate both cells. This is done by making a copy of the DNA in the original cell. Usually about a thousand to a million coding errors, in which one nucleotide is replaced, deleted, or added, result from this process. Although most of these “replication errors” have little to no effect, it is this that inevitably supplies us with both cancer and evolutionary change. Weird, isn’t it?

the blog begins

Hello all! I’ve finally set this wonderful little thing up with the only hitch being that I have sparse access to the internet. Since the Leary’s plumbing started failing a few weeks ago, the embassy has decided to graciously put me and Sarah up at another apartment down the street, which is quite comfortable but unfortunately an internet dead zone. So, while I do have the time I will catch you up on a few things! The following photo is of the street where I am staying.

You will notice that they are all 4 story apartments (excluding basements) surrounding a park square. On the day of the Jubilee float in this park I was able to attend a Jubilee party where I hummed along during “God Save the Queen”. About two blocks to the left of this photo is the Middle Eastern district, which has a very good Lebanese restaurant that Sarah’s parents took us to. About 3 or 4 blocks into the photo is Oxford Street, which is famous for its department stores. It becomes ridiculously crowded when there’s any semblance of light, so I try to avoid it at all costs. I’ll write more as I’m exploring and not busy volunteering or doing schoolwork!