Museums and farewell dinner

Friday 11 December

There were two particular highlights for the day.

I finally got around to visiting the museum of natural history and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford today (in fact, I realised that I had visited the natural history museum once before, perhaps 8 years ago (my electronic journal isn’t clear on this fact (my memory is obviously even less so!), and this means it may have been 18 years ago)).

The natural history museum focuses, not surprisingly, on natural stuff; so there are rocks, and fossils, and dinosaurs, and dodos, and insects, and some Australian animals (all stuffed), including a very sorry looking brushtail possum. There was a special exhibition about Charles Darwin, and in amongst his quotes he confessed that he wished he had learned more algebra. One other thing that was kind of cool (even though it’s an old idea), was having a model of the earth and moon on one side of the gallery, and a similarly scaled model of the sun at the appropriate distance across the other side of the gallery (you can see this distance — and perhaps you can spot the sun too (it’s beneath the third of the four distant high arches) — in the vertical photo) … and there’s a sign reminding you just how far away the next nearest star would be (and, in typical fashion, I can’t remember the exact answer, but a quick estimate and calculation just now gives me about 9000km).

The Pitt Rivers museum, which is attached to the museum of natural history but separate, is an anthropological museum, and is rather odd and awesome at the same time. It’s dark and there are rows and rows of densely packed display cabinets, filled with collections of stuff. But the stuff is organised by purpose, so you can see, for example, how different cultures have solved the “clothing” problem, or the “musical instrument” problem. Fascinating and overwhelming, because it’s kind of hard to take it all in.

[Okay, I haven’t mastered the art of positioning photos on the page so that they are optimal for all browsers. The way I have it works reasonably well on my wide-screen Mac … so maybe it will look okay if you set your screen as wide as possible. Alternatively, maybe you can just cope with the fact that, more likely than not, things may just end up looking higgledy piggledy at times!]

In the evening there was a farewell dinner to “migrating colleagues”, attended by the maths ed people from Oxford. This was to say goodbye to Sue (a Queenslander who has been teaching in the PGCE course for future maths teachers) and to me.

It was a great evening: the food was good, I had written one of my pieces of doggerel which went down well (a sort of celebratory collection of random acknowledgments with as much wit and accuracy as I can incorporate within the constraints of rhyme and meter), and the company was excellent.

[Photo upper right: Andreas and Andy]

[Photo lower right: John and Nick A.]

I have really enjoyed getting to know the graduate students, and especially Nick C who made me so welcome in Todmorden (and with whom I’ve had some good discussions about her thesis). It’s also been great to get to know Sue; although it’s struck us all as odd that we both had to go to Oxford to meet!

[Photo below: Sue and Ken]

[Second photo below: Nick C. and Nusrat]

[Third photo below: Anne and John]