To the Science Museum on a Sunday

Snowdrops in Kensington Gardens in mid-December - surely their bloom time is February?

Snowdrops mark the first sign of spring, flowering ahead of daffodils and bluebells. They emerge through frozen soil from January and are in bloom until late-February. (via)

A stop along the way at the Serpentine Gallery -

Zaha Hadid's drawings for The Peak, Hong Kong - penny plain and tuppence coloured

Love the cutout for the pen in some of her notebooks

At the "old gallery", Lucy Raven is showing; I was interested in the way
the edges of the space caught a moving circle of projected light

The light came from these machines - both were turning in all
dimensions, but one had suffered a lightbulb failure

 At the science museum, first a cuppa, sitting looking down at the street -

 Then to the new mathematics gallery, designed by Zaha Hadid, based on the flow of air around the old Handley Page plane which hangs at the centre of the gallery -

Flow lines underfoot too

Many fascinating displays, also in the adjoining Information Age gallery -

Shabolovka radio mast, Moscow, was meant to be 350 metres high, but not enough
 steel was available, so it ended up 150m (aka Shukov Tower)

 A couple of blasts from the past, for me - in the late 1960s I grappled with an old switchboard during a temporary office job in a china shop

Manual telephone exchange switchboard, 1925

 and we used calculators like those in the middle row in the statistics lab at university - they were cutting edge in 1966, but a few years later hand-held calculators made them superfluous. Good thing, too - they were so noisy - what must it have been like working all day in an office full of them!

Mechanical calculating machines, 1900-1970

 On the way home - overhead, a frieze on the Barkers building -

 and underfoot, tiling outside a shop -