the first useful london map we found

one of the problems we had for the first couple of days in london is that the city is a maze of twisty streets, all random, connected by hyperspace bypasses. there are plenty of maps of hyperspace; in fact, the standard one is iconic. but none of those actually explain how to find the wormhole mouths, nor how they relate to each other in realspace. so we were, as daniel boone would say, "never lost, but a might bewildered for a couple of days".

fortunately, high on our to-do list was hitting the london bookstores. our first stop was foyle's, a simply immense bookstore: five stories tall in a substantial building. and there dïe überblönde hit london cartographic paydirt:



that's the front of the folded up map; it's 9cm on a side (3½" or so). the back is an overview map of london:



note the concentric squares; those are the limits of the high-resolution maps.

unfolded once, there's said iconic hyperspace map:



( and on the inside, a centerfold )

steam porn

our trip to england ended with a side trip to sheffield and the peak district national park. i have some pictures of those. i'm going start posting them before i post stuff stuff about the con itself, mostly because i have to turn my fragmentary notes into something coherent.

one of the places i visited in sheffield was the kelham island museum, which is about sheffield's once-mighty steel industry. one of the museum's centerpieces is the don river engine, a 12,000 horsepower (~9 megawatt) steam engine that used to drive a rolling mill:



since rolling mills make steel sheet harder by squeezing it between rollers, they need to be able to reverse direction to run the sheet back and forth repeatedly. despite the engine's obviously huge rotational momentum, it was able to reverse in under two seconds. consider the similar problem of getting a tractor-trailer rig up to highway speed and then getting it to shift into reverse in two seconds. now consider doing that without leaving most of its power train scattered along the highway; that's what this engine used to do. they even have a movie of it doing that.

the museum ran the engine for a few minutes while i was there, but between the crowd and the difficult light (from one end of the room) i didn't try to get any video... so no hard-core steam-on-steel action. but have some steam-age industrial porn anyway.

( steam engine pornography, cut to protect innocent eyes )