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Cane toads are an example of what happens when you let a rank amateur run a biocontrol program. When experts have been involved, you get much better results. A quick example:

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/australia_innovates/?Section_id=1020&article_id=10035&behaviour=view_article

I think it is interesting that even academics and museum curators are interested in the cultural and architectural meanings in the compound eg. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/blog/index.php/2011/05/osamaslair/

I wonder if it will eventually become a tourist destination...

Um Australia had a lot to do with penicillin's use in fact. http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/australia_innovates/?behaviour=view_article&Section_id=1030&article_id=10033 Try again please. Yes I'm Australian - helping you lot defend the world pretty well unnoticed. Even from yourselves.

Scienceworks in Melbourne, Australia. Come to think of it, just come to Australia. Don't bother with Sydney though, they've only got that rather overpolished steampunk exo over at the Powerhouse Museum . But if you are really into natural history, just take a 4WD excursion through Kakadu in the Deep North. You'll see birds that'll reduce you to tears. The wildlife ain't so bad either. But stay away from the pools, they're a croc. Just sayin'.

Why the hell is this in a science museum? There isn't enough real science for them that they have to have exhibits of sci-fi? Great way to pass off entertainment as education.

Actually, this is a big improvement over the last major exhibition the museum hosted, which was on the life of Princess Diana (see link).

The museum's location within Sydney, despite being near the city centre, is such that it's really difficult to attract foot traffic from wandering tourists, so almost all visitors are people that actually set out with the intention of visiting the museum. This unfortunately means that these "big name" temporary exhibits are really needed to bring in visitors, even if their subject matter strays from the theme of the museum.

For such temporary exhibitions, the museum charges A$20 (for Diana) or A$24 (for Star Wars) on top of the A$10 admission price, but it's really a way for the museum to raise its profile and bring in more people, rather than actually make money. Apparently for the Diana exhibition, the ticket revenue wasn't even enough to cover the full cost of hosting the exhibit.

Nope, they were all based on the Animated Series. It may have seemed like they related to original episodes because the stories tended to revisit planets and situations from TOS. (e.g. The R&R world was revisited.) Also, the series never made it to the teens.

You win.

My thought is that the concept of warping space and then moving at a sub-light speed (relative) was too hard for the average viewer to understand, so they had to *become* engines...

I don't understand why you think there's a dichotomy between the way that the warp drive works and the nacelle system being a pair of "engines".

I don't understand why you think *I* think there's a dichotomy. *I* get how the ship supposedly works. I was ONLY trying to get across in my original post the notion that early on and even in later days there has been a bit of confusion about it between the various script writers.

Given what Roddenberry had to work with, he pulled off an impressive bit of SciFi for its time. By the time NextGen rolled around, they had worked out many of the details of the FTL concepts and made sure to write them down in the show's bible. (Which eventually lead to Okuda's tech manual.)

Seriously. I can't remember a time that I didn't watch and enjoy ST, even from my birth in '72. I even have a beaten up die-cast 1701 to prove it...

I wish you luck with your continued efforts!

A well designed, task-specific system could theoretically never become obsolete.

The issue is hardware, really. Where I work we have a digital audio workgroup system designed on a multiboard mainframe and driven by VT terminals (D-Cart) and it's nearly 20 years old. (Our system in Hobart is 14 years old)

D-Cart is one of the most reliable systems I've ever worked with, but there is not one spare part left in Hobart, and no parts that could be substituted in. This is what causes obsolescence, other than that, nobody would replace D-Cart because it works and it's easy to use.

I can't wait until they combine one of these with one of these and get this. A patent abstract is here.

Here's a blog from two people walking the Great Wall of China. They list some of the stuff they took with them, thought it might help with your decision.

Walking the Wall

Personally, I wouldn't take a laptop unless I plan on staying in a hotel room or have easy access to a safe to store it in. From what I've read, a modern cell phone would be more than enough to cover your tech needs.

Just use a spring (or weight) loaded pulley to measure the tension in the rope. add a pointer and a scale . Use the mechanism out of an old fashioned clockwork barometer to give you an ink trace on a paper roll if necessary (I doubt they'd bother). More likely some lucky A/B gets to stand with their hand on the rope and give a holler if it goes tight.

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/databas e/?irn=60889&search=steam+engine&images=&c=&s=

http://www.oldengine.org/members/diesel/Indicator/ Indicator1.htm

is a little later than that, but similar devices were used to measure the pressure inside steam engines right through the nineteenth century.