Riverside Museum
Started: 2024-08-26 19:45:38
Submitted: 2024-08-26 22:27:48
Visibility: World-readable
The last day at Worldcon in Glasgow; plus a tall ship and a transport museum and a distillery tour
Monday, the 12th of August 2024 was the last day of Worldcon in Glasgow. It was the last day that I caught the suburban Argyle Line from Glasgow Central's lower-level island platforms two stops west to Exhibition Centre with a train crowded with other sci-fi nerds already wearing their convention badges, the last day I walked across the red covered pedestrian bridge to the SEC, the last day I waited for the bag check in front of the main entrance, and the last day I walked through the comfortably-crowded main concourse trying to figure out where I wanted to go and what programs I wanted to see.
The first program I attended was titled "How Your Cat Is Trying to Kill You", which was a presentation about precisely what the title indicated it would be. It covered all of the exciting ways that cats can be detrimental to humans, including tripping them on the stairs (with stats about animal-involved falls), scratches and bites (with a scary photo of a human hand that had gotten infected after a cat bite and had swollen to twice its normal size), and whether your cat will eat you after you're dead (yes). The last point was illustrated by two photos from a body farm where they discovered that two different human corpses had been scavenged by two different cats, and had kind-of-gory close-up pictures of the cadavers, showing bite marks in the skin where the cats had gone after the subcutaneous fat.
The last panel I attended was "Can We Turn the Machines Off?" This panel sprawled around the idea of how much technology is too much, and the panelists mostly agreed that the technology we have today is fine but maybe we need to stop before AI gets too far. Some thought it was all about lazy kids these days who don't know how to write proper programs, and I had thoughts, but I wasn't able to phrase "No you don't understand the incentives of modern software engineering, let me take the next ninety minutes to explain in detail" in the form of a question. (One alternate take on the premise of the panel was to wonder how much we can rebuild technology without relying on technology, because we're using current hardware and software to build the next generation of software and hardware, and we have to rely on our tools even though we can't fully audit them to make sure they're doing what we think they're doing. And there's a related problem of interconnected systems: while I was working as an SRE at Google, one of the things that SRE was worried about was whether they really could reboot Google in the event of a global outage, and concern that we couldn't, and that was an existential risk.)
After two panels I got a sandwich at the coffee shop on the main concourse, then ate lunch in hall four (and read the full statistics from the Hugo Awards to learn more about how the voting had gone). I made one last circuit of the exhibits and the dealer's hall (which was emptying out on the last day), and bid Worldcon and the SEC farewell as I headed out to see the sights of Glasgow.
I walked down the Clyde, through the SEC's massive car park, to the Riverside Museum, then walked through the museum's displays of vehicles from Glasgow's history to see the tall ship Glenlee docked in the river. Glenlee was one of the last steel-hulled sailing ships built in Glasgow on the Clyde at the end of the nineteenth century.
On board I started at the bow of the ship, which seemed to be an obvious place to go, except that the signs and displays on the ship did not really provide the historical context for the ship that I was looking for. (I picked up a souvenir booklet at the entrance but I didn't really look at it until later, at which point I discovered that it actually contained the context I was looking for.) The ship traded as a freighter from 1897 until 1919, carrying bulk cargo around the world by sail power alone.
Like any artifact from its time, Glenlee had been extensively retrofitted and repurposed during her time at sea. In 1919 she acquired a diesel engine, and may have smuggled not-entirely-legal cargo working for an Italian company (historical records of this are, not surprisingly, hard to find). Then she was purchased by the Spanish Navy as a training ship (and served with the nationalists during the civil war), before leaving service and escaping being scrapped by instead being towed back to Scotland and restored as a museum ship.
All of this history was alluded to in bits and pieces in the displays of the ship, along with the challenge of interpreting the palimpsest of a historic ship that had been put to so many different uses with very different physical layouts. The museum made the choice to remove most of the structures of the Spanish Navy training vessel, which had subdivided the tween deck into cabins.
The restoration rebuilt all of the structures on the deck. This led to the curious appearance that the 125-year-old ship looked new in places, including a farmhouse sink in the galley that would look at home in a new San Francisco remodel.
One of the signs on the ship mentioned that they were looking for inspiration from the tall ship Balclutha, a contemporaneous steel-hulled sailing ship built on the Clyde at the end of the nineteenth century, now serving as a museum ship at Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco. (In fact from reading about Balclutha on Wikipedia just now I learned that her name is a reference, in Gaelic, to the Scottish town of Dumbarton.)
I enjoyed the opportunity to explore Glenlee and get a glimpse into the last generation of steel-hulled sailing ships.
I walked across the dock to the Riverside Museum, packed with vehicles and other artifacts from Glasgow's history. There was a wall full of cars, several large steam locomotives, and a side-lever marine steam engine from the tug Industry, one of the first steam ships in Glasgow.
There were a couple of models of huge cruise ships, which were built here on the Clyde; and a huge wall full of ships, from sailing ships and cargo ships to passenger ships and warships, which appeared to represent ships built here. (This is a poor picture because of the lighting in the museum and the glare on the glass; and this picture only covers a third of the wall full of ships.)
One of my favorite artifacts was a steam turbine engine built for King Edward, an excursion ship built for passengers on the Clyde, which turned out to be the first commercial vessel to be driven by steam turbines.
I walked up the Clyde to the Clydeside Distillery, a new distillery built on the Clyde occupying part of an old building at the mouth of the docks that gave Glasgow its industrial and commercial power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. (The docks have since been filled in, and the SEC was built on top of the docks. The docks shipped goods to and from the British empire, feeding and enriching Glasgow at the expense of people in the overseas colonies. The museums and exhibits I visited had added signs acknowledging Glasgow's role, but they weren't quite sure what to say beyond that.)
I had signed up for a tour of the distillery at 16:20, and I arrived with plenty of time to look through the tiny gift shop on the ground floor before the tour started. We watched a video about the history of the building (used for the water accumulators that provided the hydraulic power to open and close the swing bridge at the mouth of the docks, shown in the archive picture above) and climbed a flight of stairs to see some exhibits on the history of scotch whisky. We didn't have much time to read the displays until our guide led us past the loading dock where a couple of empty oak barrels waiting to be filled. (The whisky was aged off-site in an undisclosed location, which probably meant a nondescript warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow. Under Scottish law spirits have to age for three years in oak barrels before they can legally be called whisky.)
Our guide talked us through the process of making whisky and led us into a modestly-sized clearly-industrial room with a large copper vessel for mixing and heating the milled barley into mash, and several stainless steel fermenting vessels. We looked into the mashtun to see the wort being mixed together (extracting the sugars from the grain), and into the fermenting vessel to smell the had a powerful oder of yeast and the frothy glistening surface of the liquid that looked like it was alive (because it was, the yeast was consuming the sugar and producing alcohol and carbon dioxide).
The next step was in the next room, set up with large windows so the large copper stills looked out over the river Clyde. Here the fermented wash is heated to evaporate and concentrate the alcohol, then condensed back to liquid (using tap water as process water in a heat exchanger). The still was set up so we could see the recondensed liquid pouring into the collection vessels below the elevated floor, to be barreled and aged, and eventually bottled and sold.
After the tour I stood on the patio in front of the distillery trying to find a good angle to get a picture of the shiny copper stills visible in the windows above and ended up talking to two Dutch guys who had been on the tour, Tys and Martin. (In the end I got distracted and forgot about the picture.) Tys worked for a Dutch startup that was working on optical chips and we compared notes on our respective chip-making startups and commiserated on the business practices of startups. None of us had any plans for supper so we walked across the pedestrian bridge over the nearby A highway to Finnieston and ate pizza at Sano. I caught a suburban train back to Glasgow Central and finalized my plan for the next day.
