e mail W (balls)

by William:

hi we got there too late so NO TICKETS!!!!!!!!!! too bad but we had fun SO FUN !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WELL BYE

(Dad's note: We had originally planned to go to the Miraikan National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation since they have a planetarium. William is fascinated with space at the moment and they had one show with English audio at 2:00 PM that we thought would blow his mind. We thought we got a reasonably early start up to Tokyo...

It was OK getting to Shimbashi, but we needed to switch to the New Transit YURIKAMOME line. As we exited the JR turnstiles looking for the sign to this next train circuit, we didn't see it right away and we had a dumbstruck look for three seconds. That is about how long you can look confused in a train station before a Japanese person that speaks good English comes up and asks if he/she can help. Right on cue, a very nice gentlemen asked if he could help. Not three seconds later, William starts pointing and jumping up and down saying he found the sign we were looking for. We didn't want to insult our Japanese saviour, so we let him finish finding the stop we were heading for on the map, figure out which line we needed, and then eventually point at the same sign that William was practically yelling about at this point.

We got to the museum at 1:00PM only to find out that the planetarium show had sold out about an hour previous. It was a real bummer. We decided to buck up and see what else the Museum had to offer. It had quite a bit. We spent some time in their "Terminator" exhibit which had all kinds of terminator props and information. We also looked through their life science area where we looked at rat brains through microscopes and sequenced wood block "DNA". But the exhibit that fascinated both William and me the most was the "Mechanical Model of the Internet." You assembled a message with a binary address and character out of black and white balls that represented the 1's and 0's and they were sent through interconnected mechanical "servers" that would read the address balls and send the sequence of balls to other servers to finally deliver the message to the correct terminal. It was quite a machine and a show! Here is a video showing William sending a "W" through the machine...)