10 Questions About…

The girls and I finally had a day in Dublin to do anything we wanted. (OK anything I wanted.) We started with the Fail Better exhibit at the Science Gallery. It was a collection of failed experiments. Here are explanations from my favorite two failed experiments…

1. In 1965, George and Charlotte Blonsky, a married couple living in New York City, were granted US patent #3216423 for an “Apparatus for Facilitating the Birth of a Child by Centrifugal Force”. When a woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back on a circular table. She is strapped down. The table is then rotated at high speed. The baby comes flying out. This is intended to “assist the under-equipped woman by creating a gentle, evenly distributed, properly directed, precision-controlled force, that acts in unison with and supplements her own efforts”.
2. It was trumpeted as “the building with more up top”, a swollen pint glass of a tower that bulges out as it rises to pack in more offices at the lucrative higher levels—all topped with a Babylonian sky-garden. What the developer of 20 Fenchurch Street in the City of London had not bargained for was, that like every Bond baddie lair, the Walkie-Talkie building would also come with its own lethal death ray. In the summer of 2013, the concave south-facing facade of the 34-storey tower was found to channel the rays of the sun into a concentrated beam down on to the street below, so hot it melted the bumper of a car, scorched shop carpets and bubbled their paintwork. One passer-by even managed to fry an egg in its heat.

After that we trekked around town visit lots of shops and checking out favorite places like George’s Market. Aine and I checked out the Maker Shop, where she got to solder a homemade flashlight and we got a few minutes with the National Gallery. The older girls got in a little shopping – or maybe just hung out at a coffee shop, we’re not really sure. But everyone had a nice break from bubble wrap and each other!