Surprisingly, a very good exhibition. Bigger than I expected, covering several large rooms. The first room is mostly just propaganda posters: nice but familiar; but it gets a lot better once you get into the design stuff. Some great looking early gadgets like the sleekly minimalist Braun radiogram and futuristic black TV cubes. Has a few spy exhibits, like a miniature camera fitting into a cigarette packet. The Communist stuff is pretty good too. There's some amazing Czech glasswork, with abstract patterns and some animal forms embedded into blocks of glass.

Moving on, they have some spacesuits and flight suits, and lots of architectural models of buildings built and unbuilt. There are some designs for archologies and moving cities, including an impressive wooden model of a cantilever-hanging neo-Tokyo. Also has some of the storyboards and early designs for Dr Strangelove, including the famous ("you can't fight here") War Room.

Well worth seeing. Pretty steep at £9 though.

Museums 2
On the way back stopped at the Gerhard Richter 4900 Colours exhibition at the Serpentine gallery. Each work is 10x10 grid of shiny tiles, colours selected at random. Quite pretty to look at. Not hugely impressed by the artness of it though.

What I'm Listening To
Finished Skinny Dip by Carl Hiassen. Crime novel set in Florida. A husband throws his wife off a cruise ship: rescued by an ex-military ex-cop they try to find out why and get revenge.

Other people would probably like it more. I got another occurrence of my occasional problem with crime novels: liking the baddie more than the goodie.

There also seems to be a bit of a power mismatch: the goodies have vastly more money and resources than the baddie, which makes things a bit too easy. Still, it's quite well done, and some of the minor characters are appealingly Dickensian. Pretty entertaining.

Web
Science Dinosaur dance floor. Weapons Against Robots. Robot band.

Nostalgia food. Drinkers Alliance.

Economics. Bailout cost within norms. Naked Capitalism: Great Crash of China? Daily Mash: Banks told to stop being so obsessed with money. Pioneering economist Anna Schwartz (92) on credit crisis:

Everything works much better when wrong decisions are punished and good decisions make you rich.

"I think if you have some principles and know what you're doing, the market responds. They see that you have some structure to your actions, that it isn't just ad hoc -- you'll do this today but you'll do something different tomorrow. And the market respects people in supervisory positions who seem to be on top of what's going on. So I think if you're tough about firms that have invested unwisely, the market won't blame you. They'll say, 'Well, yeah, it's your fault. You did this. Nobody else told you to do it. Why should we be saving you at this point if you're stuck with assets you can't sell and liabilities you can't pay off?'" But when the authorities finally got around to letting Lehman Brothers fail, it had saved so many others already that the markets didn't know how to react. Instead of looking principled, the authorities looked erratic and inconstant.