Museum & Collection Tools

Test your knowledge of ancient Egypt — pharaohs, pyramids, gods and everyday life — in ten-question rounds with streaks.

Vitruvius counted in modules: the lower diameter of the column. Doric is stocky, Corinthian tall and leafy, Ionic the volute in between. Enter a diameter in metres; the plaque returns shaft, capita...

Conditional probability you can feel: what a positive test really means (Bayes' theorem), a 300-game Monty Hall simulation, and the prosecutor's fallacy — with a 10,000-person grid painted live by ...

Name the kings and queens of England, Scotland and the UK from 1066 to today — ten questions per round with streaks.

English and British legal years used to be counted from the accession, not 1 January. “3 Geo. III” is the third year of George III’s reign. The desk covers the Hanoverians to the present, plus a Tu...

The constants that run the universe, as numbered exhibits — provenance, exact or measured, and what each does. Includes a live pi engine (Machin's formula computed with big integers), a golden-rati...

Watch sunlight enter a room and cast shadows as the sun moves across the sky. See how window orientation, room depth, and time of year affect daylight levels. The sun path diagram shows the sun's a...

Walk 4.6 billion years of Earth's story in one scroll — Hadean to Holocene, an era per hall, with an Earth-in-one-day clock, jump-chips and a catalogue-numbered plaque for every exhibit...

Melvil Dewey, 1876: knowledge in ten main classes, each split by tens. Museums and small libraries still live by it. Search a word or tap a hall. This is the public summary, not a licensed DDC sche...

Lengths and masses as the casts in the hall give them — mid-range figures from the current literature, not movie posters. Enter your height; the gold line is you, standing at the snout.

The twenty-four single-consonant signs every student copies first — Gardiner’s teaching alphabet. Vowels were not written. Type a name; the case sets the glyphs and the catalogue codes. This is not...

Energy literacy in the only currency that needs no conversion: bananas, stairs and phone charges. Decode any item, your monthly meter, and the kinetic energy of a moving car (E = ½mv²).

A teaching coat, not a grant. Choose a field, an ordinary and a charge. The plaque writes the blazon in the old word-order: metal or colour first, then the ordinary, then what stands upon it. Rule ...

Not a ladder. A bush of species, several of which overlapped. Brain volumes are typical adult means; dates are first-to-last fossil appearances as currently argued. The corridor will not tell you w...

Japanese objects are dated in era years: Meiji 6, Shōwa 20, Reiwa 6. Year 1 of an era is the year it was proclaimed, even if that was December. The desk covers Meiji (1868) to Reiwa. Earlier nengō ...

Romans counted forward to the next named day, inclusively. The named days are the Kalends (1st), the Nones (5th, or 7th in Mar/May/Jul/Oct) and the Ides (13th, or 15th in those four months). The Id...

Friedrich Mohs, 1812: a mineral of higher number scratches one of lower number. The steps are not equal — corundum to diamond is a canyon. Pick two specimens (or a thumbnail and a steel file) and t...

Watch water migrate through building materials via capillary action — the same force that makes a sponge soak up water and makes your walls draw moisture from the ground. See why rising damp happen...

The quiet rectangle beside the object. In Anglo-American practice: maker, dates, title in italics, date of work, medium, dimensions, credit line, accession number. Fill the fields; the wall card se...

Colour as a dated substance. Each pot is a first-use, a chemistry, and a verdict: still on the palette, replaced, or locked in the poison cupboard. Swatches are screen approximations — never a spec...

Watch water flow through pipes in real time. See Bernoulli's principle in action — where the pipe narrows, water speeds up and pressure drops. Particles show laminar vs turbulent flow. Adjust diame...

Early Imperial bronze and silver, counted in asses. 4 asses = 1 sestertius; 4 sestertii = 1 denarius; 25 denarii = 1 aureus. A legionary under Augustus took 225 denarii a year (before stoppages). E...

Watch sound bounce around a room in real time. See wavefronts propagate from a source, reflect off walls, and decay as materials absorb their energy. Adjust room size, wall material, and source pos...

A Hellenistic tourist list, not a league table. Antipater of Sidon and others named seven sights a traveller from the Mediterranean might still catch. Only the Great Pyramid is still standing. The ...

Three statistical traps you can run with your own eyes: survivorship bias (the WW2 planes), Simpson's paradox (the kidney-stone study where one treatment wins overall yet loses everywhere), and reg...

Apply loads to a beam and watch stress propagate in real time. See shear force and bending moment diagrams update live. The colour map shows where failure begins — red zones are where your shelf, j...

Watch heat flow through building materials in real time. A thermal wave propagates from a warm room through brick, insulation, glass or wood — Fourier's law made visible. See why a 100mm air gap is...

British silver and gold are punched with a standard, a town, a maker, and (historically) a date letter. The bench identifies the town mark and the millesimal fineness. Date letters cycle by assay o...

Sixteen staves, not twenty-four. After about 700 CE the north dropped Elder Futhark down to this tighter case — one rune now stands for several Latin letters. Stones from Jelling to Rök speak it. T...