I'm back from Maryland. I enjoyed crab cakes and scallops for dinner on different nights. It was complete culture shock in many ways, but on the way out I stopped at the National Wildlife Visitors Center off of the Balitmore-Washington Parkway. This is just a few miles from NASA Goddard and Fort Meade. They have a lot of conservation oriented exhibits that are targeted at short attention spans and the web site makes reference to a popular conservation tour that I missed. Of interest to me was that off in the corner I found a large poster for the Friends of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. The Patuxent and Little Patuxent are local waterways so I was reminded of the nascent Friends / Amigos of the Dominguez Watershed. I didn't have time to explore much because I really wanted to head off to the National Cryptologic Museum, the exit for which is shared with the NSA. There were a lot of suspiciously clean cut attendees (overheard wife commenting to husband, "I bet you know all aout that.") as well as some cub scouts. The Cryptologic Museum has fun things from the history of crytography like a defunct CM-5 and a Cray YMP as well as an early Bombe. National Cash Register made the Bombe as an Enigma decoders. I remember seeing a CM-5 at NCAR in 1977 or thereabouts. The one at the museum is powered up in such a way that the trademark blinking red LEDs were still going.