Last weekend, I went to DC. On Saturday I visited the Smithsonian Museum of American History. There is an exhibit there titled something like "The Information Age." It was really great and I learned a lot. It is a funny thing about the human mind that the more you know about something, the more see when you look at it. I visited this exhibit ten years ago and enjoyed it, just for the visual aspect of the old machines. Now, as a student of engineering and history I see so much more. One thing that I was aware of this time was the apparent conflict in the engineers mind between performance and quality. The Information Age exhibit includes the telegraph, the telephone, TV, and computers. They also have a room devoted to cryptography. As a collector of this type of antiques, I am obviously wowed by their collection, and good taste, but that probably doesn't need to be said. The museum is really pleasant and the prose on the plaques next to the pieces is quite good. However, the exhibits failed thoroughly inform me on the purpose, operation, and historical significance of many of the pieces. For example, there was an display in the Cryptography room of an Enigma machine. It had a little touch screen kiosk where you were supposed to learn about Enigma and how to break codes. The girl I was with is a PhD student in EE and together we couldn't make any sense of the little kiosk. Furthermore, they showed one of the rotors of the Enigma, removed, and anyone who knows about that machine (I know a little) know that the rotors are the most important part, the part that does the substitutions. But they didn't talk about the function of the rotor. To make matters more contorted, they have a looped video dramatization of Alan Turing. He was an active guy, and worked on cracking Enigma and founding AI. But the video is of him talking about AI. If it is an exhibit about Enigma, shouldn't they find a video related to Enigma? AI and cryptography are about as unrelated as it gets.