Relevant History

Ah Ryanair, will you never cease pushing the boundaries of customer service?

My nemesis, Ryanair (which I flew several times last year), has announced a brave new era in customer service:

RyanAir this week announced that they will soon eliminate all airport check-in counters and require passengers to carry-on their luggage. Starting early next year, passengers will need to schlep their bags through airport security and drop them at the steps of the plane for checking into plane's cargo hold. Once aboard though, there will be gambling!

Not exactly going to have Virgin Air quaking in its boots.

My favorite comment: "It's like Ryanair has ceased to become an air carrier and has become a Brecktean improv group."

[h/t to Nancy]

Fort Funston

Today we took the kids to Fort Funston, an old fort and beach in San Francisco. It's very popular with hang-gliders, so while playing in the freezing cold waves was the main attraction, the kids also enjoyed watching hang-gliding up close.

via flickr

I'd never been this close to them either, and was impressed at how long they could stay in the air.

via flickr

The beach is at the bottom of a fairly steep trail, and it's too dangerous to actually swim in the water; but that's hardly unusual for beaches in this area. Unlike southern California, our beaches are mainly for walking along.

via flickr

Taleb the Improbable

"I know that history is going to be dominated by an improbable event. I just don't know what that event will be." (Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, p. 154)

The kids will want one of these

The next generation Macbooks. Top this, Windows!

On opportunity

"Opportunities to rise, which can, of their very nature, be seized only by the few... [cannot] substitute for a general diffusion of the means of civilization, which are needed by all men whether they rise of not." (R. H. Tawney)

John Oliver on information technology

John Oliver, in the latest issue of The Bugle (the funniest thing in the world), talking about the use of information technology in Iranian protests:

John Oliver: The reinforcements of modern technology stepped to the front line: the twin soldiers of YouTube and Twitter answered their planet's calling. People in protests used their cellphones to shoot footage, and then put it on the Internet. All it took was a potential Iranian revolution to find a practical use for Internet video.

And so I would like to hereby issue a public apology to the piano-playing cat; to the teenage boy receiving a nut-shot from a whiffle bat; and to the fat lady falling off a table. All of your clumsy attempts at entertainment were in fact vital experiments in the development of this communications tool.

Andy Zaltzman: They were very much the John the Baptists to the Jesus of Iranian video.

Kitten on a Roomba

Yes, I'm working on a bunch of different things, but... who can resist video of a kitten on a Roomba?

Building a labyrinth

We spent this afternoon at the house of some good friends, helping them expand their labyrinth and having a Solstice Day cookout.

First the kids (and a few of the parents) cleared the ground.

Then we laid down rocks in a spiral.

The kids then filled the labyrinth with sand.

It was a very interesting time, and the kids really enjoyed working on it.

Afternoon activity: building a labyrinth

At a friend's house, under some redwoods.

Bloomington

I've been in Bloomington, Indiana for a conference on visualization and the history and philosophy of science. It's one of those events that brings together my old life as an historian, and my new life as a futurist: on one hand we're mainly talking about how visualizations of scientific communities and social dynamics can be used by historians and philosophers; on the other I suspect that there are cool things I could do with these maps to forecast the future of science.

the official conference picture, via flickr

There's one other think-tank person here, which saves me from being the one non-academic Ph.D. in the room, the scholarly equivalent of Stephen Colbert's one black friend.

There have been some efforts to use scinometric (or "science of science") maps in the history of science, but so far as I know, most of this work has followed fairly conventional historiographic paths: for example, mapping the Darwin or Mersenne correspondence, or asking questions about the growth of scholarly networks. We've not yet used them to something radically new, like using geographical coding to calculate the speed of the transmission of ideas or instruments, or constructing agent-based models of scientific communities and seeing how they evolve over time. But that's why we're here-- to think about how we could create such things, and what benefit they might bring.

I quite like Bloomington, or the few blocks of Bloomington that I've seen.

via flickr

The place is enormous. It has roughly the same number of students as Berkeley, but physically it's much larger. It also takes collegiate Gothic (a somewhat stripped-down, modernized version) to a scale I don't think I've never seen before. If you took Princeton or Bryn Mawr, put it on a balloon, then blew up the balloon to five times its previous size, you'd get the IU campus. Yale and University of Chicago bear some family resemblance to Oxford or Cambridge, thanks to their small scale; IU takes Gothic where it's never gone before.

via flickr

It's also pretty heavily wooded. There are a couple streams that flow through the campus, and they're surrounded by forest and crisscrossed with little footbridges.

campus tuesday night, via flickr

the same location, wednesday afternoon, via flickr

The town has a lot of restaurants, and a lot of foreign food, for a place its size. Tuesday night I had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant, and last night it was Thai at Siam House. (Both are a serious challenge to dieting!) One local attributed this to the long presence of foreign students at IU, some of whom brought spouses or other relatives who went into the restaurant business. I have no way of knowing if this is true, but for whatever reason, there's good food here.

siam house, via flickr

There's a bit of a restaurant row, small places in old houses. That's cool, as it gives the restaurants a more informal character.

restaurant row, via flickr

There are also rabbits that come out in the evening, which adds one more little (furry and bouncy) note of whimsy to the place.

insouciant bunny, via flickr

Ethiopian dinner in Bloomington!

Delays and altruism on the road

I'm in the shuttle from Indianapolis to Bloomington. I got here six hours late, as I gave up my seat on last night's redeye in exchange for an early morning flight. I'm not sure it was a good trade. On one hand, I did get $350 (though it's not cash, I need to use it in the next year, and I'm sure US Airways hopes that I'll lose it rather than use it), and I won't miss any of the critical conference stuff-- I'll still get there in time for this evening's dinner. On the other, I gave up the chance to spend a day exploring Bloomington (though whether the town would really provide entertainment worth $60/hour is unknowable) and do a little early networking. And I accepted the airline's offer to stay in a hotel, though that turned out to be a wash: yes it was free, but it took longer to get the shuttle than I expected, which ate into ime I would have spent sleeping.

On my East Coast trip, I did something similar. I got into JFK around 2 in the morning, in that dead time when the airport has effectively shut down. After about half an hour I got the Supershuttle, and immediately settled in and dozed off. A few minutes later, the driver woke me up Two couples needed to go to Long Island, and if he didn't take them, they'd be stranded and have to spend the night in the airport. Could he take them, and drop them off at their homes first?

I was too groggy to ask why they couldn't drop me off first and then take the other passengers, and I wasn't really obliged to say yes. But my flight was already several hours late, and so I kind of felt like, what's a couple hours more? Plus, I know how much it can suck to be stuck in an airport: for all the appearance of luxury, they're really places designed to move people in and out as efficiently as possible, and are sullenly hostile to people who find themselves stuck. And, in some way, having had such a great time the precious few days at the conference and reconnecting with friends, I suspected that karma would catch up with me if I said no. It was time to rebalance.

So I said yes. We picked up the other passengers, who were pretty damn grateful to be going home. We then barreled out of JFK, promptly got lost, and spent the next half hour trying to figure out how to get to Stony East Oyster Point, or wherever. By the time we rolled up to the Paramount, it was about 5:30 in the morning.

Maybe I've done enough of this kind of thing for the year. But what matters is that I'm here now.

And the flight here was fine. I changed planes in Phoenix, which was a bit more direct a route than my original itinerary, which had me connecting through Charlotte, North Carolina (sigh). And I brought along a copy of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, which is a wonderfully stimulating book, and which I realize I can blend into three different things I'm working on (that I've got three different-- and more to the point, unfinished-- pieces going simultaneously is a fact we shall not linger over).

Cass Sunstein on deliberation and extremism

It's conventional wisdom that groups generate ideas and plans more moderate than those of individuals. Groups and discussion encourage compromise, smooth out extremes, and guarantee moderation. It is also one of the unspoken assumptions of facilitation and group-oriented scenario work. Facilitation and scenario-building, the thinking goes, builds a sense of collective spirit by helping groups develop a shared vision of the future.

But Cass Sunstein's new book, Going to Extremes, challenges these assumptions. As Slate's Christopher Caldwell explains in a review,

Going to Extremes... finds that sitting people down to deliberate does not necessarily lead them to compromise or to converge on their mean opinion. They tend to radicalize in the direction of whatever bias they had to begin with. Teams of doctors, deciding collectively, are more likely to support the "extreme" strategy of heroic efforts to save terminally ill patents than the average individual doctor among them. Juries tend to vote, after discussion, for much more "extreme" monetary awards than the average individual juror among them would. Talking things over isn't necessarily wrong. But it doesn't lead reliably to moderation, either....

Much of Sunstein's evidence about how people drift to extremes comes from his studies of groups that already have a bias to begin with. Individual Democrats and Republicans on three-judge panels cast more "extreme" votes when they are in the majority than when they are not. A group of conservative Republicans in Colorado Springs will move sharply rightward when they discuss global warming among themselves, and a group of liberal Democrats from Boulder will move sharply leftward.

These homogeneous groups are not the special cases they would appear. They tell us something about what happens in more heterogeneous groups, too. If you bring the two clashing sides together, they don't find middle ground any more than like-minded people do. Each side digs in. If you give "a set of balanced, substantive readings" to a group that is at loggerheads over abortion or affirmative action, Sunstein shows, each side simply mines the readings for support of its own position. Ideology, it turns out, is not just a matter of opinions or positions—it is a predisposition to receive some kinds of evidence and not others. Compounding the problem, certain kinds of extremist arguments have an "automatic rhetorical advantage" in deliberation. Me, too, but less is harder to rally behind than In for a penny, in for a pound.

The question this raises is whether the facilitation methods that futurists use tend to encourage moderation, or exacerbate this problem. Do scenarios tend to force people to think together, and recognize that complex issues can't be solved through simple means? Or does the intellectual and imaginative freedom that thinking about the future provides encourage groups to project their own extremes?

Add this to the list of insights from psychology-- along with the work of Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Kahnemann, Philip Tetlock, et al-- that futurists need to consider when thinking about how to improve their work.

Sunday in the park, Silicon Valley style

Birthday party with bouncy house.... Couples out for a stroll... IIT
alumni cricket match....

Steam train at Vasona Park

A favorite with the kids!

Live music at Cafe Zoë

Guitarist DeBraun Thomas. He's good.

View from Sather Tower

Peninsula graduation tomorrow

My kids get another year closer to eighth grade themselves...

Emanuel Derman on Tithonus

From Emanuel Derman's blog:

Tithonus got eternal life, but forgot to ask for eternal youth. (See Alfred Lord Tennyson and Aldous Huxley.)

The whole point of eternal life is eternal youth, or at least eternal middle age.

[To the tune of Audioslave, "I Am the Highway," from the album Audioslave (I give it 4 stars).]

Giant babies

This is the kind of thing lifeblogging and Flickr make possible: comparative studies of giant babies!

changi airport, singapore, 2008, via flickr

times square, new york, 2009, via flickr

The great Strawberry Street Cafe reunion

Wednesday night I got together with some high school friends, and my high school choir director, for dinner at Strawberry Street Cafe, a restaurant in the Fan.

strawberry street cafe, via flickr

These are people I was pretty close to in high school-- I spent a huge amount of time doing choir stuff, and several of us were also the core group for the school's honors and AP courses-- but haven't seen in person for a very long time, and reconnected with on Facebook over the last year or so.

I chose Strawberry Street Cafe because everyone knows where it is, it's kid-friendly, and because I didn't really know it. The place was just a couple years old when I started high school, and it advertised regularly on the radio, so I heard about it... but never went there. It remained part of a cool grown-up Richmond that I was too young and poor to visit myself. Reconnecting with my past social reality in a place from a past imagined landscape seemed nicely symmetrical.

strawberry street, via flickr

It was especially lovely to see my music teacher, who was a terrific influence on me, and who went on to run a very successful intensive performing arts school, from which she's retiring in a few weeks. She was an influence not just because I spent a lot of time in her classes, or because I've continued to play (I have my old guitars, but don't really use them; I expect my daughter is going to take them over sooner or later). Of course I continue to love music, but I peaked as a musician in college (I didn't want to devote the time to meeting ever-higher performance standards, to say nothing of taking the hit on my grades).

But I learned a lot from her about how to perform, and those bits of craft and instinct have been a great help. It's not just that workshops and talks are performances, obviously they are; but I think you can fruitfully think of a lot of knowledge work as one kind of performance or another. As the Bard said, all the world's a stage; so knowing how to play is always going to be useful.

me and my music teacher

It was a nice reminder that some of the organizing tools I use for work and research are ones that I can use in my social life as well. When you spend a lot of your time with books and words, and come from a profession that alternated solitary contemplation and intensive gossip about colleagues, but featured very little genuine planned collaboration, it's easy to develop a sense of yourself as not that social, and maybe not that good at it. Wrong. As one of my daughter's friends once told a boy who was teasing her about being introverted, "I'm not an introvert. I'm very extroverted. I just don't like you very much."

And even if I do test as an introvert on some psychological scale, I can fake it.

There were eleven of us at the dinner, including two kids, four and five years old. (Most of my class seems to either have 5 year-olds, or 15 year-olds; I'm the only one with a child in the middle.) Two of my cohort married each other, two others had remained in regular contact these last 25+ years, but the rest of us were at best erratically connected. So it wasn't just me parachuting into an old social circle for an evening; it was a chance for the circle to reconstitute itself. I don't know why I assumed that people who'd remained in or returned to Richmond after college would have stayed in touch-- Richmond is a big place after all, and life does intrude on old connections-- but the fact that many of us were reconnecting after years was pleasant. It wasn't any less something that people were doing for me... but it was also something I was able to do for them.

And Strawberry Street Cafe was a good choice: the food is good, they were very gracious about our ever-expanding party, and they were welcoming of the kids. For me, it was good for another, entirely unexpected, reason.

For whatever reason I had no desire to go back to my old high school, to the apartments we lived in, or other places I saw on a daily basis; both Mom and I opted for the places that we always thought were special, like the VMFA and Maymont Park. (As one of the characters in Dune memorably put it, "People I miss. A place is just a place." While I admire that gruff practicality and emphasis on loyalty to comrades and family, I don't actually agree with it at all-- places do matter-- but some places remain more attractive than others, for whatever mysterious reason.)

the fan, via flickr

Walking through the Fan, I was struck by how well it compares with similar neighborhoods in Philadelphia or Boston or San Francisco, and how it feels like a great urban area for kids and families; I could appreciate the immense amount of energy that's gone into restoration and renovation of the turn-of-the-century housing stock. As someone intimately familiar with parenting and property ownership, I could appreciate things I couldn't twenty-five years ago, and imagine myself there.

virginia museum of fine arts, via flickr

Likewise, I always liked VFMA, but it felt like an expression of Richmond polite society, a UFO populated by Izod-wearing aliens. But in the year since, I've spent time in the British Museum and MOMA and the Smithsonian and DMA, I've given a talk at the Globe Theatre, I have a wallet full of membership cards to Bay Area institutions. I'm no longer alien to these people, I am them.

And I can now appreciate that the nicest parts of Maymont compare favorably with similar places in England and the Continent: it's not just a lonely Old South wannabe of a great estate, it IS a great estate.

maymont park, via flickr

Staying away from my high school Richmond and planting myself squarely in the places I imagined as defining grown-up Richmond let me start seeing the place differently. Maybe it's the start of a relationship with the place that has less to do with who I was, than with who I am. Which is good, because in the last year I had the very distinct sense of part of my old self being sloughed off, to make room for something new.

I thought I was visiting to reconnect with some of my past. But maybe I was visiting to create a future.

[To the tune of Carly Simon, "You Belong to Me," from the album Carly Simon: Clouds in My Coffee 1965-1995 (I give it 3 stars).]

Linden Row Inn

Wednesday night while in Richmond I stayed at the Linden Row Inn, in downtown. I think technically this is the edge of the historic Fan district, or just outside. I've been staying in lots of different kinds of hotels the last couple years, ranging from serious business hotels to things out of Blade Runner. This is way up there one the historically interesting, quirky in a Southern and slightly Gothic kind of way. It's a tremendous little hotel, and I've had a great time here.

via flickr

The hotel is actually five buildings, built at different times. The buildings facing the street were joined together, forming a walled compound, and two buildings are in the center, in the garden. It's sort of like a topologically complex version of London's Goodenough Club, or the creation of an antebellum Frank Gehry.

via flickr

The buildings have an interesting history. Edgar Allen Poe spent part of his childhood living in the compound after his mother died. (According to the hotel Web site, "Local legend has it that this was the 'enchanted garden' that Poe mentions in his famous poem, 'To Helen.'")

"Nevermore! Nevermore!"

After that, it was a succession of girls' schools-- first the Southern Female Institute (possibly my favorite name for anything anywhere, and a brilliant girls' rock band name), then Mrs. Pegram's, and finally Miss Ellet's School (which eventually became St. Catherine's, where a friend of mine teaches). So that adds an interesting little twist to the place. The doors to some of the suites still have plaques that read "Miss [Teacher's Name] Parlour."

via flickr

There's also a "Miss Scott's Alley." I have to wonder what she taught....

via flickr

The rooms themselves and the service are fine. There's a basic free continental breakfast, and-- and this is the real treat-- the inn will drive you around and pick you up if you're going somewhere in the Fan, Shockoe Bottom, etc.. I hadn't really thought about it when I was picking the hotel, but it's a surprisingly nice perk once you've used it a couple times. And for exercise fanatics, there's a really well-equipped YMCA a block away that you can visit for free. (Outstanding.)

via flickr

So it was cool. I'm staying there next time I come to Richmond.

Dinner. At Taiwanese Gourmet Corporation

That would be a fabulous rock band name.

Where my brother lives

Above the Chinese restaurant. In Brooklyn.

On my way to New Jersey

I got up early this morning, and am headed out to the New Jersey
suburbs to meet some friends. Then it's back into the city, to spend
the day with my brother and his family.

Where I'm staying

The lobby of the Paramount Hotel, near Times Square. Pretty crazy. But
great.

These girls schools are a mystery to me

The other teachers at the Southern Female Institute (now the Linden
Row Inn) had parlours named after them; I wonder, what did Miss Scott
teach that earned her an alley? The (male) mind boggles.

Shelagh Delaney on women

"Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old." (British author nd playwright Shelagh Delaney)

On the train to Richmond

I'm on the Amtrak from Raleigh, North Carolina to Richmond, Virginia. We're passing through the low pine woods and fields that I remember from when I grew up here-- to my botanically challenged eye this part of North Carolina and Virginia look pretty similar-- and little towns with white wooden houses and red brick main streets (broken up by the occasional strip mall and fast food complex). So even though I've never travelled this stretch of track, it feels awfully familiar.

Train travel has always felt more fraught with meaning than, say, driving or bicycling. Partly it's the role that trains have played in Southern literature or popular culture: think of the blues and country songs that feature train whistles in the distance, or the first and last train station scenes in In the Heat of the Night. More personally, the train was my Way Out: I first took the Southern Crescent when I went to visit colleges, and most years I would travel back and forth between school and home by train, carrying a duffel bag of clothes and backpack. It didn't hurt that the train from Richmond to Philadelphia left at 4 a.m., which meant I'd go to sleep in one part of the country and wake up in another. (It later became my route to archives and a thwarted affair.) So riding the train became a pretty archetypal thing.

The Raleigh train station is three blocks away from the hotel and conference center, though for some reason the front desk didn't tell me this, and I took a cab. Maybe their sense of distance was more cultural than physical, because when I stepped into the station-- a tiny place compared to Philadelphia or New York, two rooms with wooden benches-- I had the very distinct feeling of having moved from the world of global discourses about sustainable innovation and the cultural factors that support academic-industrial knowledge transfer, to the set of In the Heat of the Night. (There was no Rod Steiger trying to fix his air conditioner, though.) It was a bit of a shock, after several days of hearing English spoken with a variety of accents, along with Spanish, Korean, Arabic. Yes, there's a world outside the conference events. And yes, we are in the South.

It's also a reminder of just how easily intelligent people and well-meaning projects can become almost hermetically sealed in their own worlds. This isn't to criticize the conference organizers-- they did a terrific job, and are rightly proud of the role RTP has played in the development of the North Carolina economy-- but to note how closed a system most conference are. Between the conference hotel, the conference center (which share a common basement, so you can go between them without ever going outside), the restaurants and bars catering to conference-goers, the full schedule of events, the vast numbers of people with whom you exchange business cards-talk-drink-eat-network, and the psychological and physical stresses and challenges of sitting in uncomfortable chairs for hours on end, eating marginally healthy food, and fighting jet lag, it's easy for conferences to turn into their own worlds.

On one hand, it makes sense: you've come a long way and are doing a lot of work, so you don't want distraction; but on the other, it does contribute to a certain otherworldliness in your thinking. This may not be a big thing if you're at a big microbiology conference, but it's a little worrisome when you're in a field that deals very directly with people and their lives, and professes to take an interest in the specifics of place and local culture. I'm not an insider in this field by any means, but I get the sense that there's a tendency to think of regional development or economic development as a problem that can be solved with the right formula or model; and I wonder if unconsciously we tend to assume that people who are already living in the place we're charged with changing-- or the company we're asked to help transform-- are going to be more an impediment than a resource. Likewise, when you're a futurist, it's really easy to get caught up in your own models and abstractions, and to lose sight of the scenarios you write are ultimately really about people. For us, I think, we need a different kind of conference. (Actually I think the whole model of the conference as a mix of academic meeting and trade fair should be overthrown, but that's a different matter.)

Indeed, in my work I've tried to point out that there are often local cultural resources or technical skills that conventional development tends to ignore, and which smart developers or entrepreneurs should try to harness: the pursuit of the New Thing sometimes keeps us from seeing the continuing value of older forms of knowledge. Likewise, we eliminate manufacturing at our own long-term peril: making stuff is actually pretty hard, requires a lot more skill than we knowledge workers tend to acknowledge, and manufacturing exerts a gravitational pull on other economic activities. Both of these argue for approaches that take a more sympathetic yet opportunistic attitude to history and local culture: rather than pave it over, you should ask if the local knowledge ecosystem (as we like to call it) has resources you can reuse. "Sustainable development" (which is a new popular buzzword) should pay attention to knowledge ecologies as well as biological ones, and learn to see local culture as a potentially valuable resource that provides useful services-- just as smart developers will realize that a swamp might provide more value as a bulwark against floods than a parking lot.

Ironic that I argue for preserving and using culture and history after spending so long happily (or sometimes militantly) apart from my own past and the world where I spent the bulk of my childhood. And maybe timely that I notice it now.

So it was kind a relief to get out of that and into something different. After I found baggage check and dropped off my duffel bag (one from REI with rolling wheels and various cool pockets, not the Army surplus one I had in college), I went for a little walk. Lots of old stores selling tires, beauty supplies, and other goods; a few bars or clubs, closed in the morning; and some vacant lots. And in the middle of it was a store converted into an artists' studio.

[To the tune of The Allman Brothers Band, "Melissa," from the album The Allman Brothers-A Decade Of Hits 1969 - 1979 (I give it 4 stars).]

Marriott bar

Doing technical stuff

I'm running Anthony's presentation. Prezi rocks our world. And I get
to hang with the A/V crew.

Governor of North Carolina

Opening session of IASP2009. Man is this thing big!

The busiest street in Raleigh

That's a big statue of Walter Raleigh!

Welcome back to the South

I'm in Raleigh, North Carolina for the next couple days, for the big International Association of Science Parks conference.

I haven't been to North Carolina in ages. I spent a summer at Duke in their precollege program 25 years ago-- it was a great time, but it more or less ruined my senior year, as it deepened my already substantial teenage "I wanna get out of there and get on with my real life and this rinky-dink high school is NOT it" angst-- and I spent a day or two in Raleigh at the NC State archives in 1994 or so, but that was one of those trips where all I was doing was taking notes on old correspondence and had no interactions at all with the place. I don't remember anything about Raleigh itself-- where I stayed, what NC State was like, where I ate lunch-- but I still remember working through the correspondence between Architecture School Dean Henry Kamphoefner and Buckminster Fuller.

The IASP conference is one of the big science parks managers' and developers' conferences. My friend Anthony is doing one of the big talks, and I'm here to meet with our clients, meet various other people, and talk about the next phase of our work on the future of science cities.

I'd forgotten how lush North Carolina is. It's all that summer heat and humidity, which is already showing signs of appearing. California isn't exactly a barren wasteland, but the South always feels more verdant. (It must have been an extraordinary thing to come here from Europe 300 years ago, and to see these spectacular forests.)

I still have visceral ambivalent feelings about the South. On one hand, I like the land, the premium Southern culture places on friendliness and gentility, and the relatively low cost of living; on the other, I remember a certain amount of downside as well (kind of a cross between Faulkner and Bruce Hornsby), and I wonder how much easier a time my bookish, mixed race kids would have here. Probably Atlanta and RTP, which now have pretty large Asian populations and the kinds of service / information economies, would be fine; maybe Richmond would be too. But I'm happy having the kids where they are.

In Raleigh!

Greetings from Dulles International Airport

I can't see the Saarinen terminal, and this is BY FAR the most
interesting thing in C terminal. I'm always depressed by the contrast
between the majesty of the main terminal of IAD, and the later
additions. No great building anywhere is surrounded by less inspired
successors.