Trip North

For the next week, I will be at an academic conference at Bryn Mawr college.  I am typing this from one of their library computers.

Bryn Mawr looks and feels like Hogwarts.  All of the buildings look like castles and there are interesting cravings everywhere.  The dorm rooms are a convoluted maze.  Some inspection reveals why.  Each room has a fireplace.  From the outside, you can see the chimneys.  Each room's fireplace feeds into a shared chimney, and the dorms must have been designed around these chimneys.

According to the conference program, most of the talks will be given in 'Park Science 25'.  I am in the Park science building now, and have been all over it, and have yet to find a Room 25.  All of the rooms are three-digit with the floor number, and the basement is nothing but maintenance stuff.  The librarian here had never heard of Room 25.  This will be interesting.

The campus also suffers from a severe lack of benches, trash cans, and water fountains.

Random travel notes:

Last night I stayed with my great-uncle in Virginia.  He is a retired manager of a gasoline terminal, so he had a lot of good stories about the oil industry, and comments on the current spill.  It was interesting to hear him discuss all the safety precautions and drills he had to do, while wondering why similar drills were not in place on the rig that caught fire.

I spent 30 minutes in a traffic jam caused by a badly designed toll plaza on I-95.  I now have bad feelings about the state of Delaware.