Ryan and Debi Cragun’s Blog

This was a pretty boring day, really… Or, at least it seemed so at the time. We took my rental car back to the airport in Newark then flew, without incident to Atlanta. But that’s when things got a little weird. I noticed on a TV in the Atlanta airport huge blackouts in Florida. We weren’t home yet, but I was wondering what was going on. I didn’t see the details before we boarded. We taxied out to the runway and were about to take off when the captain came on and told us the flight controllers in Tampa had just put our flight on a 1 hour delay. We ended up sitting on the tarmac for an hour waiting for the go-ahead. I was wondering if the blackout was connected to the flight delay.

We eventually took off and everything seemed fine until we got pretty close to Tampa. Then we hit the turbulence. I’ve been on some pretty turbulent flights, but this one was great. We must have dropped quite far one time because I heard screams, moans, and vomiting (not sure if it was dry or not). It got pretty wild for a few minutes, then the captain came on the speaker again and informed us that we were circling about 20 miles away from the airport as it was getting hammered by storms at the moment. We could see the ominous black clouds enveloping the entire coast. So, we circled for about an hour waiting for the storm to pass.

Turns out the blackout was a mechanical issue in the power grid (and human error); the flight delay was the storm. No connection. We arrived safe and sound. Home, at last.

Oh, and we have a small garden started. We have snow peas, tomatoes, basil, and cucumbers growing. Florida…

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I spent the day at Trinity College, a non-sectarian private, liberal arts school in Hartford. I presented some of my research than sat in on a brainstorming session with the researchers who did the ARIS study working on new questions to ask in a follow-up survey. It was very cool to spend time with such well-known researchers.

The lead researcher took me on a tour of the campus. It’s enormous considering the enrollment is only a couple thousand students. It’s also very posh - some of the buildings are extremely nice.

Debi slept most of the day then went out for a late lunch with Steve then shopped for a bit. When I got back from Hartford we had a late dinner in a Princeton pub before calling it a night. It was actually quite an eventful day for me, but mostly in ways that would bore the average reader… So I’ll keep those details to myself.

(Note: I’m not mentioning the names of the researchers because I don’t know if they want to be mentioned in my blog and I try to keep work issues out for professional reasons.)

Teaser for Tomorrow: Who had the luck of avoiding the nasty Florida blackout of ‘08 but ended up circling Tampa’s airport for an hour? (no point offering a reward on this one… it’s Debi and I)

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My work trip started Sunday while Debi and Steve got to spend another day in NYCity. I picked up a rental around around 9:00 and headed to Demarest, NJ where I met with one of the researchers from the institute I was visiting for lunch. From there I headed to Hartford, CT. I checked into my hotel for the evening then drove to the house of the other researcher. We chatted over tea then he took me for a drive around Hartford. The drive included a quick jaunt through Farmington, CT, which is a remarkably old town (it was incorporated in 1645 - you read that correctly, 1645). It’s so old and posh that people post both the year their house was built and the house’s name (e.g., the Wolcott Estate) on the exterior of the house so people can see it.

Farmington also happens to be the location of Miss Porter’s School, a semi-famous (I say “semi” because I’d never heard of it) prep school for girls. It was Sunday night, around 6:00 pm when we drove past. There was a marked police cruiser in front of the school just watching the intersection. My host suggested that it was probably to protect the girls as they are the daughters of some of the wealthiest people in the world and kidnapping is a legitimate threat. Who knew? If you guessed Miss Porter’s School - you are way too preppy!

The researcher I was with then took me back to his place where we watched Argentinian soccer for a few minutes, during which he figuratively blew my mind. Ever wondered why there are often multiple soccer teams in a city or why soccer is so popular around the world but not in the U.S.? While it isn’t true of all soccer clubs, it turns out many of them were started by either religious or political rivals and the initial rivalries were quite intense. A good example of this is the Scottish teams The Rangers and The Celtics. I had no idea about any of this until this researcher pointed this out. I’d love to see clear delineations of political and religious affiliations of soccer clubs around the world, if anyone knows of one.

Anyway, he had me mesmerized by this for quite a while as we headed to dinner at a local Indian place in West Hartford. We ate and chatted late into the night…

Debi, on the other hand, spent the day in NYCity with Steve. I don’t know what all they did, but they did stop at Ground Zero long enough to snap a few pictures:

I did kind of want to see Ground Zero, but it’s basically just a construction site at this point, so I guess there isn’t much to see.

They also went to a Broadway show - Mama Mia - which Debi really liked. They ended up in the “biggest tourist trap ever” (Debi’s words, not mine): The Empire State Building. It costs about $20 to go up to the top, and, apparently, there are people hawking pop-up city maps all along the way (for like $12 a piece). She shot some pictures from up there as well, but they didn’t turn out so hot.

Teaser for tomorrow: Without looking it up, is Trinity College affiliated with a religion or non-sectarian? (No reward this time, you just get the benefit of being right.)

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We tried to get an early start into NYCity, but sleep won the battle against sightseeing… So we ended up taking a later train from Princeton to Penn Station than we originally planned. From Penn Station we took the Subway down to the Staten Island Ferry, which is the poor man’s way of seeing the Statue of Liberty (it’s a free ferry). We rode the ferry across the bay and snapped a few pics:

From there we headed into some of the ethnic neighborhoods. I had heard about some of these neighborhoods and thought they would be good places for a quick lunch (I dig authentic foods). We originally cruised Chinatown for a restaurant, but couldn’t find anything that looked good, and pretty soon were solicited by someone outside a tiny Italian place in Little Italy. We were pretty hungry by that time, so we allowed ourselves to be herded into the tiny, tiny seating area where we basically shared tables and chairs with every other tourist in New York on February 23rd. I get that NYCity is short on space, but I was really amazed at how many people they crammed into that restaurant. Even so, the food was good and it was a fun experience.

After lunch we headed to the American Museum of Natural History. We’re science geeks, what else are we going to do in NYC? It was about 2:30 at this point and the museum closes at 5:45, so we cruised through the exhibits. You could easily spend several days there and not have time to read everything they have on exhibit. It’s an impressive, enormous museum, but would probably be more fun with kids. And it also happens to be where I flipped someone - okay, something - off…

But first, a little background. On our first anniversary, Debi and I went to Vernal, UT. They have a dinosaur quarry out there and some petroglyphs, and since we’re total geeks, we thought it would be fun. It was fun, but it was also empty - no one goes to Vernal UT on New Year’s Eve. The emptiness of the museum in Vernal gave me an idea. The full-scale skeleton of a velociraptor looked menacing, but I know that my large human brain (with the help of other human brains) could outwit that nasty hunting machine. So, I flipped it off and Debi caught it on film:

When I saw the velociraptor’s big brother on display at the Museum of Natural History, I couldn’t help myself:

(For those who guessed an actual person, I’ll still buy you the drink. There’s no way you could have guessed a t-rex!)

From the museum we walked a couple blocks to around 71st street, outside the Dakota building so I could see where John Lennon was killed… (Rot Mark Chapman, rot, rot, rot!) We then traipsed around the Strawberry Fields of Central Park, but had no luck finding the monument as it was buried in the snow. Oh well, I have made my pilgrimage…

From there we walked the short distance to the Mormon temple in NYCity just to see it (there’s no getting inside it for us). We then headed to Times Square, again, just to see it. It was around 6:30 or so at this point and bitter cold. But guess who was hanging out in Times Square? Who else but the naked cowboy. Not much of a musician, but the Japanese girl we watched pay him to squeeze her ass for the camera didn’t really seem to care. From there we hiked over to Grand Central Station, again just so I could see it in my whirlwind one day tour of NYCity.

We were hungry again and opted for an Irish pub near Grand Central Station. It was actually really nice. It wasn’t packed and the servers were very nice (and very Irish). We wrapped up our dinner then booked it back to Penn Station (quite the hike that one) to catch the 9:04 express train back to Princeton Junction. It was a long and busy day, but entertaining to finally see all of the things I had heard about for so long.

A couple things stand out in my mind about NYCity. On our first trip on the subway I overheard conversations in at least four different languages - English, Spanish, French, and Russian. Only the French-speakers seemed to be tourists. I guess you know you’re in a true metropolis when people are just as likely to speak another language as they are to speak the primary language of the country. The number of people was also shocking. This really wasn’t that apparent most of the time as you get lost in the sea of buildings. But it really stood out at the Museum of Natural History. We were able to see pretty much whatever we wanted, but I’ve never been in a museum that is that filled with people. Every room we entered had to have had at least 30 to 150 people in it. Regardless of how obscure the exhibit, it was chuck full of people. I was also taken aback by the garbage. I guess I’m used to suburban living or something (even though I live very close to downtown Tampa), but the piles of garbage on the sidewalks was odd. People bagged their garbage or tied it up, but there were no recycling bins and no large plastic cans that can be hefted by automatic garbage trucks. Just piles and piles of trash, everywhere. Odd… Finally, the music in the subway. We walked past a couple of Asian men playing Oriental-sounding music on one of our subway rides and I was very, very impressed. I could have sworn it was a CD. Steve said he’d seen virtual concerts in the subways of New York… I guess when you have that many street performers to compete with, you have to be good.

I’m sure I could spend years living in NYCity (not that I’d want to) and not see everything there is to see there, but this was a fun trip.

Teaser for tomorrow: Name the school just outside Hartford, CT that has children so highly prized it has local police officers guarding the intersection just outside the school on Sunday nights? (Another drink on me if you guess right…)

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At the last academic conference I attended I became acquainted with a couple of researchers who are well known in the sociology of religion. Given our shared interest in the non-religious, they invited me up to Trinity College in Hartford, CT to give a presentation on my research and to get to know them better. Always on the look out for a chance to take a short vacation and see the world, I figured I could go up a day or two early and see some of the surrounding area. As it just so happens, Debi’s brother, Steve, is doing a post-doc in Physics at Princeton. Princeton is about 3 hours (with good traffic) from Hartford, but I figured that was drivable. So, we turned my work trip into a long weekend visit with Steve as well.

Now, of course, I need to set the scene: If you live in areas that actually have cold, snowy winters, picture early fall or late spring weather - when it is crisp at night, but sunny and cool during the day. That’s what the weather was like in Tampa when we left Thursday night, around 8:00 pm. We flew into Newark in the middle of the biggest snow storm of the season (a good 3 or 4 inches stuck, maybe more). We planned on catching the train from the Newark airport to Princeton Junction where Steve would pick us up, but the snow delayed our flight then shut down the train from the airport to the railroad. And since we got in just 15 minutes or so before the last train to Princeton (we arrived around 1:45 am), Steve ended up driving into Newark to pick us up. Debi came down with a nasty cold a day or two before, so she wasn’t feel well at all. She slept in the back seat while I chatted with Steve and helped him find his way through the snow back to Princeton.

We slept in until around 11:00 then walked to Princeton University’s campus. Steve had a meeting at noon. While he and his colleagues worked out a general theory of everything, Debi checked her email and I wandered around the physics department. It was kind of reassuring to find that even a wealthy school like Princeton looks like, well, just about every other university:

I found this pile of random stuff, including a tennis racket, on the 4th floor in a back hallway. It wasn’t too far from Richard Feynman’s office:

(In case you don’t know, Richard Feynman was a famed physicist and Nobel Laureate who worked at Princeton. He’s dead. Some grad student had the idea of giving him an office full of random junk; that white tag has his name on it.)

After Steve’s meeting we headed over to the faculty club for lunch. It’s a nice faculty club, but I was more excited about getting my picture taken with Gregory House, M.D., who everyone knows works at the (fictitious) Princeton/Plainsboro Hospital in Princeton (also known as the Frist Student Center):

Lucky for us he was in a moderately good mood; we were only insulted a few times to get this picture.

We then trekked back to Steve’s lab to see how physicists do their research. We donned sexy protective eyewear (just in case there was a laser accident) and avoided the super magnet that will rip metal plates out of your body (okay, slight exaggeration). Here’s Debi pretending to be a physicist:

We stopped by the chapel and a few other buildings, then headed back to Steve’s place for hot chocolate to warm up and plan our activities for the next day.

For some reason it slipped my mind that Steve and I did venture out for one final excursion before calling it a day.  Debi, not feeling well, opted out of this excursion and chose to nap instead.  Princeton is just a few miles from the Delaware river, which is famous for… George Washington’s crossing during the Revolutionary War.  Steve had never been there, and neither had I.  So, we headed south toward the Delaware and, after a few wrong turns, eventually ended up at the park and the monument.  It was getting dark by the time we arrived and the visitor’s center and museum were closed, but we still walked around the area and some some of the cool monuments.  Here are a few cool pics:

Here’s Steve by one of the monuments.  The Delaware is in the background.  This next picture gives a sense of what it must have been like when Washington’s crossed - not fun!

Here’s a bigger monument with Washington looking very brave.  Notice the freshly fallen snow.  Apparently the visitor’s center was not a popular tourist stop this day as the snow fell the day before.  Steve and I took advantage of the virgin snow and left our tracks:

Finally, here I am in front of the bigger monument:

After we got back from visiting the site of Washington’s Crossing, we had dinner at a nifty little Mexican place then watched a flick before crashing for the evening.

One thought is really sticking in my mind about Princeton: Students who go to Princeton don’t take out loans to pay for it. If their parents are wealthy, they pay. If not, it’s covered - everything is covered. Granted this isn’t quite as good of a system as those in Europe where, if you pass the tests, it’s all covered, but it makes so much more sense. If you don’t have to worry about the expenses of higher education, you can focus on your education. Additionally, the best/brightest are arguably going to benefit from such a system, turning it into a meritocracy (at least in theory). I can’t complain considering how much I paid for my schooling (ask me and I’ll tell you), but that did make me a little jealous.

Spoiler for next post… Guess who I flipped off in New York City? The winner (Steve, Debi, you don’t get to compete) gets, um, a drink on me the next time we meet up.

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