I finished up things at the National Academies, and am on the 6:00 Acela to New York.

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As a friend of mine put it, the Acela rocks. It’s basically a nice European train, which makes sense, since this is just about the only part of the country that could support train service of this sort. And yes it’s expensive, but the Keck is about 7 minutes from Union Station, and my hotel in New York is two blocks from Penn Station; so even though JetBlue or the Delta shuttle is cheaper, once you figure the time and cost of getting out to Dulles or Reagan, up to JFK or Laguardia, and then back into midtown, it’s easily a wash.

Today’s meeting was pretty good. We got a lot of useful criticism, which from a group of very smart scientists and VCs is what you want. If you just get faint praise, or worse yet no reaction at all, you know you’re in really serious trouble. Only really promising projects are worth tearing into.

Tomorrow I’m spending the morning in New York. I’m meeting a friend who’s an IP lawyer, a hedge fund guy, and a collaboratories designer, and by a remarkable set of coincidences, they all work within view of (or literally within) the New York Public Library.

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One of those strange things.

Then I’m back to Philadelphia, and on the plane home.

I’m in 30th Street Station, waiting for my (now delayed) train to Washington DC. This is not an unfamiliar situation: I spent a lot of time in 30th Street Station was I was living here, as it was my portal back home to Virginia, up to Boston to the MIT archives, or other points along the Northeast Corridor.

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I had a very interesting day at the Chemical Heritage Foundation. When I was a senior, I took the history of science methods seminar with Arnold Thackray, who at that time had a fledgling outfit called the Center for the History of Chemistry; in the interim, the Center went through several iterations, a couple changes of venue, and along the way Arnold raised a quarter of a billion dollars to support history of chemistry- and increasingly, history of science of all sorts. Pretty remarkable stuff.

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After wrapping up at CHF, and managed to get a little time with one of my mentors and former bosses: he was my dissertation advisor (and senior thesis advisor- and come to think of it, probably sponsored half a dozen independent study courses during my chequered undergraduate career), and she was my boss when I was an editorial assistant at Isis.

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I also got to spend enough time today in the Philadelphia subway system- taxis are for sissies if you know the public transportation system in your city; I never take cabs in Singapore or London any more, and proudly so- enough to confirm my ancient feeling that the subway in Philadelphia is one of the harshest, most unfriendly spaces ever created by humans. The Underground isn’t incredibly charming, but at least you get the sense that despite the bureaucracy and budgets, someone was trying; I suspect that whoever designed the Philadelphia subways knew they and their families would never need to use them.

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In the morning, after taking the train in from the airport to 30th street, I walked over to Penn and spent a hour or so wandering about the campus. The place has undergone some incredible renovation since I was there: it’s even denser, but nicer, than ever. It’s also probably the most memory-filled space in my life, and I suspect it’ll always be so.

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On the Penn campus!

I’m on Flight 188, about half an hour outside Philadelphia. I worked for a while, napped fitfully, then woke up again and am doing some more stuff.

Not quite long enough a flight to enter a deep version of the Airplane Creative Zone- some of my best ideas seem to come to me on the long overnight flights to Europe- but I did make some headway in an article I’m writing for one of my colleagues at Oxford, on a future of futures. Essentially I’m trying to lay out what our work would look like if we were to create the field from scratch, and took into account what brain scientists and psychologists have learned in the last twenty years about the way people think about the future.