Home Again.

I have returned home to St. Louis after a short trip to the east coast. I watched as my colleague at East Coasty University presented our final project. I jumped in some to answer questions and fill in blanks on the engineering side. It went well and they were satisfied with the results. As with any simulation, it isn’t perfect, but I feel it’s useful. As with any presentation, we put the best face on it. I feel like there are important ways it can be made better. And we will. No question.

What I need to remember is that this is easily the most ambitious simulation of an emergency facility ever done. Well, at least, the literature doesn’t contain any reports of anything this complex. It’s certainly possible, perhaps even likely, that simulations this sophisticated have been made and not published in the peer-reviewed medical or engineering literature. Most of this work is done for corporate profit, not scientific exploration. Resultingly, much is not published. I had an idea for a cool paper this morning, that would be a review paper and a lot of work, but it would be really interesting, and I think highly publishable.

After spending time at ECU, I met up with people from twitter for dinner, and then went to New York City. I spent two days in Manhattan with other friends from twitter, and with Chicago Joe, who moved to NYC last month. It was good to see friends. Joe and I walked to hell-and-gone around Manhattan, saw Ground Zero, where the new Freedom Tower has risen to impressive heights. Manhattan, so long with a hole in its still-impressive skyline, has been nearly restored.
We walked across Central Park, and then went to the American Museum of Natural History, which in fact has a lot of human history as well. Though, I suppose for better or worse, humans are part of nature.

And I got to visit with my friend, of whom I’ve written much here, who is now six months sober and doing remarkably well. We went to two meetings, Saturday night and Sunday morning. AA in New York is much like AA in LA. The flavor was a little different from the AA we have here in St. Louis. But it was clearly excellent sobriety, well-distributed, and supportive. A bunch of us went to breakfast after, before I had to catch a ride to the airport. It was a lot like being here. It’s good to be with people. With drunks. Who care about each other. That’s what we do in AA.

It was a good trip. A good time. I’m not particularly glad to be home.