I checked in with colleagues in Japan today and was relieved to hear so far OK. Our condolences go out to the victims of the quake and Tsunami. And of course, we watch with concern a nuclear power plant in distress.

1. Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran
2. Design and Computing ’10 John Gero Editor

I’m back…flew in from St. Kitts last night. I’m enclosing a picture from St. Barthes though. These are two of the six boats owned by the same Russian Billionaire. The one that appears to be a submarine is particularly stunning. It covered the distance from where I took the picture to over the horizon is what appeared to be 20 minutes.

As for me, I’d rather have a two-photon microscope.

Thanks to patient and loyal readers for their patience. Now back the world of science….

With the Advisory Board, we did another walk through of the new Krasnow Institute space–the progress is terrific. I’m extremely pleased with the speed of construction and the caliber of the new labs. Thanks as always to the members of our Board who play a central role in the vitality of Mason’s Institute for Advanced Study.

They are still delivering the US Mail today, but here at Advanced
Studies, we're going to take a short break. Thanks so very much to
all our readers and wishing you a very happy 2011.

Gail Collins with her usual excellent NY Times column here. In the meantime, there are some very interesting new initiatives coming out of Mason that I hope soon to report to you on that have the potential to be transformative. Stay tuned.

It’s become a tradition at the Institute–we welcome back faculty, staff and students with a picnic barbecue. Today, the weather is picture perfect–the torrid heat of the Washington summer is in transition to the much more temperate norms of Fall–the University’s dormitories are being refilled as I write these words with new incoming freshman and a huge crane is pouring the concrete for the slab on the second floor of the new Krasnow expansion building.

I’m looking very much forward to today’s events and for a productive semester.

For the readers of this blog, I’ll be posting from around the globe this semester as my travels take me overseas.

Former dean Stanley Fish writes about a subject near and dear to me  here. What is it about conspiracy theories that attract the human mind? Is there a neuroscience of conspiracy theories? Here’s my previous blogpost on the matter.

It was a great time in New England this past week. My niece got married in Watertown. We attended the MBL gala to support Woods Hole’s scientific gem, spent some time on the cupola roof of the Mansion House in Vineyardhaven (that’s the image), and came back to the MBL to attend the annual Corporation meeting.

Yesterday, I woke up early–around 4:30 and enjoyed a walk through town that was virtually quiet except for the stirrings of folks getting their boats ready for fishing. Otherwise, nothing but the ducks on Eel Pond and me. But by 5, the Pie In The Sky bakery was humming with activity, the coffee was brewed and I was on my way to Boston by 5:15.

Sarah Maslin Nir has a fascinating piece in today’s NY Times on-line about men who seek nearly complete social isolation (think Robinson Crusoe) here. Money quote from the University of Chicago’s John Cacioppo: