I was taking the train today for the first time in a couple of months so that I could go to Stoke-on-Trent to take a cab and head over to Keele University for a talk. The train was running late---shock!---so I ended up on a differently-configured itinerary that was leaving 30 minutes later. I was trying to find two consecutive empty seats so that I could have some space and I noticed while passing by lots of situations without such empty seats that one person seemed to look vaguely like someone I know. I didn't think much about it, though, because she has a postdoc at Brown and it was not reason it would be her. Except that it was, as she had flown in this morning for a job interview at Warwick. (Some of my readers may know who this, but I am withholding the name from a public web page for obvious reasons.) That was pretty cool! This is among my least-expected random encounters ever. (I have occasionally run into friends unexpectedly at random airports before---e.g., once in Dallas when I was making a connection---but at least they were in the right country!)
Anyway, this is my cool story for today.
When I was in the UK for work in 1997 I took a weekend to go to Cambridge to visit a friend from HS who was on a Marshall scholarship. We went to some barbeque or whatnot and there were two other Americans there; one of them was from my class at Caltech.
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