Its a small world after all...

Adam, a former coworker at Intel, has a great post up about some of his recent work related travels.

We all hear plenty about the shrinking planet, how we're all more interconnected than ever, etc. This drove it home in a really palpable way. A snippet (as background, it's worth pointing out that Adam spent some time in the past working at Los Alamos):

"I had lunch with the local manager. i was thinking about it last night, the fact that in the past 2 years i have spend a significant amount of time in countries previously considered hostile (read: communist). both the last two places my parents would think their kids would never spend time. think about this for a minute: as soon as 1998, we were afraid of having bombs dropped on us from these people. now, i am having lunch in a country peopel used used to get shot at if they left, and now i am having lunch in a building in that country. i spent time building technology to help defend my country from these people.

It comes out during the discussion that the man across the table from me used to work at sarov. sarov is the los alamos of russia. so here we were, literally trying to kill each other 10 years ago (or protect our country from the killing machines of the other place), talking as if it never happened. i think about this again when discussing the mathematics of snowflake generation and modelling the collection on tree leaves when it reaches a critical threshold and falls off, startled when i hear the engineer say 'this is quite beautiful'."

Go read the rest.