Duke 67 - St. John's 50

It has been over a month since my last post, but that isn’t an accurate reflection on the rate of adventure. In fact, these past few weeks have been exciting, and I can only begin to summarize. One trip stands out in my mind, being the journey to New York City to watch Duke Men’s Basketball vs. St. John's in Madison Square Garden. The trip was nonstop, and I did want to mention it was unfortunate that I couldn’t meet up with my sister who also happened to be in town on Sunday.

The itinerary included driving up with Vito, Jeff, and Kristen to Philadelphia to stay at Eric’s place. The next day we took the train. I met Jeff and Liz for a tour of the American Museum of Natural History. I enjoyed that a great deal. There’s so much information there it can be overwhelming.

A remarkable small world story was that we ran into another group of students from our department in Penn Station. We each had an independent travel schedule, but managed to run into them just after getting off our train. This was marginally more significant for them because we were the only people they knew in the City. Personally, that’s what I like most about New York: Even though there are more than 8 million people living in NYC, it’s fairly common to cross paths with people you know.

I met up with Lauren and Leah from high school to celebrate Lauren’s birthday. She also went to the game with us. I think Leah may have said it best in commenting that we would have never expected the reunion if it was predicted back in 2001.

Mathematically speaking, this reunion phenomenon is similar to the small world phenomenon. The probability of a particular reunion event on a given day is low, but integrating all the possibilities over a time period of years has a tendency to make the unlikely a reality.

See also: The Serendipity article on Wikipedia describes many life changing inventions such as Penicillin and Post-It Notes.