My family and I are back from an enjoyable two-week trip to North Carolina and Washington, D.C. It involved some work as well as some vacation.

We spent the first week in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the second in the Outer Banks (along North Carolina’s coast), Virginia, and Washington. Raleigh, along with the cities of Chapel Hill and Durham, is in the “research triangle.” The name comes from the research universities in those cities: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. Few metropolitan areas in the country have a comparable concentration of research universities - certainly none in the Upper Midwest - and this is sure to become an even more important area in the future. Read the rest of this entry »