I might be going to Singapore this summer, to do a little research. I've never been there, but Singaporean restaurants are all uniformly amazing, so I'm looking forward

During my recent trip to San Diego, I took a little time on my last afternoon to go to the world-famous Salk Institute.

In the main courtyard

As a graduate student, I wrote a couple articles on laboratory design and the history of science, including one on the Richards Medical Research Building, a Penn biomedical laboratory designed by Louis Kahn (a Penn alum and Philadelphia native son). Kahn later designed the Salk; and years later, Bruno Latour went there to do the fieldwork that would become the foundation for Laboratory Life. So it was pretty much irresistable.

Here are more pictures, though it's the kind of place that no photographs-- especially mind-- can do justice to. You really have to go see it yourself.

Some years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Rainger published a collection of essays on "The Invention of Tradition," on the ways things we think of as timeless, local,