Scottish Weekend

We spent the Veterans' Day weekend visiting new friends near Ayr in Scotland. The Hepburns (whom we met through a colleague of Chuck's) own a beautiful country hotel (Ladyburn) about 10 miles from Ayr. On Friday night we attended, with the Hepburns, the Remembrance celebration held in the Ayr town hall -- a smaller version of the UK national Remembrance celebration held in Albert Hall in London. (Remembrance Day is the UK's version of Veteran's Day.) The ceremony was moving and the bands, choruses and other music were enjoyable and stirring.

Before the ceremony we were invited to join a group of the Hepburns' friends -- all the men (including David Hepburn) being retired British Army officers or currently officers in the Territorial Army (the Reserves). It was a very congenial and friendly group -- and Chuck enjoyed being the only "blue suiter" in the group.

On Saturday we enjoyed a tour of the local area around Maybole -- the nearest town to Ladyburn. Just driving through the beautiful Scottish countryside was a treat. This area is "Robert Burns Country" and we visited his birthplace and the associated museum in the town of Alloway. (One of the local rivers is the River Doon -- and we were surprised to learn that Burns, in his story "Tam-O-Shanter" referred to a bridge over that river - the "brig' a Doon", the source of the name of the famous musical and movie.)

A few photos from the weekend are at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/969815/1/44668557

Denmark and the Netherlands

Chuck recently made two trips on business to the continent. The first was from 24 to 26 October to a research institute in Denmark, in a suburb of Copenhagen. This came about as a result of an invitation by a member of the institute who had attended an earlier workshop in which Chuck participated in Genoa. Also along on the visit were one of the program managers from the Office of Naval Research and a professor-researcher from the Univesity of Iowa.

The second trip was a few days later, from 31 October to 3 November to the Netherlands. This one consisted of 3 one-day visits. The first was to a research organization that specializes in the "human factors" of defense systems; how the machine-person interface can be made better and how the system can be designed to minimize demands, and the resulting stress, on people. The second day was devoted to a seminar on high speed patrol vessels. A visit to a Dutch shipyard that specializes in ships for the Dutch Navy rounded out this visit.