Monthly Archives: July 2022

Horizon

The more I read of Barry Lopez the more I come to appreciate his worldview and how it overlaps with the way I would like to be able to relate to landscape and place. He had a long career traveling, writing, and generally investigating the interactions between culture, society, landscape and nature. Lopez (paraphrasing a…

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Suit up

My first internship was at a coal fired powerplant in Omaha. The job was menial in some respects, but it gave me an opportunity to walk up and down the entire plant frequently, learn about all the equipment and processes in a real world setting, and ask a lot of qestions. In retrospect, it set…

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Why not now?

I once rode a bicycle from San Francisco to Los Angeles. A few buddies of mine were touring the entire Pacific Coast Highway, I was in LA already for an internship, and the timing worked out for me to join them for the middle portion of the trek. There are a couple moments that stick…

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Project Lifecycles

When I started my career, I generally thought that projects proceeded like the first chart below, which plots entropy as a function of time. You start with a high number of unknowns at the proposal phase. There’s a lot of work in the PDR (Preliminary Design Review) phase to understand the problems and put together…

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Patterns

I read quite a lot, about a book a week, over 50 in a year. Yet I would be hard pressed to write more than a page on any particular book I’ve read recently. Considering all the hours I put in, what is the point? I recently came across an essay called How You Know,…

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