A tidepool has been called a world under a rock
John Steinbeck became a favorite of mine after I read East of Eden, so it’s about time I finally got around to reading The Log of the Sea of Cortez. The non-fiction tale of exploration and adventure chronicles a 6 week journey that Steinbeck made with his good friend and marine biologist, Ed Ricketts around…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Time Machine
I am not a geologist by any stretch of the imagination, yet I do help operate a mobile geology lab on Mars and occasionally get asked about why we should explore Mars in the first place. I usually mumble something about geology and why rocks are important and how water was probably there once and…
Robots and Interviews
As far as I could tell at the time, my very first interview at JPL did not go well. This was at the end of an internship when I was poking around about full time jobs and my mentor helped me set up a meeting with a couple of supervisors. I was expecting a friendly…
The Panorama
My wife and I visited the Velaslavasay Panorama in Los Angeles a few weeks ago. In the early part of the 20th century, panoramas were popular a form of entertainment around the world. The best way I can think of to describe a panorama is as a 360 degree immersive painting. You walk up a…
Pedestrians
I occasionally read Seth Godin’s blog. In a recent post he made the statement, “In our culture we give way too many resources to cars and their efficiency, and not enough to pedestrians and the opportunities they deserve.” He used it in a list of other traffic related metaphors to make a point about how…