Category Archives: Musing
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…
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…
This does not exist
I recently stumbled across a website called This City Does Not Exist. Every refresh loads an AI-generated aerial image of a city that, indeed, does not exist. As a lover of maps, I enjoy playing with this website, creating stories and histories in my head for these invented landscapes. Through researching the technology that enabled…
Power of Landscape
In response to a question about how landscape is something that forms each of us, Irish poet, theologian, and philosopher John O’Donohue provided this answer on Krista Tippet’s podcast “On Being” that I think wonderfully summarizes the need for wilderness in our collective lives. Krista Tippet: “I know that “landscape” is a really pivotal word…
Time enough
Time is a fickle thing. In the western tradition we tend to describe it as something we continuously move through with a constant speed and direction, but I’ve come across some other interesting descriptions lately that I think are worth considering. In PrairyErth: A Deep Map author William Least Heat-Moon notes that in western philosophy…