Category Archives: Uncategorized
Interns
It’s typical to conclude an engineering internship with a presentation summarizing your work and accomplishments from the summer. Attendance at these presentations is sometimes embarrassingly small, to the point where it makes you wonder what the point is. I was fortunate. Everyone in my intern cohort at JPL, students placed all over the lab, gave…
Help Others
I’ve slowly been building a mentoring relationship with an active astronaut I was connected with through work. Astronauts are typified by an articulate and confident manner, and this man is no exception. During one of our conversations, he mused how we may be better off if the bookstore had a ” help others” section at…
Heaven in your pocket
I’ve had this interview from an NPR series in my virtual pocket for some time now. The conversation revolved around the author and her siblings’ feelings about spirituality after their parents’ death. I can’t say I relate to much of the conversation – the idea of a mystical “force” or “energy” doesn’t appeal to me….
A Lotta Fountain
For nearly two years now I’ve biked to work along the Charles River Esplanade. Approaching the band shell, there is an art deco statue of a somber looking dog perched on a column always that has always caught my eye. Its something about the incongruity of it. It isn’t a statue of a famous person,…
A powerful stranger
I learned of a poem called Lost, by David Wagoner, on an episode of the podcast On Being. I don’t remember which but the idea of approaching place as a powerful stranger stuck with me as a useful metaphor for how I would like to relate to place and landscape in my own life (even…
Genius loci
There are places that matter, sites of consecration and meaning, both natural and human, that possess, through the alchemy of time and memory, a holiness: very old churches, ancient baseball stadiums, certain groves of trees on certain campuses, The Romans called it genius loci, the spirit that inhabits the earth and and air of a…
Atlascope
Here are a few mapping resources that I’ve come across lately, thought were interesting, and would like to hold onto: Atlascope – The fine people at the Leventhal Map Center in the Boston Public Library digitized old maps of the Boston area and overlaid them on modern digital maps. Its a fascinating way to learn…
Time
I generally stay away from self-help books these days, but I recently read Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. It has come up in enough dispirate contexts I thought it was worth a shot, and it certainly was. The book is generally an argument against the modern busyness epidemic, that feeling that we always need…
Shop class
One of the biggest mistakes I made in my educational career is not taking shop class in high school. I was fortunate in that my school had well outfitted metal and wood shops, yet I never set foot in them. Honestly, I think I was even a bit afraid. The kids taking shop classes weren’t…
Network
When I take public transit to work I typically pass through South Station and exit up the stairwell just east of Summer and Atlantic street. On the wall is a gorgeous tiled mural showing the region overlaid with waterways, railways, roadways, and the deep blue ocean stretching out to sea. The only splash of color…