Dream Job

Last weekend I went to the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Culver City to attend a symposium spondored by bldgblog, an architectural interest group. The CLUI, as it's known, greatly impressed me if for no other reason than it showed me a type of job that an academic human geographer might be able to do besides become a professor at a university. It's essentially a non-profit, private sector, professional geography group that tries to understand and represent visible artifacts on the earth's surface. The photo above is an example taken from their website that shows the very early stages of road production - the piles of asphalt precede even the clearing of the roadway. The lectures at the event covered a wide range of topics from the southern tip of the Mississippi River to hyperbolic spatial patterns crocheted by a mathematically informed artist working for the Institute for Figuring. Hyperbolic forms are the kind you might recognize in coral reefs - like the plants that are curved. After the event fellow geographer Rick Miller, others, and I went to a Cuban restaurant where I had a mango milkshake and pork sandwich - Cuban classics.