the fractal geometry of the mississippi river delta

mississippi-river-delta Hosted on Zooomr

Mississippi River Delta. Stolen from Google Maps.

Try this. Get in your airplane (poor man's equivalent: load up Google Maps). Go to Baton Rouge. Now follow the river as it winds south. The evolution is spectacular.

What surprises me more is that there are (or were) roads and towns out there.

Also, Flickr's geotagging interface is exciting: you can browse a map and find photos taken at a given location. This is exactly what the GeoWiki was to be, but with wiki snippets instead of just photos. (GeoWiki became BerkeleyWiki became RocWiki.)

LIGO Livingston

Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Stolen from Google Maps.

On the left, Baton Rouge. In the upper right, the "L" of the LIGO Livingston Observatory's gravity-wave detector.

We are moving to California and Louisiana

I was thinking I would delay the public announcement until everything had fallen into place. But there is no sense in that. Here it is: Bree and I are moving to Los Angeles in December and to Louisiana in July and will remain in Louisiana for at least a year. (Briefly, and in a pun, we are moving to LA.) After Louisiana: Unknown.

To pre-emptively answer a few questions: There will be a big Going Away party. The co-op will persist. In California I will work at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, better known as Caltech. In Louisiana, the LIGO Livingston Observatory. All of this is predicated on various applications being approved and accepted that have not yet been so. Thinking two steps ahead, planning two moves.

What I need from you is a Reading List and a little networking. I need to hit the ground running. What should I read? For Los Angeles, I have City of Quartz. I have "Los Angeles Against The Mountains." I need more. I need to be culturally aware. I need the zeitgeist. I need the Weltanschauung. And Louisiana—I know nothing! Give me a reading list. Who should we know? And, where should we live? I grew up in Los Angeles's shadow, but know nothing of it.