It's been almost two months since the last post, so I suspect enough decompression time has gone by to get back into the blogging game. For starters, a quick life update. Hannah and I are living in a duplex about a mile from downtown Detroit in a neighborhood formerly known as Briggs but now associates with a nearby neighborhood and has adopted the name North Corktown. It's a wonderful place and I'll have much more to write about it in future posts.
On the employment front, Hannah is busy with her practice and I've taken a job as a doctoral student at Wayne State University. The perks are a stable income, benefits, a pleasant bike commute and enough autonomy to work on the things that interest me the most. I am in the Transportation Research Group, which, unfortunately, operates mainly as a traffic engineering research outfit and doesn't do much in the way of transit or walkable communities. Hopefully this will slowly change.
In between working on our half completed apartment (long story) and setting up a fly breeding operation in our basement (really long story) I haven't had too much time for blogging, but I have been reading some fascinating books. Thor Heyerdahl's The Ra Expedition was a fascinating exploration of the remarkable skill and drive of our ancestors and the ever present forces of diffusion in our world community. Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic read more like a textbook, but after studying the same material for the last month I forgive him, traffic engineering is much more pseudo than science.
I had the time recently to read a review of Julian of Ascalon's Tretise on Building. I would strongly recommend any interested in the creation of medieval cities to take a look at Besim Hakin's website. Also, I've just recently picked up a copy of J.H. Crawford's Carfree City Design Manual (the WSU library shelved it Wednesday) which has proven very fascinating. I hope to have a review of it out shortly (and perhaps one on Traffic as well).
Sunday, May 31, 2009
And we're back!
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