Summer Gig


Gossamer Albatross


For this upcoming summer, the midway point of my two years of graduate school, I’ll be working near Los Angeles at a company that is probably best known for designing and building the Gossamer Condor and the Gossamer Albatross (shown above). They are human-powered flight vehicles masterminded by the late, great Dr. Paul B. MacCready and made history by successfully completing a fully human-powered flight across the English Channel on June 12, 1979. They’re not doing human-powered flight anymore, but they are getting into some pretty amazing wind-power systems, solar vehicles (including solar flight vehicles), unmanned aerial systems, and electric vehicles and charging systems. Should be a good time!

1947 (yes, really!) Nissan Tama Electric Vehicle


1947 Nissan Tama


22 MPH top speed with a range of 40 miles.

Louis Agassiz


"Great in the abstract, but not in the concrete"

The statue of Louis Agassiz, fallen from the Zoology building at Stanford after the earthquake in 1906. Someone was quoted in the papers as saying Louis Agassiz “was great in the abstract, but not in the concrete.”