Everything is Somewhere Podcast

More thoughts on crop circles in America from Jeffrey Wilson, Director and founding researcher of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers' Association. Part 1 released as episode #3 on April 8th, 2024.

Boyce Upholt is the author of 2024's The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi River. As I read this instant classic, I was reminded of David Ambrose's Undaunted Courage, Kevin Fedarko's Emerald Mile and John McPhee's Coming into the Country. But more than any of these, Upholt tells the tale of early surveying along the Mississippi and writes the history of 200 years of river management infrastructure in interesting and exciting detail.

Will Selman is an urban planner with 30 years of public and private practice, and the founder of Symbolic Urbanism. His book "Temenos: The Design and Experience of Urbanism as Spiritual Path" is an essential text for anyone interested in the philosophy of land development.

If you’ve ever wished you could listen in as two top-flight experts on modern bridge design and construction engage in discussion about the cutting-edge geospatial technologies now applied in this infrastructure arena, this is the episode for you. HNTB Associate Fellow Natalie McCombs is a structural engineer specializing in bridge design, and was a judge for the prestigious 2024 Prize Bridge Awards.
 HNTB Section Leader of Civil Integrated Solutions Adam Horn is a land surveyor who leads a team that implements the use of high technology to the layout, construction, and monitoring of bridges.
 HNTB Corporation is, of course, the multinational infrastructure design firm founded in 1914 in Kansas City, Missouri and now with 6,100 employees worldwide, is considered one of the most trusted firms in the AEC sector.
 My conversation with Natalie and Adam did not disappoint; I learned a lot about geospatial aspects of bridge design that were entirely new to me, such as ‘reverse digital twinning’ and ‘geospatial convergence’ and this episode concludes with some fascinating and slightly controversial thoughts on the ways that artificial intelligence is likely to change bridge design, construction, and operation forever.

In the first of a two episode series, I’ll be speaking with academic and scientist Jeff Wilson, Director and founding researcher of the Independent Crop Circle Researchers' Association. Jeff is probably the world’s most knowledgeable expert on the crop circle phenomenon in the USA—crop circles are often thought of as being exclusive to the UK, but in fact thousands of crop circles have been appearing in America’s amber fields of grain for at least a century. I got in touch with Jeff after my article, Land Surveying and Crop Circles, appeared in the December 2023 issue of The American Surveyor magazine. I wanted to know what a serious investigator thought about my article, and he was happy to tell me.

Assuming you’ve ever traveled by plane, train, ship, or automobile, or received a package in the mail or by shipping company or have used an autonomous drone or vehicle of some sort, or perhaps played a video game then you have likely benefitted, albeit unknowingly, from some piece of technology developed by Mike Horton. Now though, Horton is turning his attention directly to the problem of GNSS signal interruption, particularly due to space weather, and his new tech startup, GEODNET, can be described as an attempt to create the world’s largest and most accessible RTK network via crowd sourced receivers funded by a bespoke crypto coin, the GEOD token, with proof of accuracy protocol and token distribution enabled by blockchain.

Land surveying in scripture and folklore. Also, vampires! Dustin Gardner is a 4th-generation land surveyor licensed in three western states and currently employed as Principal Survey Analyst at Rick Engineering. Despite the family history, Dustin’s path to surveying as a career was anything but conventional and followed the attainment of degrees in literature, criminal justice, and mathematics. And before settling on that degree path, he seriously considered the pursuit of a PhD in religious studies, with the aim of becoming a professor of folklore and mythology. Well, academia’s loss is land surveying’s gain: Dustin published a very interesting essay on the importance of boundary location and land surveyors. In his article, titled “Sacred Boundaries,” Dustin was able to firmly connect the profession of land surveying to the surprisingly extensive folklore and mythology of vampires, also known as ‘revenants’ and that is an interesting aspect of the noblest of trades that certainly never occurred to me.