ISPRS 2008

Happy July 4!! Today was the first day of the ISPRS conference. I wandered around looking for Americans to say "Happy Independence Day!" but then I couldn't actually bring myself to gush it out. Very interesting presentations from a new international organization devoted to the disseminbation of spatial data (http://earthobservations.org/), Leica Geosystems talking about LiDAR and a professor from Wuhan talking about the earthquake. He showed some very heart breaking photos of absolute devastation: villages buried by rubble, collapsed mountains, etc. I can only pray that the rich politicians driving around in $100,000 Mercedes can find it in their souls to help those people. Party of the people, my ass. On the lighter side, a live pig was recently found that had been buried for 39 days! Go pig!!


I also got to practice a little Chinese on a cab driver. I realized the value of the lesson from my Chinese class at Berkeley that was devoted to giving directions. He actually understood what I was saying!! And we were able to navigate to the right place! Holy shit! It works: "I want to go from here to there... Keep going straight... Turn right here... Turn left at the next light... It's here... How much?" I have definitely been cursing myself for putting in the bare minimum of studying, but at least it's better than before.

This is the view from the institute. I know it's kind of small, but you can see some of the Olympic infrastructure from the steps of my building. It's very exciting.





Here's the view in the other direction. You can see that we are smack dab in the middle of a large Chinese Academy of Sciences "compound" or "campus" or whatever.






Lastly, hard at work, at the controls of this whole situation, my mentor, the man, the myth, the legend, 宫老师 (Gong LaoShi):

At a meeting of the institute the other day, he called me 博士(bo shi, meaning doctor, or literally "rich learned scholar"). I like the sound of that!