Hugh's Worthless Blog

Yesterday I received a phone call from a fellow Washington University employee who worked at West Campus asking what was the best way to watch next Monday's eclipse since he was coming in to work that day. The university is actually sponsoring an Eclipse watch event on our campus (with ice cream), but unfortunately none of our campus is within the range for totality so it would only be a partial eclipse party. Our campus further west is extremely close to the edge of totality so the West Campus employee was asking if he could just walk across the street and down the block to see the full total eclipse. I told him he could, but he would likely only experience a few fleeting instances of totality and it would be better for him if he could get further south and possibly further west for a better experience. However, since West Campus is located very close to the Forsyth Metrolink station and all employees can receive a free Metro U-Pass, I realized the easy solution. Hop on th...

Danforth Campus West Campus Shuttle stops - August 2017 For the past several months, one of the most favorite pasttimes here on the Danforth Campus of Washington University has been grumbling about parking and all the construction on campus. One of the solutions the "powers that be" came up with was the new ParkSmart option where a bunch of people park over at West Campus and then take the Metrolink or the new West Campus shuttle to get between their cars and their work on the Danforth campus. Many of the people who had their parking displaced when the lots in front of Brookings closed were the people who work on the east end of campus, namely in Sam Fox , the Brown School , Engineering , Brookings, and those of us in Earth and Planetary Sciences and Physics too. So to appease us "Easterners" they placed a stop on the east end of campus, first on the northeast corner of Forsyth and Hoyt. They had a test run in April, and I tried it out and it actually wor...