Electrical Vehicles (1916)

Title Page
Title Page

The first thing I like is the complexity of the typography on the page above.

Notice the curved outlines of “Hawkins” and “Number”, the odd mix in “Questions Answers & Illustrations”, the modern san serif all-upper case “Electricity…”, and the circular “by” near the bottom. What a feast!

The motto: “The thought is in the question. The information is in the answer.” What does that even mean?!


The 1916 Prius

I was surprised to see “gasoline-electric” mentioned on the first page!

First Page
First Page

“It is evident that the short coming in each case can be overcome only by combining the gas engine with a dynamo connected to a storage battery…” Wow! 1916 and they already had hybrids!!

Gasoline-Electric Vehicles
Gasoline-Electric Vehicles

Not sure why they felt hybrids weren’t good as “pleasure vehicles?” A bit of speculation here… There is no mention of having a personal vehicle for getting to work. Presumably that was achieved by walking, the “omnibus” and other forms of public transportation!

Lots of Choices

Again, in 1916… “…city delivery service is well within the limits of the electric truck built at the present time.”

Electric Cars and Trucks
Electric Cars and Trucks
Wind and Tires
Wind and Tires
Batteries
Batteries

Makes one wonder how the world could have been different and what we missed?!

Chaco Canyon 2023

Chaco Canyon Entrance
Chaco Canyon Entrance

After braving the nearly washed out road from the north I arrived around 9am. I had to “walk” my Prius diagonally over piles of gravel and exposed rock faces. This was my third attempt over twenty years to visit this important site. (The first two failed because the roads were completely washed out!) [Full Gallery]

The map below shows the basic layout of the park (click to enlarge). Most of the sites are easy walking distance from the main loop drive.

Chaco Canyon Map source:nps.gov
Chaco Canyon Map (source:nps.gov)

A short walk from the Vistors Center is the small un-excavated ruins of Una Vida. The prominent Fajada Butte is seen in the distance. This is the location of the famous “Sun Dagger” astronomical feature presumed to mark the summer solstice.

Una Vida Ruins and Fajada Butte
Una Vida Ruins and Fajada Butte

A short scramble above that are impressive Petroglyphs inscribed into the cliff face.

Look Up! Petroglyphs
Look Up! Petroglyphs
Petroglyphs Detail
Petroglyphs Detail

The focal point of the entire park is Pueblo Bonito, a huge stone edifice that contained over six hundred rooms and dozens of circular ceremonial structures called “Kivas”. (source:nps sign)

Pueblo Bonito Sign
Pueblo Bonito Sign

The walls nearest the cliff were crushed by a rock slide after the structure was abandoned. The rounded walls are the remains of various kivas.

Pueblo Bonito Panorama
Pueblo Bonito Panorama

One quadrant has been restored so visitors may explore a warren of small rooms. Notice the very low doors and what remains of wooden timbers holding up the floors above. The stone in the foreground was used to grind corn. The consensus is these rooms were not residential but related to the ritual use of the site.

Pueblo Bonito 360 Panorama
Pueblo Bonito 360 Panorama

The nearby ruins of Chetro Ketl features a Great Kiva 62 feet in diameter. Notice the two seated visitors for scale!

Chetro Ketl Great Kiva
Chetro Ketl Great Kiva

The remains of Chacoan Stairways can be seen in several places behind the ruins. These are no mere “Moki Steps” but wide grand staircases leading to cerimonial roads throughout the area.

Chacoan Stairway
Chacoan Stairway

Several flowering plants were abundant due to recent rainfall. This particularly showy example is Emory’s Globemallow.

Emory's Globemallow
Emory’s Globemallow

The Pueblo Alto Trail starts above the Kin Kletso ruins. I attempted this late in the day after finding out there were no more campsites available that night. The trail went straight up into a huge crack in the rock!

Cliff Rim Trail Above Kin Kletso Ruins
Cliff Rim Trail Above Kin Kletso Ruins

As I was ascending I noticed one boulder that was different then all the others. It had Fossils! Mostly cross-sections I thought. Here is what some online geologist friends speculated…

“Mostly cross-sections of fossil shells, mostly bivalves & I think a gastropod.”

“…the large white mass consists of opaque secondary calcite that precipitated in an empty shell post-deposition, in contrast to the others that filled with silt or lime mud shortly after death.”

Fossils
Fossils

I climbed about two hundred feet to the stone rim.

Cliff Rim Trail Panorama
Cliff Rim Trail Panorama

There were helpful signs along the way, including this one calling attention to several man-made basins pecked out of the rock where water would sometimes flow.

Water Collection Basins
Water Collection Basins

I finally got to the overlook where you could survey Pueblo Bonito in all its glory!

Pueblo Bonito from Above
Pueblo Bonito from Above

At that point I had to turn back and start my downward climb… (Alternate Video)

Note: The trail went through a huge crack in the rock face. I used a Theta S 360 Camera to capture my descent. At one point I was also fighting a 20+ mph headwind! It looks very steep at the end… IT WAS!

I ate dinner as the setting sun lit the virga falling from late afternoon clouds.

Chaco Canyon Sunset
Chaco Canyon Sunset

What I missed…

I did not have time for the seven mile hike to see the Supernova & Comet Pictographs near the Penasco Blanco ruins (picture shown here from Wiki Commons). The “starburst” figure may document the 1054 CE Crab Nebula Supernova.

Supernova & Comet Pictographs source:wikicommons
Supernova Pictograph (source:wiki_commons)

I left the park at dusk via the south entrance road. Fortunately this route was in better shape and the main hazards were multiple tall cattle grates that threatened to high center my car.

More Photos…

Keep It Simple Text (KIST)

KIST combines the best elements of various plain text markup languages I’ve used or developed over the past forty years. I assume the source text must be easily understood by casual readers. To the extent possible I exploit conventions already used by plain text typists (in email for example). The most basic of these conventions are:

  • Separate paragraphs, headings, lists, etc. with blank lines.
  • Precede headings with pound signs (#).
  • Precede list items with tabs.
  • Bracket words for emphasis with asterisks (*).

KIST aspires to the “Minimal Ink Principle” proposed by Edward Tufte in 1983: “The ratio of ink that conveys information vs the total ink used should approach unity.”

KIST aspires to “fail gracefully” when something isn’t quite right.

Background

In the beginning there was Text. By “Text” I mean the digital representation of characters from the major phonetic languages in use today. And because I’m writing in English, I will focus there. Things first come into focus with the “American Standard Code for Information Interchange” (ASCII) back in 1961. It represented all the characters found on typewriters of the time (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, with assorted punctuation). ASCII is embedded in modern encoding schemes such as Unicode and UFT-8. Various systems evolved to process and display text on screens and paper.

Then there was HyperText–the ability to link words to information in other locations. Many developers proposed hypertext systems (myself included), but none dominated until “HyperText Markup Language” (HTML) came on the scene in 1980. After five major revisions it has become the de facto standard for most electronic publishing.

For all its strengths HTML is somewhat hard to write freehand. It has complex syntactical rules that are easy to break (the ubiquitous “unclosed tag” problem for example). Writers want to write–without focusing on a language intended to be read only by computers. So programmers immediately began inventing ways to generate HTML from other formats. This 1996 list from CERN has over 80 entries, including my own MTX.

Synthesis

KIST combines the best ideas from several sources:

  • MTX (paragraphs, headings, lists)
  • TSV (tab separated values, tables)
  • Email (block quoting)
  • Action Journaling (task lists)
  • HTML (hypertext, etc.)

Examples

A simple document structure:

  Title
  # Heading 1
  ...content...
  ## Subheading 1a
  ...content...
  #Heading 2
  ...etc...

Nested lists:

    Fruit
        apple
        banana
        orange
    Veggies
        carrot
        rutabaga

An inline image:

  ^Flower Photo(flower.jpg)

A hypertext link:

  A line with a ^link(more.html) to more info.

My History of Textual Tinkering

  • 1988 HYTEXT Hypertext Publishing System for MS-DOS
  • 1989 Conversion of Medical Textbooks with AWK (NLM Fellowship)
  • 1996 MTX Marked TeXt for Web Publishing (U of Fla)
  • 2000s Action Journaling for Paper, Computer & Web
  • 2016 TableTop – Table Manipulation App
  • 2020 Keep It Simple Text (KIST)