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!
“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!!
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.”
Makes one wonder how the world could have been different and what we missed?!
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.
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.
A short scramble above that are impressive Petroglyphs inscribed into the cliff face.
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)
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.
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.
The nearby ruins of Chetro Ketl features a Great Kiva 62 feet in diameter. Notice the two seated visitors for scale!
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.
Several flowering plants were abundant due to recent rainfall. This particularly showy example is 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!
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.”
I climbed about two hundred feet to the stone rim.
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.
I finally got to the overlook where you could survey Pueblo Bonito in all its glory!
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.
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.
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.
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: