Ruins of Tuzigoot

This is an ancient pueblo of the Sinagua people, who lived here between AD 1000 and AD 1400.


A panorama courtesy of the Autostitch app.







OCR on an informational sign:

For thousands of years, the Verde Valley has been a
human melting pot. Hunters and gatherers came first, searching for wild game and grasses. Traders followed, digging salt and minerals, and then settlers farming the fertile bottomlands.
A tribe of southern Sinagua built their masonry homes on this ridge about AD 1000 and established a thriving agricultural community. Inexplicably, they left in the early
1400s, more than a hundred years before the first Europeans rode into the valley.
A circular 1/4-mile trail winds up and through the remains of the Tuzigoot pueblo.


In a typical late-pueblo room, storage cists were frequently set in a corner of the room and clay vessels for storage were submerged in the floors. When Sinagua children died, they were buried in lined crypts beneath the floors of the dwellings. It was hoped their spirits would be incorporated into succeeding generations.



- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Montezuma Well

So called because early Europeans thought that the cliff dwellers in the area were at the north end of the Aztec empire. The name has stuck, though we now know better.

It's a large sinkhole fed by a constant flow underground flow of water.

There's cliff dwellings on the far side




Maybe you can see the cliff dwellings a bit better



This is as good a picture as I have of the cliff dwellings





This water source was used for irrigation by the original people of the area.

OCR on an informational sign:

Since water in Montezuma Well is charged with carbon dioxide (CO2), gill-breathing fish can not
survive: instead, an aquatic community of several unique species—each dependent on the other - has evolved.
By day, small floating plants—aIgae—manufacture food from light energy and the rich supply of carbon dioxide. Tiny, shrimplike animals—amphipods— feed by combing algae cells through appendages below their mouths.

Leeches, living by day in the bottom of the well, rise at night and, searching with the sensory hairs of their bodies, gulp large quantities of the small amphipods. Night-swimming water scorpions also make evening meals of the shrimplike creatures. More familiar turtles and muskrats live around the
well, and at dawn and dusk you might see squirrels, foxes, skunks, raccoons and snakes coming to feed. ln winter, look for black-headed Canadian
geese, green-winged teals and mallards.


- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

SWM seeks vortex

In Sedona, I asked the local crystal dealer if I could align my chakras better if I ingested a small crystal. She'd obviously been mocked by far far better because she didn't skip a beat in her no-nonsense response that she didn't think that was the right way to align chakras.

The scenery is still magnificent, no matter the poor humor of the local vortex shills. I'm using my trueHDR app which is doing a good job, with the exception that it occasionally misregisters the images.




















- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Jerome

ROCKER SHOVEL AND DRAGLINE



Ocr on the friendly sign tells us that, "This piece of equipment was the first successful mining device to replace human labor in removing the rubble from underground hard rock-blasting. The Model 12B, which weighs 4,200 pounds and requires 60 to 125 pounds per-square-inch air pressure, was first introduced in
1938. When the bucket is loaded with rubble, the
operator actuates the bucket drive motor to exert force on
the rocker pull chain, which is attached near the outer end of the rocker arms. The rocker arms roll the bucket upward toward the rear of the machine so that it maximizes the initial lift force on the bucket. As the bucket is thrown rearward, its vertical velocity decreases, and its horizontal velocity increases until the rocker arms strike shock—absorbing stops on the frame. When the bucket stops, the contents are flung into an attached mine car."




More ocr: "Jerome is perched on the side of Cleopatra Hill over rich ore deposits. In 1876, mining claims and a mill were located near the town. These claims were purchased in 1882 by thebUnited Verde Company and the tent camp was named Jerome after Eugene ]erome, a major financier of the company."

Today there's wine tasting, galleries, and tourist shops. We had a short and wonderfully personal tour of Robin John Andersons' gallery and studio located in the former high school across the street from the first photo in this post. See http://www.anderson-mandette.com





- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

More photos from J Tree

On the 27th, winds at 6 pm were rising and ultimately got to the point around 10 pm to 2 am that my tent roof was bending down and hitting me as I lay bundled in my sleeping bag.

Despite the cold and frigid winds, Pine City campground was a nice experience. In particular, I enjoyed using my new HDR app for iPhone. I'm using TrueHDR and it is good, but has a few issues with crashes. I've read that ProHDR is also worthy.

In some ways these fancy photo apps are like trying to make a silk purse out if a sow's ear because the iPhone picture capabilities aren't all that great. What I really need is a wifi connected camera with a keyboard.

Jumping Cholla



Barrel cactus


The following was really dark in the foreground and sunlight was still hitting the hills in the background. I tried several exposures but the first was best.



Normally, you couldn't take a photo of a little tunnel like this and see through to the trees on the other side.



Amazing rock formations.


Another dark foreground / light background HDR combination. Scouts are on a rock seen through the trees.


- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Backpacking at Joshua Tree

26 November. It's so cold that I'm in bed at 6:26 pm as I try to stay warm. Fortunately, my tent and sleeping bag seem up to the task. I'm backpacking with the Boy Scouts and last night I was warm and full of turkey.







I purchased an app called Autostitch that makes larger pictures from many smaller one, as if i had a wide angle lens. But my best example so far is more panorama than wide angle. There's some blurriness where the stitching took place :(




I have another new and better toy for my iPhone- an app to do high dynamic range photos. What's HDR? See the following example. The app took two images, one exposed for the foreground and one for the sunlit rock and sky, then merged them into a single, better picture.


Same here:


And here:



Past sunset now. Good night with red light in the sky to the east.






- Posted at great expense from my iPhone

Computer algebra

I've been looking into computer algebra systems for some mathematical noodling that I'm doing.  I'm rusty enough at calculus that they are a useful crutch, but if I get handy enough with them they could be useful in ways beyond my current problem.  I'm interested mostly in doing symbolic manipulation and I've found that Maxima seems to be the free gold standard for what I'm interested in.  However, I've ended up using a program called SpaceTime, because it seemed to have a lower threshold to get to useful results and because it has versions that run on my PC and on my iPhone.  The PC version is free and the iPhone version is $20, which I haven't yet decided to pay, but isn't it wonderful that I can try it out for free?

There is an interesting anecdote or two here, illustrating why one might want to do computer algebra.