Category: Albuquerque & New Mexico

Startup: Albuquerque and the Personal Computer Revolution

Born from Paul Allens desire to give back to the city where he and Bill Gates spent their early years with Microsoft, STARTUP opens Nov. 18 to the general public, and offers countless items from Allens own collection. Dozens of displays take the visitor on a tour from the computer eras dawn to the present day.

Its relics carry a certain mystic power, starting with the entrance hallways pre-revolutionary murmurs. There is a Frieden S10 calculator from the 1930s. IBM 700 Series vacuum tubes sit before an ancient Big Blue ad describing them as “fingers you can count on.” A television plays a public information movie about “machines that can practically think,” a self-parodying artifact of the 1950s. Behind a glass screen stands a UNIVAC 1 mainframes control desk. Upon it is an OQO, nearly invisible amid the electromechanical monoliths myriad of buttons of lights.

“Its educating people about history,” Aydelott said. “When I started university, I was using punchcards. When I left I was using an Apple.”

Gear Factor: Wired

And where is the city Paul Allen and Bill Gates spent their “early years”? Why it’s Albuquerque — and Startup is in our very own New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

[As elsewhere, the apostrophe key appears not to work at Gear Factor.]

Festival of the Cranes

Friends of the Bosque del Apache keep the census of waterfowl at one of America’s great wildlife refuges. Click to see the lovely photos, which rotate every few seconds.

And this photo is a must! Read the caption and listen to the recording. Isn’t nature awesome?

In the 1930s, the Rocky Mountain population of greater sandhill cranes was severely declining. Habitat loss in wintering and breeding areas, land use changes and other factors had taken their toll on the population. In 1941, fewer than 20 sandhills wintered on Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge (NWR).

Since 1939, refuge staff, volunteers, cooperators, and other agencies have worked to restore wintering habitat along the Rio Grande for the cranes. Intensive management on the refuge, including moist soil management (growing natural wetland foods), cooperative agriculture, and crop manipulation have helped the population recover dramatically. Bosque del Apache NWR hosts about three-quarters of the Rocky Mountain sandhill crane population each winter, totaling up to 15,000 birds.

In addition to the sandhill cranes, the refuge is also a wintering stopover or home for snow geese, Ross’ geese, pintails, shovelers, mallards, and a host of other waterfowl. The spectacular wildlife viewing opportunities contribute to the fact that Bosque del Apache NWR is consistently recognized as one of the top birding areas in the country. Enjoy our trails, observation decks, and tour loop during your Festival visit.

The Quiet Man

U.S. Senator Jeff Bingaman was re-elected to his fifth term yesterday, winning 70 percent of the vote and taking all 33 New Mexico counties.

Now seriously, how many of you outside of New Mexico could even have named our junior senator? (Yeah junior; the senior senator, Pete Domenici, has been in the Senate since 1973, Bingaman only since 1983.)

Our governor, Bill Richardson, was re-elected with 68% of the vote. He may have lost one county. The joke was Bill Richardson was the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate was someone “who isn’t Bill Richardson.”

The local house district is too close to call and a recount is inevitable — and after all that negative advertising.

I Voted

I Voted

Took about 20 minutes including the commute to and from the nearby school. This morning it was all backed up, so I’m glad I waited as there was no line at all.

We voted with paper this year — too much like taking the SAT if you ask me. Fill in the ovals. Once done, the ballot is scanned into a shredder vote counting machine while we watch.

I was asked to show ID and when I balked (because my preferred M.O. is ass), I was only asked to provide the last four digits of my SSN. (I did show my ID, I simply questioned why.) Anyone know what the law requires in New Mexico?

The more things change, the more they remain the same

One hundred years ago today the citizens of New Mexico and Arizona voted on whether to join the Union as one state.

The Territory of New Mexico (1850) had originally included Arizona; Arizona Territory was split off in 1863. (The original boundary proposal would have split the two north (New Mexico) and south (Arizona), not east and west as it turned out.) New Mexico was 50 percent Spanish-speaking; Arizona’s Indian and Mexican-American population was less than 20 percent.

In 1906, congress passed a bill stipulating one state for the two territories, but the act stated that the voters of either territory could veto joint statehood. The Arizona legislature passed a resolution of protest; combining the territories in one state “would subject us to the domination of another commonwealth of different traditions, customs and aspirations.” A “Protest Against Union of Arizona with New Mexico” presented to Congress early in 1906 stated:

[T]he decided racial difference between the people of New Mexico, who are not only different in race and largely in language, but have entirely different customs, laws and ideals and would have but little prospect of successful amalgamation … [and] the objection of the people of Arizona, 95 percent of whom are Americans, to the probability of the control of public affairs by people of a different race, many of whom do not speak the English language, and who outnumber the people of Arizona two to one.

Joint statehood won in New Mexico, 26,195 to 14,735. It lost in Arizona, 16,265 to 3,141.

New Mexico entered the Union on January 6, 1912 (47th state), Arizona on February 14, 1912 (48th).

Boring stuff

In case you’re keeping a chart, the highest temperature officially in Albuquerque during October was 82° on the 1st. The low was 35° on the 19th and 23rd. There was 1.70 inches of precipitation, but none in the last half of the month.

It was twice as wet, but just a fraction cooler than the average October.

Blood and Thunder

Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday has written a review of Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West. Momaday’s summary paragraph:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

NewMexiKen began reading the book the other day and, so far, it’s been very good — excellent reading. For whatever reasons, Sides jumps around in the chronology but, while unusual for a narrative history, it seems to work. It has the effect of seeming to move the story along more rapidly.

I’d noted three passages I found particularly amusing, informative, or resonant:

[S]tories like the one about the mountain valley in Wyoming that was so big it took an echo eight hours to return, so that a man bedding down for the night could confidently shout “Git up!” and know that he would rise in the morning to his own wake-up call.

As a baby in his cradleboard, Narbona [a Navajo leader] probably was not called anything at all, for Navajos, who tended to view early infanthood as an extension of gestation, did not usually give names to their children until specific personal characteristics began to show themselves—Hairy Face, Slim Girl, No Neck, Little Man Won’t Do As He’s Told. Although Navajo parents followed few hard rules about how to name their children, it was generally agreed that the watershed moment when a baby could definitively be said to have passed from infanthood into something more fully human was the child’s “first spontaneous laugh.” First laughter was an occasion for much celebration, and it was the time when many Navajos held naming ceremonies for their young; it is likely that this is when Narbona received his original “war name,” whatever it might have been.

Perhaps to dignify the nakedness of Polk’s land lust, the American citizenry had got itself whipped into an idealistic frenzy, believing with an almost religious assurance that its republican form of government and its constitutional freedoms should extend to the benighted reaches of the continent held by Mexico, which, with its feudal customs and Popish superstitions, stood squarely in the way of progress. To conquer Mexico, in other words, would be to do it a favor.

The Pueblos from A to Z

The Seattle Times provides a brief description of the 19 New Mexico pueblos — “the oldest tribal communities in the United States, having descended from the ancestral Pueblo cultures that once inhabited Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and Bandelier.”

The accompanying article — Catching glimpses of tradition in New Mexico’s native villages.

Thanks to Ah, Wilderness! for the link to the above, which was first posted at NewMexiKen a year ago.

Three for Saturday

Last week’s New Yorker was particularly good and these stood out.

Surgeon Atul Gawande surveys recent developments in childbirth — as he describes it “How childbirth went industrial.”

Historian Jill Lepore reviews Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, a new history of the conquest of the American southwest and California.

Mark Singer has a profile of murderer and escapee Richard McNair. The article is not available, but here’s a video of the suspect confronted by a police officer the day of his last escape. Priceless.

Stuff

The leading contender for the name of Albuquerque’s new far west side high school (recently approved by voters) is Volcano Vista. Five long dormant small cinder cone volcanoes top the west side mesa.

The Volcano Vista Vulcans. What else could it be?

The Chicago White Sox have figured out how to sell something new. Night games will now begin at 7:11 PM. Guess which convenience store chain gave them $500,000 for this change from 7:05?

The airship Hindenburg I learned tonight did not explode because it was filled with hydrogen. The outer skin of the big German aircraft — longer than three 747s — was painted with an iron oxide, powdered aluminum compound to reflect sunlight (to minimize heat build up). The powdered aluminum was highly flammable and was ignited by an electrostatic charge in the imperfectly grounded zeppelin.

How flammable is iron oxide and aluminum? It’s the fuel used to launch the Shuttle.

Quality of Life

Bernalillo County voters have to decide whether to approve a 3/16ths of one percent increase in the sales tax (actually a gross receipts tax, but it amounts to the same thing as a sales tax). That’s 19 cents on $100. The increase would raise the overall sales tax in Albuquerque to more than 7%. (The tax does not apply to groceries, which are tax free in New Mexico.)

The effort to get the tax approved is called the Quality of Life Initiative because the funds would go to programs devoted to culture, history, art and science. The income raised would be administered by the county with advice from an appointed Cultural Advisory Board. Various organizations, public and private, would make proposals, the Advisory Board would review the proposals and make recommendations to the County Commission.

NewMexiKen strongly believes there should be public, tax support for “culture.” That stated, I have three concerns about this initiative that MAY result in my voting against it.

First, I object to the use of the sales tax, which even though it excludes groceries, is still a regressive tax. I believe zoos, museums, and the like should be supported by the property tax, or possibly a tourist tax (rental cars, lodging).

Second, I’m uncomfortable with the idea of a Cultural Advisory Board. Who died and left these people in charge? One person’s culture is another person’s excess. I much prefer that elected (and presumed accountable) officials be more directly involved. This arrangement shrieks of potential “behind-the-scenes” favoritism.

Third, here’s a list of potential recipients from the Quality of Live Initiative web site:

Albuquerque-Bernalillo County Public Libraries
Keshet Dance Company
Tricklock Company
New Mexico Holocaust & Intolerance Museum
National Atomic Museum
New Mexico Jazz Workshop
New Mexico Symphony Orchestra
Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
Once Upon A Theatre
STEPS Dance Academy
Harwood Art Center
Friends of Music
National Dance Institute of New Mexico
Los Reyes de Albuquerque
Working Classroom
Albuquerque BioPark

In fairness, the list is billed as “A Few Examples of How Organizations May Use the Funds.” Still, it seems to me more a list of worthy projects than a list entirely of programs that tax dollars should support.

Help me out here. Are my concerns legitimate? How would you vote?

I’d Vote Today If It Meant the Political Junk Mail Would Stop

NewMexiKen caught up on the mail yesterday — ten days worth all at once (including a bunch that belonged to the folks next door, stuck in with mine).

Among the 90% or so of the mail that was junk were nine mailings (in ten days) concerning my congressional race (NM-1). Each was expensively printed on over-sized card stock. Even the realtors don’t print such fancy mailers.

The race here is between the incumbent, Republican Heather Wilson, and the Democratic challenger, current New Mexico Attorney General Patricia Madrid. It’s considered a bellwether contest in the national congressional picture, as Wilson has been a supporter of President Bush on most issues including Iraq. Current polls show Madrid with a lead.

We can vote in New Mexico beginning today (four weeks before “election day”). For now, it’s just at the county clerk’s office, but starting the 21st there are a number of locations. Here’s the details: Bernalillo County Early Voting Locations.

In the Mountains, Fall Is Already Winter

NewMexiKen ventured to Santa Fe and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains Tuesday in hope of seeing some fall color.

The color was mostly gone, just a few aspens left with leaves and those far past their prime. The color had been replaced with the absence of color — you know, that white, cold stuff. Click each image to see larger version.

Aspens October Snow

Photos taken at Aspen Vista and along highway at about 10,000 feet.

Santa Fe Ski Area Sunlight through Trees

Photos taken at Ski Santa Fe, 10,350 feet.

Stuff

NewMexiKen, still hacking from the Virginia cooties, is going to Santa Fe for the afternoon — get some fresh air, take some photos of the aspens (if it’s not too late), and have a little repast on the plaza, as people have been doing for nearly 400 years.

And don’t worry Albuquerqueans, true to our apparent sworn civic duty, I promise I won’t like Santa Fe no matter how wonderful a time I have.

(Actually, in NewMexiKen’s opinion, living an hour from Santa Fe, one of the unique, special cities in the U.S. — an attraction people travel for thousands of miles to enjoy — is a bonus to living in Albuquerque. In other words, one of my very favorite things about Albuquerque is Santa Fe.)

Before I go:

Scott Adams tells us about being In Over My Head. Self-serving, no doubt, but still interesting. Go read it. (Adams claims he’s turned down as much as $100,000 to give an hour-long speech. His blog is free.) Link via Three Bed Two Bath.

Andrew Tobias has links showing how the Republicans can win the election, no matter what the polls say, including this, “hotel mini-bar keys open Diebold voting machines.”

And, in what one hopes will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said today that anyone who covered up information about contacts between then Rep. Mark Foley and male pages “really ought to go.”