Musings

Time is a difficult concept to grasp, frame, and master. But, as humans, we try mightily to do so.

The simplest time concept, I think, is the continuum—it’s all the same thing, going on and on.

Then you can get fancy, and introduce starting and ending points. Events, you might say.

Sometimes you can employ/deploy the idea of hinge points, or pivots, when something happens and things change going forward.

I keep thinking that overall it’s a matter of perspective, that reality is subjective, that we’re just fleas on Mother Earth’s back, belly, or neck.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

Improved version of Fig. 1 from Baggaley et al by Boy and Baggaley elsewhere on the interwebs.

Sooo cool. I’ve been thinking about making a version of this figure myself, just to see the pattern. Quite excited to find that someone else has already done so.

Shows a persistent impetus to move along. Note that as time goes along there are more dots for each color…which I interpret as more people, so more cultural deposits left to be dated….

Posted at 6:33 PM | 2 Comments »

Sometimes, this is what happens on a rainday—the sun comes out and mocks you as you do indoor work. Still, in this case, the indoor work was backlogged and now it isn’t.

To be fair, the rain didn’t totally stop until shortly after lunch.

Posted at 8:01 PM | Comments Off on Puffy clouds

Bucrania—a new word for me I came across the other week…used in the context of the Neolithic Turkish settlement we call Çatalhöyük. The archaeologist I was reading defined it as cattle horns and skulls in a display context, interpreted as intended to impress, intimidate, and remind visitors how important their hosts were.

So, I drove up on this semi-load, and all these projecting arms were aligned and appeared as one, and thought: modern mechanical bucrania.

Posted at 10:22 PM | 2 Comments »

I understand these come in sets of four: 10YR, 5YR, not entirely certain of the other two. Handles, um, tend to fail.

Google your own set soon….

For extra credit: what color is your coffee?

For Munsell details, start with WikiPee.

Posted at 10:34 PM | 7 Comments »

From the other day….

The Guru says the Texaco font is wrong. I never wouldda figured that out…. My faves are the triangular stacks of oil cans in the windows.

Posted at 9:26 PM | 1 Comment »

I think this was just east of Amarillo.

I wonder if construction were beginning now if this architectural form would be used for local grain storage depots across the Great Plains.

Of all things! I just checked The Great WikiPee, and apparently the English word silo derives from the Greek word for a grain storage pit. Apparently, also, groups of silos and associated buildings, etc., are termed by their function: grain elevators. The architecture signals the shift from shipping grain in bags to in bulk, which changed dramatically in 1843, when the first mechanical complex was opened in Buffalo. Yes. Not on the Plains.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Sentinels of the Plains

This storage area, just below the ceiling at Cliff Palace, could only be reached through houses in half of the architectural complex. Thus, the contents were controlled/secret. Why? Because it mattered so very much….

At Mesa Verde, the Ancestral/Ancient Puebloan* peoples abandoned their mesa-top and cliff dwellings in the late 1200s long before the Spanish arrived. They were small-statured people, in the 5-2 to 5-4 range. I’m figuring a big part of that was restricted calories. Sure, a pound of piñon nuts is something like 5K calories, but the rest of the dietary assortment is pretty low fat and the carb loads had to be, um, light, everything considered (like the calories it would take to navigate up and down cliff-faces…).

Speaking of food management, we enjoyed a lovely organic Nero d’Avila from Sicily that we found at the Log Cabin liquor store in Mancos—a pleasant surprise.

* More PC to use Ancestral/Ancient Puebloan rather than Anasazi….

Posted at 10:22 PM | 1 Comment »

We explored history in assorted ways when we did the walking tour at El Morro, which is a sandstone formation known for its carved inscriptions that began with ancient native peoples and hosts additions well into the twentieth century. Coolest stop: the kiva in the small excavated area of the Atsinna pueblo ruin atop the landform. Maybe a dozen rooms are on view, but reports say there are something like 875 rooms. That’s a lot of construction! It’s dated to something like AD 1300….

Posted at 9:25 PM | Comments Off on Readable past

I was too tied up and boring today to even walk, let alone create a fresh/fun foto for this space.

Instead, I give you an interior view of the Sears, Roebuck building we toured the other Tuesday.

This is a view to the west, and the windows look north onto Ponce. The floor is original. Workers had to remove six layers* of carpeting, we were told, to reveal similar maple strip flooring on a lower “shopping” level.

The pillars are original and the floor above is poured concrete. Boards were used to hold the wet concrete, then removed, leaving the stripes you see in the ceiling.

To ensure that the dust created by construction doesn’t wreck the now-exposed wood floors, the developer bought a wood-floor zamboni, and the floors are cleaned frequently.

* Can you imagine the amount of trapped yuck in that much carpeting? Ick.

Posted at 10:22 PM | Comments Off on Interior stratigraphy