“Mushroom Row,” at the edge of the sandstone theater that hosts the Alien Throne.
Having performed my reconnaissance by visiting the Alien Throne during the day, I was now ready to consider taking its portrait at night. I had in mind a view that included the Milky Way. And I wondered if I could create a timelapse of our galaxy moving across the sky behind it. It would require planning, equipment, and a bit of luck. A target 1-1/2 hours away from our hotel in Farmington, a further 1-1/2 mile trek across the desert, and an all-night vigil tending cameras, made this one of my most ambitious photo projects.
I had a backpack into which I put my gear: essentials like navigation tools, raingear and first aid, fleece, hat and gloves for overnight temperatures, a sleeping bag for further warmth (and option for sleeping), some snacks, plenty of water, and then the real payload: 20 pounds of camera equipment, which brought the total close to 40. For a single overnight trip, it felt as if I was going out for a week.
My planning [using the PlanitPro app] informed me that sunset would be at 8:20. I wanted to be at the site well before so I could set up and arrange my compositions, and also to capture the scenery in the “beauty light” that precedes sunset.
I got to the trailhead later than expected because I’m not immune from wrong turns, even when I “know” where I’m going. And the desert hike also took longer (was it the heavy pack?). The terrain tricked me into some dead ends. But I arrived at the Alien Throne just before sunset. It was spectacular!
And I was alone. I had feared that I would encounter other photographers with the same idea, but it looked like I would not have to negotiate camera positions, something I had never needed to do. So I went ahead and placed my tripods, aimed my lenses, set the exposure and interval timers, and started the shutters clicking. It takes a bit of time and concentration, but this is the pleasure of the hobby for me. Every outing is a new experiment; I add the details of each to my notebook, which then helps me on the next one.
With the cameras now clicking away on their schedules, I could step back and breathe a little easier. I found a niche among the rock formations to set my pack and recline against it. Twilight was advancing, and as I was recording my notes, I noticed lights splashing against the rock formations. Someone was hiking here in the dark, a headlamp lighting the way!
Rather than have them stumble across me in the dark, I called out, “hello?”
A voice replied, and a lone hiker arrived in the sandstone theater around the Alien Throne that hosted my cameras and my nesting place.
As I mentioned, I prefer to be alone during my nighttime star gazing excursions. If I see headlights approaching, I worry about what that vehicle brings. Often, it is a patrol car whose occupants either want to see your permit, or they want to look at Jupiter through your telescope. Though I am more fearful of wild carnivores than humans, I understand why women might prefer to encounter a bear than a man.
In this case, it was a student, recently graduated from UCLA, exploring the country before returning to his home in China. He had acquired a camera and discovered the cool startrail effects that could be obtained at night in unique settings like the one we were now both immersed in. It was a shared interest.
We exchanged introductions while he found a location for his tripod and camera. We had similar equipment, even identical travel tripods. Because my cameras were already in place and running, he found a location for his that did not interfere. It was an act of respect for the compositional claims that I had already staked, but also, I think, a reflection of his Asian culture of honoring and deferring to elders. I was pleased, perhaps even flattered, at the respect. There are few perks to being a septuagenarian; this was one of them.
My plans involved keeping my cameras in place and running all night. I needed to make some tracking adjustments and periodically replace batteries. His plans were to gather an hour or so of exposure in one place, and then move to a new location with a new subject and new backdrop. It all worked out with little or no interference. Between camera moves, we chatted and exchanged information from across our generations, homes, and cultures.
As the desert cooled down, we took refuge. I climbed into my sleeping bag, and he found enough surface area to pitch a small tent. I faced the open sky and watched the young moon set, the stars drift past, and the Milky Way rise from the east. “Sleeping under the stars” is a romantic notion, and a rare opportunity in modernity’s protected life. It is not easy to do in my midwestern home, where the sky is often cloudy and the air is filled with insects, but here in the desert, it is a wondrous experience.
The night passed pleasantly by, in 90 minute segments, per my alarms to get up and attend the cameras. In this remote location far from city lights, the sky transitioned from one of the darkest possible, to the natural progression of twilight leading toward sunrise. The Milky Way faded into the brightening sky. My startrail and timelapse work was now complete, but I wanted to see the hoodoos in the morning sunlight. I was not disappointed.
As I started packing up my gear for the trek back, my fellow photographer brought out another of his gadgets: a drone, which he sent overhead to capture stunning views of the terrain in which we were immersed. I think this is technically not permitted in a BLM wilderness area, but I couldn’t deny how cool it was, and no one else seemed to be around to complain.
I finally said goodbye to my overnight companion. We exchanged email addresses, and I hope to share photos with him. I then hoisted my pack and headed back. The water weight had diminished, and I admired the morning light on the unique desert features. I was exhausted, making the night’s experience all the more valuable.
Here are some photos from that beautiful night. The first set was taken during daylight, the next from my nighttime exposures. Finally, I offer the timelapse video composited from the frames I acquired. I hope you enjoy them.
As I start out on my hike to the Valley of DreamsTypical of the landscape along the routeThe Alien Throne among its neighbor thrones in this theaterThe moon is a few hours behind the sunMy camera and tripod, trying to emulate a hoodoo and fit in with the crowd.The niche containing my pack and sleeping bag, with Weiheng and his tent behind. The “Giant Mushroom”, surrounded by a ring of similar structuresI encountered this on my hike back the next morning. It is exactly how I felt.Photos of my hike to and from the Alien Throne. Click to enlarge, then scroll through.Alien Throne in moonlightMilky Way to the northMilky Way to the southA mushroom hoodoo and Milky WaySouthern star trails. Look for the celestial equator.Circumpolar star trails, one-hour exposure.Photos from my overnight session in Valley of Dreams.
A link to the timelapse sequence. Enlarge to full screen for the full visual experience.
The American Southwest is an amazing, mysterious, and visually stunning place. I’ve had a fascination with it my whole life, and make excursions whenever an opportunity arises. A few years ago, Poldi and I discovered an area in New Mexico with remarkable geologic features: badlands, hoodoos, and petrified wood! It was the Bisti Wilderness Area, held apart from private and reservation land by the Bureau of Land Management for the benefit of the public. It is only very lightly “managed” by the BLM. There are no visitor centers, no picnic areas or campgrounds, and no trails. There is a small parking area at the end of a difficult dirt road, marked by a signpost and featuring an outhouse.
Despite the lack of trails, we were able to follow the breadcrumb descriptions posted online by a photographer who explores Bisti for its photogenic subjects. We located and visited the Alien Egg hatchery, a 30-foot-long petrified log, and a hoodoo village. In the years since, we have wanted to return and explore more of this fascinating area.
Poldi in the nest of alien eggsPetrified logHoodoo villagePhotos of Bisti Wilderness, November 2022. Click to expand, then scroll
We were able to do so this year. The timing was right—late Spring, before the desert becomes intolerably hot. We both researched and found several more sites with novel features bearing names like “King of Wings”, “Chocolate Penguin King”, and “Alien Throne”. These are not roadside points of interest with explanatory markers; they are deep in wilderness area, accessible to intrepid hikers willing to explore the desert and locate them. Those that are successful bring back stunning photographs.
Those photographs inspired us to consider visiting them. A particularly novel feature, “The Alien Throne”, made me wonder if I could get a picture of it with a night sky backdrop. I read the accounts of others who had made the trip. Maybe it was possible!
After deciding on this photographic target, I needed to find it! There are several levels involved in “finding it”. Navigational dead reckoning by hiking the desert is one level. Based on GPS coordinates, it could be located on a map, but how to even get close? Ideally, you’d drive to the nearest point on the nearest road and hike from there. That seems easy enough if the roads were like the ones you find on state highway maps, identified by number and by road type.
But the roads throughout this area of New Mexico are not like those roads. They range from a regular width of gravel, to narrower washboarded and eroded dirt roads, to pairs of ruts, to a single path indicated only by a slight contrast in vegetation. In fact, they are sometimes not even visible on the satellite views presented on Google Maps. Were it not for the Google label overlay, some of the roads would not be identifiable.
The roads do have numbers, often multiple numbers: state, county, and reservation, each with a distinct designation. Not that it matters. When on one of these back roads, there are few identifying signs showing any number at all.
We had no fewer than four navigational tools to help us. My trusty old standard is a state road atlas, printed as 90 pages of large 11×17 B-size paper sheets bound into a book. This revealed land ownership status and showed details, including unpaved roads, but only down to the officially maintained gravel roads. The lesser roads were not shown at all, yet we needed them to reach our desired access points.
In addition to the paper atlas, we had electronic tools: the mapping applications on our phones, a route display in our car (Volvo calls it “Sensus Navigation”), and a handheld Garmin GPS receiver marketed for outdoor enthusiasts. Having been raised on paper maps and magnetic compasses, I have mixed attitudes towards the electronic tools. I have owned GPS receivers since 2000, starting with a gift from my mother-in-law, who thought it was the height of silly electronic gadgets (but she knew I would love it).
And they are indeed amazing gadgets for locating one’s position on the planet, but less amazing in identifying orientation, and a bit scary in terms of being dependent on batteries and infrastructure (cell phone and satellite signals).
The phone is our main navigational tool on the road because its display and user interface is the most supportive. But it is highly dependent on being in cell phone range. Outside it, one will see a blue dot representing our current location, but in an ocean of gray—the maps that provide context are loaded on an as-needed basis from the cell phone network. No cell tower nearby, no map.
I am also skeptical about its GPS capabilities. My phone does not have the characteristic stubby antenna for GPS wavelengths; how does it see enough sky to get the triangulation data from the satellites?
The car’s Sensus map worked well, but was harder to operate, and suffered some of the same limitations—the map data did not always show. It was better than the phone; I think it has better local storage of map data, but as with all electronic mapping, there is a “level of detail (LOD)” display control that depends on how far you are zoomed in. If it appears that your blue dot is lost in space, not on any route, zoom in some more, and the lesser roads will show up. I often wish I could override the automatic LOD to show more or less of the map detail around me. But even fully zoomed in, we noticed that some of the backroads were invisible—an apparent gap in the map data.
The Garmin receiver (Montana 610t) was the most reliable in getting a signal—it embeds the stubby antenna and it carries all of its mapping data internally, so our location was always displayed and the map seemed to have ALL of the near-invisible back roads. The Garmin, however, suffers from a klunky user interface. I might call it user-hostile, but instead will generously label it as “industrial”. It uses a touch screen that requires a heavy hand, an awkward data entry screen, and the functions are just not intuitive (to me). As a result, even after five years, I barely know how to operate it.
Its greatest weakness, however, is the power supply. GPS receivers don’t need power to transmit, but they must detect very weak signals from satellites hundreds of miles away and make complex calculations on them. The built-in rechargeable battery might last a day or so, but on this trip, it failed to recharge. It could be replaced by lithium AAs, so I now carry spares. Despite this shortcoming, the Garmin was definitely the unit to bring on our excursions into the desert.
The Garmin was superior in its location display, but it was an app on the iPhone that helped us locate the route to the Alien Throne. Apple Maps and Google Maps are wonderful applications that have changed how we get from place to place. But they are designed for driving, public transport, bicycling, and walking urban streetscapes. There is another application focused on hiking in backcountry settings: AllTrails (alltrails.com), from a company that caters to those of us who enjoy exploring the many hiking trails out there in the world.
They collect and publish maps for these trails, and they support a community of hikers who report back on their experiences and offer advice and photos. The maps can be downloaded to your phone (while connected), and then are available to show your position while on the trail, regardless of cell phone coverage. It turns out your phone is still in contact with the GPS signals (even in airplane mode—recommended to conserve battery life).
There was a trail in the AllTrails library for the Valley of Dreams. This was the navigational help we needed, not only to find our way through the unmarked desert, but also to find the access point! Although we were not at the trailhead yet, the AllTrails map showed us where we were with respect to it, and the roads (numbered or not) that could take us there!
This is how we located the trail to the Alien Throne. The AllTrails application guided us to an informal parking area. There was a clear trail that started here, but then dissipated onto the sandy washes and scrubland of the desert in front of us.
We had located the trailhead, a wide spot to the side of one of the “pair of ruts” roads in the New Mexico badlands. We marked the location on the Garmin GPS, and returned to Farmington to prepare for a hike the next morning.
AllTrails screen shot (left) showing our location (blue dot) while seeking the Alien Throne (green dot trail head and green hiking trail). We are at a local landmark, a windmill on gravel road 7870. The dotted lines are lesser roads and foot trails. The Garmin display contains similar information and shows our route history (red) and the waypoints I set at the landmarks.
The weather was clear the next day, and we were excited about hiking to the Valley of Dreams, but it took 1-1/2 hours to return to the trailhead. The day was heating up as we embarked. We had come for the unusual and novel beauty of the desert and this trail really embodied it. It was a little over a mile to reach the area of wind and water-eroded shapes contained in the Valley of Dreams. On the way we encountered other badland features, previews of hoodoos, dry creekbed washes that hosted flash drainage during rain, and the hardy patches of vegetation: cacti and tumbleweed, that somehow make a life here.
Normally, I estimate a two-mile-per-hour rate while hiking over flat terrain, but for whatever reason (trail conditions? distractions? age?), we took twice as long. There really isn’t a trail here. It is a broad, flat area of desert scrub punctuated by interesting geologic features. Distracted by them, we strayed from the AllTrails route, which, because there is no trail; is just a recording of some person’s path. The application would alert us that we had gone off the trail (“Did you take a wrong turn?”). This was both annoying and reassuring.
We reached the Valley of Dreams around noon and entered a region of highly eroded features, areas separated by chasms and gulleys, clearly carved by water, but completely dry today and most days. We found ourselves off the prescribed route and trying to figure out how to not get trapped in some box canyon. We climbed out of one and into another, but eventually found (or think we found) a feature we had read about: the giant mushroom.
And then finally, the Alien Throne! It evoked a sense of both awe and less. As large as it was, sitting amongst its peers in this setting of similar thrones, it did not match the scale that we had cultivated in our minds’ eye from the photos we had seen. Yet it was unique, so eroded by the elements that its supporting column had been eaten through, and the penetrating holes provided viewports to the vista behind. We marveled at it, took photos from all angles, some selfies, and then had lunch under it!
The heat had suppressed our hunger, but our thirst was unquenchable. Electrolytes had fueled our passage to this point, and now apples and grapefruit were the preferred lunch nutrition. We slowed down, caught our breath at this elevation (7000 ft), and enjoyed a moment in the sparse shade of this alien monument.
I was scouting for potential nighttime compositions when I noticed that I could no longer read my position on the AllTrails map on my phone. It had gone dark. Yes, it was high noon in broad daylight in the desert, so I expected the display might be hard to see, but this was significantly dimmer than I had experienced during the hike to this point. The brightness setting was maxed out, but only a faint image, too dim to read, showed itself. The AllTrails app, which up to now had surpassed my expectations, had suddenly failed. I tried various help-line-advice type tricks, like stopping and restarting the application. I shut down every other application that might be running in the background, but the problem persisted. Finally, I shut down the entire phone and restarted it.
A few minutes later, the phone came back to life, the display once again readable. I was relieved. We were never in any danger; it was just a reminder of being out on a technology limb. And in fact, a few minutes later, the display dimmed again, rendering the AllTrails guidance once again useless.
Later, I would learn that this was not an AllTrails problem, but rather a “feature” of the iPhone platform it lived on. When the operating temperature exceeds a certain threshold, the phone cuts back on its power, the display being a big part of it. Even though my body temperature is regulated, and the phone is not even trying to transmit while in airplane mode, evidently sitting in my pocket, or in my hand during a hike at noon in the New Mexico sun was too much for it, and it went into a lockdown safe-mode.
Fortunately, we had our printed maps. They didn’t need batteries, and we could read them even in bright daylight. Although we were never in danger of becoming lost or unable to return to our car, we really wanted to find the remaining cool features in the Valley of Dreams, so we set out from the Alien Throne to find items with names like The Turtle, Petrified Log, and the Chocolate Penguin King. We somehow managed to locate them using our stone-age technology.
We eventually found ourselves back at the entry point to the Valley of Dreams and headed back to the trailhead. Poldi, making the calculation that a straight line was the shortest, led us across the desert in a beeline, never mind the snakes and cactus. She knew that there was a beer packed in an ice chest waiting for us in the car.
It was an exhilarating day, one that we will be adding to our life highlight list.
Horses, wild and domestic, are sometimes seen hereThe view through binoculars shows a complex landscapePassing the “Three Wise Men”In a ravine within the Valley of DreamsLooking down into one of the canyonsArriving at the theater of thronesThe majestic Alien ThronePoldi strikes a pose and provides a sense of scaleThe view at high noon, directly southThe mandatory selfieChocolate Penguin KingThe Turtle, and Petrified LogThe best beer she ever enjoyed!Pictures from our hike to the Alien Throne in the Valley of Dreams. Click a thumbnail to see the full image, then scroll through.
I find the news these days to be very distressing; I’m surprised by how many things being enacted by our leaders seem to contradict the values I was raised with. So I retreat to the world of what’s real, which to me is the world of Nature and the physical laws and relationships it embodies.
Science and math are incredibly powerful tools. Despite their unpopularity, their predictive abilities are unrivaled. So I use them to assess the world around me, and recently I have been exploring the limits of our cultural assumption of unlimited growth. Unfortunately, I find that we are reaching those limits, and I suspect that our current political conflicts may be related to them.
I don’t want this blog to become dominated by such heavy material, so I will simply reference the next essay, Defending Malthus, in my “limits” series, for those who find them interesting.
Everyone else can hold tight. I’m on my way to New Mexico, hoping to hike the Bisti Badlands again and take some photos. That is what will keep my attention away from the daily dose of discouraging news.
Many of you follow my eclectic blog posts hoping that one of them might appeal to you. They span a broad range from personal to professional, craft to art, simplistic to technical, worldly to cosmic. I sometimes offer my opinions and back them up with data. In today’s data-challenged world (not from a dearth of data, but rather the challenges from those who don’t like the data), it is hard to make a compelling argument.
Nevertheless, I recently embarked on exploring a topic that has always bothered me: the idea that we can solve our problems by economic growth. I can see how it can solve certain short term problems, like borrowing money to pay back interest on prior loans, but it didn’t seem like a viable long term strategy. We live on a finite planet and so eventually we would end up against practical physical limitations, right?
It is obvious to a physicist, but seemingly not to many others.
Over the last month, while staying warm in our natural gas-heated home, I looked into the future of fossil fuels and their impact on our global economy. I crafted three essays which are more technical than many of my posts, and may not be of interest to many of my followers. So don’t feel compelled to digest them.
But if you are curious, here are brief descriptions, with links.
I still don’t have a reliable setup, but some recent changes I made to my cloud chamber have resulted in this very satisfying display of subatomic contrails. Here are a couple of recordings. The first documents when I was stunned to see multiple concurrent trails and I called for Poldi to witness it.
“Hey Poldi!” (expand to see what we were excited about).
The second video is a sustained view for several minutes, placed to background music, to mesmerize those of us who are susceptible. Think about it. This is a visual representation of the radiation that is all around us! Expand to full screen for best effect.
If you’d like to read about how I got here, the previous post describes the project of building the cloud chamber.
A view looking directly down in my cloud chamber showing a fragment of uranium glass. A small white streak pointing to 11:00 appears above it, which is a track of some subatomic particle, possibly an alpha particle from a radioactive decay within the glass. (Click to enlarge).
Years ago, after watching some YouTube videos on making cloud chambers, I tried my hand. A cloud chamber is one of the earliest techniques to see the paths of subatomic particles. It turns out that there is a natural background radiation of them and I wanted to see if I could watch these particles as they whizz around us. It seemed like a cool experiment.
The analogy I like to use is of a high altitude jet leaving a condensation trail behind it. You can see the contrail, but not the jet making it. In a cloud chamber, similar condensation physics is at work, but instead of engine exhaust, it is the particle’s ionization of gas molecules that triggers the condensation. The original Wilson cloud chambers used water vapor; modern chambers use alcohol, which is more easily managed.
My attempt to make one was less than satisfying. I recall staring at the mist at the bottom of the container and imagining that I was seeing patterns of droplets. Maybe I did, but it was not the thrilling experience of seeing the invisible that I was hoping for. I put the project aside. Until recently.
It is hard to describe the loss of a sibling. I have accepted the passing of grandparents, then favorite teachers and past professors, even parents, and now some of my classmates are encountering their ends. And whenever it happens, I am hit by my strong memories. It all seems so impossible that they could be gone… and gone for good. With each such death, I face both the loss of a relationship, past or current, and with the fact that we are all mortal, including me, and including the “littermates” I grew up with.
So with the passing of my sister Laurie, the middle child among five, I am slapped with an awareness of death’s proximity.
Like most sibling relationships, it was intense and close while we were children, sharing the same parental guidance, following (and breaking) the same family rules, experiencing family events together, creating family jokes, exhilarating in, and sometimes suffering the family vacations. We also spent a lot of unsupervised time together. Our diverse individual interests ended up enriching all of us.
As we became adults, the sibling intensity diminished as we expanded our horizons and relationships. In our case, a bond remained that kept us in touch, continuing to attend family gatherings but also sharing our life experiences as we found partners, built careers, and raised our own families, occasionally leaning on each other when we encountered difficulties or setbacks. Our interests may have been diverse, but the childhood and family connections remained.
An early example of those unsupervised times was when my brother Eric and I built a treehouse. It took days, maybe weeks of unskilled labor to hammer a platform between oak tree stems and construct a rope ladder to reach it. When completed, we had our sanctuary, high up and overlooking the neighborhood. Our sisters were curious, and after their persistent complaints about our “no girls allowed” rule, we decided that we would allow them up, but only if they paid us a nickel. This worked out well, right up until they depleted their entire allowance savings, after which we denied access. Somehow, word of our treehouse fee arrangement reached our parents. It must have been difficult for my entrepreneurial father to explain why we needed to return our take.
Despite being scammed by her older brothers, Laurie was one smart cookie. But her strengths were not the same as her brothers, who had excelled in chemistry class. This created a gap in the teacher’s expectations and caused him to say to her one day: “Why are you not as good at this as your brothers?” It hurt her, and when I later heard this story, it diminished my opinion of that teacher. Laurie may have gotten a B in chemistry, but she was a National Merit Scholar; I was not.
As children we were captive passengers on summer family vacations. Despite the natural bickering that occurs when siblings are held in close quarters, the fascination with the rugged landscapes of the mountainous western U.S. kept us in collective awe. We camped and hiked and explored, building a shared experience that we still reflect back on today.
Our connections as siblings continued as we became adults raising families. And when our parents moved to Idaho, we formed a caravan of vehicles, helping to transport their possessions west, but stopping to camp at State and National Parks along the way. It was an amalgam of families, each trying to keep their brood safe and under control. It was nearly impossible of course, which only reminded us of how it must have been for our parents to have managed us.
Laurie encountered challenges in her first marriage and eventually divorced. I recall them, but only at a distance. No one can know the inner workings of a marital relationship. I don’t know if I was able to help her during this time, but I do know that when I encountered marital problems of my own, she was extremely helpful to me. What a reversal of sibling support! The younger being able to counsel the elder.
It was not the only difficulty Laurie encountered. She suffered several others, perhaps related. While her first marriage struggled, her second thrived. Her boys needed guidance; she provided it. Her husband suffered liver failure; she helped him at every step through a complex transplant. She once sought solace in alcohol; she overcame it. When she encountered declines in her health, she found the balance of medications to mitigate them.
She more than once quoted John Lennon to me: “Life is what happens when you are making other plans.” This suggests that she was embracing the chaotic nature of her life, rather than regretting it not running at a slower pace.
Whenever something unplanned came along, she made plans to get past it. She was an optimist. Her Facebook page announces: “Encourage one another and build each other up.” This was Laurie.
She had a smile that always lit up the room, and she had a friendly social breeziness. She had the ability to make friends easily with everyone around her. As my “outlaws” can attest, she was a welcoming sibling-in-law to each of my siblings’ spouses. They saw her go out of her way to include them and help them penetrate the sibling circle. This was Laurie
Laurie was also a strong support for our mother, during her long struggle with COPD. She frequently flew to Idaho Falls to help her, assisting and relieving our brother Eric and wife Rhonda, the front lines living in the same city. This was Laurie.
In her recent years she has enjoyed her continued happy marriage. I am extremely grateful that I met her the day before her scheduled surgery, the precipitating event of her passing. She told me that it gave her great satisfaction to see her boys thriving. She was proud of them. She was pleased to be a grandmother to the son of her eldest, most challenging boy, who had found love, purpose, and family. She was proud of her boys who had become fine men with talents and skills, had built strong relationships, and maintained the sense and appreciation of family, a value for which she so strongly provided an example.
I will miss Laurie. This is a lightning strike for me. A strike that happened while I was making other plans.
I was recently presented with a gift from a young family member. He thought I would get a kick out of a “NASA Mission Control Computer Chip.” And I did, even more than he could have imagined.
I suspect that an entrepreneur had acquired some decommissioned NASA equipment and found a way to monetize it by stripping the chips out of their sockets, packaging them, providing a backstory, and selling them to nostalgia seekers, space history nerds, and millennials looking for novel gifts for their boomer relatives. This is not a criticism. This is a fine way to keep these components from ending up in a scrap heap headed to a landfill and instead make a final tribute to a remarkable human project.
To someone born after the Apollo moon landing program, the artifacts of those times must seem just that: obsolete artifacts. There are still computer chips, of course, but they are smaller, more complex, and come in highly sophisticated packages that look nothing like those of that era. Just look inside a cell phone.
My pleasure at receiving this gift was not just the experience of once again seeing a 16-pin DIP (“dual inline package”). It was also the recalled memories of designing circuit boards with them in the 1970s. At that time, I worked for a small company that made geophysical instruments. We had employees, mostly women with fine motor skills, who hand-assembled these DIP packages, along with other electronic components onto circuit boards, soldering them into place and wiring the boards into the instrument chassis. I contributed to the design of those boards by figuring out how the digital chips needed to connect to each other.
I was curious what exact chip from mission control I had received. When I looked closely, I could see the part number stamped on its top: MCM 4116 BC20, along with the manufacturer’s logo and date code (8122- the 22nd week of 1981). This part number seemed familiar to me. I looked it up and found it to be a memory chip with 16,384 bits. Now even more memories flooded in! This was a milestone memory chip in its day!
And it was the very chip I had used in one of my first memory board designs. I was quite intimidated because it was in a class of memory called “dynamic,” which was a euphemism for memory that forgets rapidly. In order for it to not forget, it needed to be refreshed. And I had no idea how to do that.
There are now many different technologies used to store data, but in the 1970s, there were only a few, categorized by type. Read-only-memory, ROM, had data permanently etched in place. It was good for storing data that would never change, like program code and conversion tables. The other major memory type was, and is, random access memory, RAM. This is memory that can be written with any data pattern, and accessed later, in any order (randomly) to recover it. There were two types of RAM: static and dynamic. Static memory, SRAM (pronounced “ess-ram”), would retain its data state for as long as it was powered on. Dynamic memory, DRAM (“dee-ram”), as mentioned above, would fade away with time, measured in milliseconds.
Why would anyone bother with memory that didn’t remember much?
Capacity. It was possible to fit much more memory in a DRAM chip than an SRAM chip. This was due to the additional complexity (transistors) needed for the static memory cell to stay, well, static, and hold its value. In contrast, the DRAM cell comprised a single capacitor, a place to store electrons. As a result, DRAM chips had 4X the capacity of SRAM for the same size or cost.
Unfortunately, the electrons on the DRAM capacitors had the tendency to leak away. This can be compensated for by sensing the memory value before it fades, and then re-charging the capacitor to its original state. It is a lot of overhead to visit every memory cell, read it, and re-write it before time runs out, but memory was valuable, and the effort was deemed worth it.
I knew little of these underlying details of memory chips in 1977, but I did know that it was easy to design circuits using SRAM chips. Connect them up, and they seemed to “just work”. On the other hand, on hearing about the onerous demands and complexities of using DRAM, I was scared. It just seemed too complicated, and I didn’t think I knew enough to take it on. It might be really hard. So I resisted this project.
Eventually, I had to face the task. I obtained the data sheets and application notes for the DRAM chip I would be using: the 4116, just like the one recovered from mission control. In the days before the internet, this involved procuring the published data books from the parts vendor. I then dove into learning about dynamic memory and how to manage it.
I learned the basics that I described above, and I also learned that I didn’t have to read and re-write every cell. The chip could help out with that task. Memory was arranged in rows and columns of cells. If I could access each row, the chip would take care of refreshing all the columns in it! Other chips were available to invisibly help with accessing each row.
As I learned how to make the control circuits keep the memory refreshed, I realized that my fear had been unwarranted. This wasn’t so awful. It was not over my head. I knew how to do this!
I would eventually become skilled enough to use DRAM chips in high-end color displays, sometimes devoting many bytes of memory for every pixel, an unheard-of extravagance made possible with the increasing capacity and dropping costs of DRAM.
I took away a lesson from all this. Something may seem incredibly complex, like the ubiquitous example of “rocket science,” but a complex field is not necessarily a difficult field, especially to those who are in its midst and have learned along the way. As one learns a little, the next questions to ask become apparent and guide you to learn more.
As a result of this experience, I became less hesitant about taking on new and unfamiliar challenges. Confront the challenge and the results are better, and you are better.
Sausage pressing in 1992. The kids take turns at the crank. An older cousin is handling the sausage as it is extruded from the press.
It has been discouraging to see the social disruption around us, the breakdown of norms, maybe a result of covid, but probably other forces as well. These ebbs and flows of how humans manage themselves are part of a longer-term story. Our individual experiences are part of a much smaller one, usually within a family with children, parents, and grandparents.
Some years ago, my dad sent me an article titled “The Stories That Bind Us.” It was interesting, but I took away only part of the message, which was that those children who had an awareness of their family history, by way of family stories, did better when they were released into the wild, er, I mean, into the world. The ups and downs, the achievements and setbacks, the triumphs and failures of older family members, became part of a narrative that demonstrated the arbitrariness of life events, and the pluck, resolve, and dedication of those family members to overcome such setbacks.
It’s a fascinating article, but I had forgotten some of the recommendations it made. I am always wary of correlations between some behavior and some outcome, say “people who do X, live longer than those who don’t”, where X can be anything, like “read a novel every week” or “be an amateur radio operator”. Somehow, I just don’t buy that if I read more fiction, or took up ham radio as a hobby, I would live longer as a result.
But in this case, there was an assessment tool, twenty questions, and there was a suggestion that family traditions contribute to the resilience we seek for our children. Traditions, even hokey ones, seem to instill a sense of stability and foundation in our kids.
So I was extremely pleased to host a “sausage-making party” shortly after Thanksgiving with Poldi’s and my combined families, this year including grandchildren! The last time we made sausage was seven years ago. Then Covid and other factors interfered.
This is a tradition that goes back many years in my family. My Swedish grandmother would anticipate the upcoming Christmas dinner she prepared every year, and make sure that she had a supply of Swedish sausage at hand. After all, her father would expect it to be on the plate right next to the lutefisk!
So she organized a sausage-making event every year, inviting her children and their families to participate, luring them with a delicious meal when the work was done. The sausage-making work itself required a coordination of tasks: the sausage casings (pig or cow intestines) needed to be rinsed and cleaned of their salt packing; the spices that provided the flavor, however minuscule, had to be measured and blended; the filler ingredients, potatoes, celery, and onions, had to be peeled, sliced, and chopped. And it all had to be blended into a mix of ground meat, usually pork and beef. There was a lot of labor involved in this project.
The climax of the event was when the ground meat, spices, and vegetables, mixed by the hands of grandchildren willing to get them messy, was placed in the sausage press, a large cast-iron cylinder with a giant crank and mechanical gears that drove a piston plate.
At this point, some finesse was involved. The casings were carefully applied and mounted onto the nozzle of the machine. And then the piston was cranked down into the press cylinder to force the meat through the nozzle into the casing. Two people were required for this task. A delicate balance of piston pressure and casing management was needed to make a proper sausage!
Most children don’t particularly care about the intestine casings (which involves touching them), but they all seem to enjoy turning the crank. So it is a frequent scene where the kids are taking turns at the crank, while a few adults are preparing the casings and pulling the sausages as the press squeezes the meat into them.
And this year, as we resumed this tradition, was no different. Kids being squeamish about guts, but curious about meat, is just exactly the thing that might make a mark in their memories.
I look forward to future sausage-making parties and the involvement of my grandchildren. Maybe it will contribute to their sense of family, that we are all part of their team, and give them confidence as they navigate their world. If so, I am happy to provide the hokey tradition that does it.
Dads and uncles supervise the sausage pressing as the next generation is introduced to this long-standing family tradition. My grandmother’s notes after making sausage in 1981. This is about as close as I expect to get to an authentic recipe for traditional Swedish sausage. It includes the quantities we used, how much we made, and the price per pound of our output. It does not include the full attendee list– a departure from her usual style– but does indicate how much sausage went to my uncle Bob, and to me. The remainder went to “we”, the hosts of the party, Ted and Grace Olson, my Scandinavian grandparents.
One of the works that came out of TAT Productions in the 1960s was an educational filmstrip. “Filmstrips” were a popular and common educational resource in the days of ditto machines and library paste. They presented a sequence of images that were explained by the teacher to convey an important topic in the class.
The project was for a history assignment. I don’t remember the exact topic, but I remember being pleased that I had access to a special-purpose camera. The camera club, sponsored by our chemistry teacher, Mr Van Wyk, had equipment available to its members, including a “half-frame” camera. This enabled and inspired us (Terry and Thor, the principals of TAT Productions), to make our own filmstrip. Terry did the heavy lifting, gathering the visual sources that we would include in our filmstrip, and I provided the technical effort of operating the photographic copy stand and the lighting. We had a broad range of materials and worked to present them in a coherent explanatory sequence. I arranged the camera position, lighting, and exposure, to capture each item in its best representation. We both worked on the script to accompany the filmstrip presentation.
When we developed the film and spooled it up to load into the filmstrip projector, we discovered a “production error”. Most of the images had been taken in “portrait” aspect, taller than wide, but the filmstrip projector was designed for frames in “landscape” mode. This resulted in the class having to turn their heads to make sense of it. We soon figured out that someone could turn and hold the projector on its side while advancing the film. And some poor student had to do this whenever our history teacher inflicted our production on his subsequent classes.
TAT productions went on to undertake more projects, forgettable to most, but unforgettable to us, including “The Commercial”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, and “Images”, all featuring fellow students and our teachers, conveying truly important messages to our classmates of those times.
Today of course, the classroom projector would automatically rotate the pictures to match their aspect. I suspect that somewhere, in the same spirit that created TAT Productions, there is a modern-day collaboration between students making TikTok videos for their history class assignment. They will probably also encounter “production problems”, but it won’t be something as simple as getting the aspect ratio wrong!
