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Calender Germar's Monthly Updater

March 2006: New Mexico

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In March, I attended a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, organized by the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement program. I arrived two days early and took the opportunity to explore the "Land of Enchantment." On the first day, I visited the Petroglyph National Monument, and on the second day I drove to Bandelier and Los Alamos. It was my first visit to New Mexico and I was very impressed by the natural beauty and cultural abundance offered by the state.
 

Petroglyph National Monument ...
... is located west of Albuquerque and contains about 20,000 images pecked in stone. Most petroglyphs were done in the "Rio Grande" style, which developed around 1300 A.D. and continued until the late 17th century. The images give important clues into the culture of ancient people. Please excuse my completely inappropriate interpretation of the pictures' meanings!
 


Humanoid Cephalopod

Smiley

Warrior

Practice Rock

 

 

Bandelier National Monument ...
... is located about 100 miles north of Albuquerque and features the ruins of ancient dwellings carved into canyon walls or built on the floor of the Frijoles Canyon. The structures were created by "Ancestral Pueblo" people (the politically correct expression for the Navajo term "Anasazi"). The height of the development was in the late 1400s A.D. Some cave-dwellings are only accessible by ladders, which are fun to use.

 


Cave Dwellings

Village of Tyuonyi

Cave Kiva

Maze of Caves

Ladders

Kiva

Inside the Kiva

Pottery

 

 

After exploring Bandelier, I drove to Los Alamos and visited the Bradbury Science Museum. Amongst a large variety of exhibits it also features a Cray-1 computer, which once was the fastest computer in the world. It weighs 11,000 pounds, has a memory of 8 MBytes and can resolve up to 160 million operations per second. Any contemporary desktop PC is over an order of magnitude faster. The museum also has replicas of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki on display. Both weapons were developed in Los Alamos. It is a very chilly feeling to stand in front of these warheads, which killed more than 100,000 people instantly, injured many more, and initiated the era of the Cold War.

On the way back from Los Alamos, I almost killed myself: I was going 70 mph with my rental car in pitch-black night when suddenly a tire was lying in the lane in front of me. There was no way of going around and I only could hold on to the steering wheel and go over it. The damage to the car was fortunately minor and I could continue driving, but it could have been much worse.

 

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