Still in Bozeman

Another vid reminder...when viewing in your browser, don't forget to go full screen, those four diverging arrows at the bottom right.

This is the 160th blog post since I started in 2011.

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A bit more on Genghis.  Because he conquered so much territory (map below) and because he encouraged some of his followers to stay behind in his conquered lands, intermarry & raise families, it is said that 1 in 200 of the earth's population today carries DNA that traces back to these folks.

 
GK did not have a well thought out succession plan.  A very long story very short, his empire fell apart in the 14th century during his grandson's generation.

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I mentioned a 2nd poem awhile back.  Here it is.  With no punctuation whatsoever, it took me several readings to group the thoughts into phrases and sentences.   Some of the capitalization helps.


Anzick Child, by Al Nyhart

Hunting marmots in August
near the Shields River
we found parts of you

buried in a sandstone outcrop
with tools washed in red ochre
Twelve thousand years

before you could tell us
of your ancestors leaving Siberia
walking the land bridge

into the Americas
Child of hunter-gatherers
you were too young

to forage wild plants
growing near your camp
or fear the mighty mammoth

kept near by the mountains
We borrowed you awhile
to examine your bones

then put you back into the earth
where the spirits of your descendants
celebrate your return

It turns out the above poem is based on fact, not imagination.  There was an archeological find in 1968 about an hour's drive from Bozeman.  Anzick is the name of the property owner where the bones and tools were found.  The last paragraph, referring to the child's return to his burial site, happened in 2014.

Here are some newspaper accounts of the events.

WEBLINK 1

WEBLINK 2

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My laptop is on a partial fritz; it's become glacially slow.  This is due to an intrinsic Dell Inspiron problem on some units whereby something goes wrong in the operating system such that the unit no longer recognizes the Dell AC charger as correct for this laptop.  So it will not charge the battery.  But luckily, with the unit plugged in, it at least keeps the battery at the same level.






To do that, it goes into the battery-saving mode by slowing everything way, way down.


And that makes doing this blog more difficult & time-consuming.


So...with the addition of this next photo, I'm going to suspend the blog, probably for the rest of this trip until I can get back home to have this unit serviced.



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The other night we met with a bunch of folks from the local synagogue at a brewpub.  They call the event "Brews for Jews", held monthly.  This one was special because the synagogue just hired a new rabbi (the former rabbi retired) so it was also a "meet the rabbi" event.
 
Anyhow, I wasn't much into taking pics except to be reminded of Montana's screwy alcoholic beverage laws and the power of the lobby.


We've all seen the rise of microbreweries and brewpubs...Montana is no exception.  The bar & tavern owners saw this as a big threat and lobbied the state legislature (that only meets every-other year, another Montana oddity) to place restrictive rules on the brewpubs.  One is to limit the amount of beer to be served daily to each patron.  They do this with each customer receiving the following slip of paper, the front & back shown below.

So to purchase that 2nd & 3rd beer, you have to present the slip to the barkeep or server to be checked off.

This, of course, is really stupid because these slips are all over the place, scattered on every table & in front of every bar stool occupant.  Anyone wanting to go beyond the three pint limit (not me or Susanne!) just uses another slip.
 
Another rule is that they must close at 8pm and yet another is that they cannot serve prepared food.  The food thing is easily gotten around by having the on-site food service listed as another business entity.


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On Monday, we head to Billings for four days, haven't been there since our first Montana swing-through in 2008.  It's east of the Rockies, more plains than mountains and near the Little Big Horn, of Custer fame.

With this, dear blog reader, I'm signing off probably for the rest of the trip.


Thanks for stopping by!!!

Getting Settled & Getting Around

I forgot to mention/remind you that if you receive this post by email, click on the title & you'll be taken to the web edition, complete with photos & videos (several posted below).

We had a lovely, lovely dinner the other night.  After ordering, I swore I'd take photos of the food, but it arrived & we dug right in.

I ordered Cioppino (an Italian-style seafood soup), Susanne had Miso Honey Salmon.  We shared a salad with chevre (goat cheese), beets & mixed greens, an unlikely combo but wonderful.  Everything was fabulous!  The best meal out we've had in a very long time and to think it was here Montana.

We've sworn to go back again before we leave.  (And maybe even take some food pics!)

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We took a short drive into the Bozeman countryside.  This part of Montana has been having unsettled weather; we experienced it during the drive.


Even in July there is mountain snow.  The lower ranges have snow patches, the higher peaks remain covered.

There always seems to be a thunder shower going on somewhere.

Not having a super-wide angle lens on my little point-and-shoot Nikon, I took a vid to show the variety of weather conditions existing simultaneously.

Note: You can't view any video in an email.  You'll need to click on the post title above "Getting Settled" to see it in your browser.


After this shot, we headed back to town and ended up driving right through the downpour.



We did our annual tour of the Museum of the Rockies.



Click here for their website:   WEBSITE


MOR is  most famous for its dinosaur exhibit, very extensive.  It turns out that the earth's layer containing the dinosaur fossils is most exposed in Montana.  Here are some pics.

Big Mike as he is called, is actually a life size sculpture of a T-Rex.

Here's another T-Rex inside. 

And a pair of Triceratops, a baby & a young adult.  Brown = actual bones, white is plaster fill-in.

Here's a shot to give scale to the size some of these guys can be.

There was a current exhibit all about Genghis Kahn.  The first thing we learned was the Mongolian pronunciation of his name...the first "G" is soft, as in "judge".


We took a guided tour, got so enthralled, didn't take any photos.  Major points:


1.)  Lived 1160-1227 AD, was illiterate.  His tribe did not have a written language; he developed one later.


2.)  Conquered more territory than anyone else, including Alexander the Great.  Employed superior military tactics & had a better weapon.  His bow surpassed the English long bow of 200 years later; could fire an arrow 100 meters farther.


3.)  Ran a merit based organization which is how he was able to organize so many tribes and build a large army.  To advance in his military command, there were only two requirements: You had to have a special skill and you had to be trustworthy.  Tribal/family origin & religion were irrelevant to GK.  Contrast this with European military commands that were hereditary up through WW I.


4.)  He was totally ruthless...certain death to any person, village or tribe who opposed or betrayed him.


Fascinating guy.



GRIZZLY TIME!!!


What's a visit to Montana without a (safe, well controlled) grizzly encounter?


Meet Bella, born in Alaska, came to this sanctuary as a cub, now five years old.

Grizzlies are not particularly social animals so although there are four grizzlies here, they only show them one or two (if they're mutually compatible) at a time.   Bella is characterized as a mischievous teenager who needs her own space.


Here's a Bella-vid.  Fortunately she's further away than this telescopic view would indicate.

Here is the sanctuary website:  WEBSITE


 
That's it for now.  Will send this on its way.

In Bozeman

Just to let you know, my desire & motivation to take photos & do this blog have been decreasing for the last several years, probably starting with our last Paris trip in 2017.

It's alot of work shooting many pics, then downloading them to the laptop, writing the text & uploading the chosen images to the blog.

Making it seem even more difficult is our recent move to smartphones.  It is so simple to upload the shots to Facebook and tap out a comment.

No, I do not want to encourage my blog folks to become my FB friends.  I have a quota (already full) and don't want to enlarge it.  My FB account is much, much more than what my travel blog would be.

I could create a FB group maybe called Steve's Travel Blog and encourage you to go there.  But it requires ongoing administration, approving new members being the easy part.  It's the ongoing review of comments & group member's posts that I don't want to have to do.

It may turn out that this blog has run its course & will just end.

So I'm in a quandary that hasn't been resolved yet.

Just giving you a heads up.

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We had a smooth, uneventful trip up.  This year, instead of renting a car (to save mileage on our already aging vehicles) we drove our new Toyota Highlander (bye-bye Tundra, you were a good, loyal friend for many years).  It drove like a dream.

The first day, Scottsdale to Beaver, UT was mostly state highways above Flagstaff.   Flagstaff to Page is a straight run through desolate desert with colorful red cliffs most of the way.  The terrain got a bit friendlier after Kanab, UT.

Beaver is a nice little town; stayed at the same Best Western motel as the previous two years.

The second day is alot easier, Interstate 15 all the way to the next stop, Idaho Falls.  Our motel was right across the street from the falls, not high, but runs along the road for maybe a half mile.  Turns out it's man-made, a hydroelectric project done in the '80's.  The falls were always there, just human-rebuilt to produce electricity.

Our last morning heading into Bozeman was back to local highways, with a drive along the western edge of Yellowstone National Park, along the Gallatin River in Gallatin Canyon.  It's a rushing stream flowing north with wading fisherman trying their luck.  That was yesterday.

Gallatin is a very popular name in these parts...Bozeman is the seat of Gallatin Country.  We have Meriwether Lewis to thank for this.  Albert Gattatin was Thomas Jefferson's Secretary of Treasury along with James Madison, Jefferson's Secretary of State.  These three gentlemen played a role in authorizing & financing the Lewis and Clark expedition to find the source of the Missouri River.  Lewis honored these men by naming the three rivers that joined to form the Missouri after them.

Turns out, the Jefferson isn't much of a river.  The Madison is a major, major fly fishing stream with the Gallatin not far behind.

The weather was great as we arrived in town, but turned stormy by mid-day beginning with a humdinger lightning & thunderstorm (rare back in AZ) and continuing off & on into today.

Not much to photograph except the side of this trash collection truck.

Today was gloomy with rain & thunder showers on & off most of the day.  Same forecast for tomorrow, July 4th, so that may nix our sojourn to Ennis.  We'll do our early morning yoga, then see what develops.

We did do Main Street today with a few pics.

A sky crane in a small Montana town is always a good sign.  In this case, the construction of a new building on one of the two adjacent commercial sites that experienced a terrible gas explosion in 2009, one person killed.   

How bad was the explosion?  Here's a photo from the local paper's archives.  Yes, it was in winter, March.

Buildings repurposed...this corner store was a bakery, now a jewelry store.  The most obvious are the former bank buildings.  I'll post a few shots later.

For the tourists there are lots of souvenir signs, many about Montana and others...life advice, like this one.

July 4th.  The weather continues chilly & gloomy so we passed on spending the day in Ennis but had a great early morning yoga class.  The teacher lets us spread our mats in the back of the yoga room and do our own thing.  So Susanne does her Yin Deep Stretch and I continue my Ashtanga Mysore practice.

Every region has a culture.  I love the Montana outdoor way of life.  Had I discovered this wonderful place a few decades ago, I might've bought a summer condo here.  I understand what Ted Turner & Craig Barrett (retired CEO of Intel) love about this state.  Of course, they have ranches & huge land holdings.  We have our rented Garaj Mahal.

If you're at all outdoorsy, you'd love the mag "Outside Bozeman", here's their website:

Outside Bozeman

And here's a poem from the current issue.
 
Meadow, by HG Moser

The gift of a mountain meadow
deep into summer
at rest by a winding brook
almost silent
a mayfly skitters over the surface
leaving her eggs
a mule deer observes from a
distant hummock
my presence a temporary curiosity
Awakened from drowsiness
by a foraging squirrel anxious
on leaving the pine grove
something we share with the
waning sun

There's another longer, even lovelier poem I'll save for a later post.

OK, not much in the photo department but I think I'll send this post on its way.

Heads Up...Heading Back to Montana

It's been almost a year since I posted cuz that's when we traveled last.  But we're going north again and will be blogging but I'm not sure how much.

We usually go to Missoula first, then on to Bozeman.  But because our Missoula place was already committed for our preferred time, we reversed the trip...going to Bozeman first.

Last summer in Missoula I explored a little known museum called the Museum of Mountain Flying.


CLICK HERE FOR LINK


As you scroll down the many photos, you'll come across a particular aircraft, a Douglas C-47 twin engine transport plane.  This plane had lots of history back when those photos were posted and the future was mentioned as a goal to participate in the Normandy Invasion 75th anniversary commemoration earlier this month.

As a C-47/DC-3 with much history, she was to become known as "Miss Montana" for this mission.

Skip to the summer of 2018 when I was there.  I toured the museum but didn't blog about it.  Here are a few shots from last year.

Her intro:

Her mid-restoration state, engines not installed yet.

A close-up of her nose art, copied & re-named from a vintage B-29.  The lady who posed for this shot came to the museum.  (She's 95 now.)

The cockpit & instrument panel.

Outside the hangar, getting ready for her test flight.

And finally, a shot of her flying over England, taken last month.  As you can imagine, getting her there was no small feat.  A fairly short range aircraft, she made many stops on the way over.  An oil company provided a full fuel scholarship for the trip.

The museum tells me she'll be back in Missoula by the time we're there.  I'll post some "after" photos.

Last Post From Bozeman

We are leaving in a few days, so this is going to be a collection of miscellaneous photos.

Lot of videos.  If you received this by email, be sure to click on the title above to read on the web.

Let's call the first group "Signs of Bozeman".

Convoluted arithmetic...

Street sign in Gardiner, Montana, the north entrance to Yellowstone.

The next two are window signs at a local investment firm.  After digesting the caveats, who would want to walk through the door?

OTOH, anyone entering is fair game, n'est pas??

A little bit of corn.

Susanne & I hit the road yesterday to explore a small section of the Yellowstone River, one of the premier fishing rivers in Montana.  It begins in Y'stone, of course, heads north for about 50 miles, then turns right at Livingston heading east, then northeast through eastern Montana until crosses into North Dakota and empties into the Missouri just a smidgen inside N.D. then continues its way to join the Mississippi at St. Louis.

We followed the river from Livingston to Gardiner and back using different roads.  The weather was not kind to us.  It was gloomy & hazy, all the color drained from the landscape.  So, oodles of pics I have but they are b-o-r-r-ring.  So here are just a few, along with some vids.

A day bad for photography is probably a good day for fishing.

Mountains in front of mountains in front of mountains.  That's Montana!

Here is a 180º pan on one side of the road, further down towards Gardiner.

And crossing the road facing the opposite direction, another 180º pan, starting with Susanne.

Here's a still from the beginning of the vid above.

Back in Bozeman, we returned to the Gallatin History Museum, the former jailhouse until 1982.  Here are a few shots.

This is the 48 star flag I grew up with, Hawaii & Alaska didn't become states until 1959, by then I was in college.  I remember going to movies as a kid, every time this flag appeared on screen (mostly in war movies & westerns), everyone clapped & cheered.  Not these days!

One of the things I loved about volunteering with the Scottsdale Police Department was that assemblies always began with everyone standing, hands over hearts, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.  And I remember as a grade school kid when "under God" was added & how we fumbled that in the beginning.

Gawd, I'm old!!!

Every town has a famous citizen.  For Bozeman, it's none other than Gary Cooper, graduate of Gallatin County High School, class of 1922.  The now Historical Museum is the building on  the left.

Susanne & I love to practice yoga when we travel.  Our best travel yoga was in Barcelona, I blogged about that.  Early morning yoga in Missoula was scarce.  We did one late afternoon class there.

But in Bozeman, our "home" studio (the one where we've taken classes during each of the last four summers) now offers a 6:30am class five weekday mornings.  We took a bunch of those.  Here's a sign in the changing area.

It turns out not a lot of yoga teachers & students get that.

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Let's do some of Susanne's pics.

From the Y'stone road trip...green, green.

Alfred!!!!!

Snow melt gushing from the mountainside from the first road trip.

In & around Bozeman.

Sunrise.

At Famous Dave's BBQ:

Cat walking man walking dog.

Since this is my last post, I'm  going to make the most of it.

This is the Bozeman Sweet Pea Festival weekend.  It kicks off with a parade.  We didn't wait around for all of it, but the cops were at the start with two captains greeting the kids along the route.

We ran off to the festival and grabbed an iced tea to share.  Paper straws, by golly...that's Bozeman!

I'm kinda pictured out and blogged out.  So I didn't take many pics at the festival.  We walked past one of the stages as very young ballet girls were getting ready to perform, part of the Montana Ballet Company.

Here's a shot during the performance, some of them on stage for the first time.

I had to take a vid.  They're not very together or coordinated...ballet puppies, really.  But I hope some of them hang in there, keep at it and down the road, put Montana on the map in New York.

Tonight we're heading up the interstate for a bit to have some walleye for dinner.  No one serves it in Bozetown.  I grew up fishing for walleye with my dad & brother, bringing it home, my mother would fry it up for the family.  From lake to plate in a couple of hours.

Update: We arrived at the walleye place, but they sold out earlier in the evening.  Had steak instead.

OK, that's it for this jaunt.  Now to the serious business of finishing up the sights, closing up shop, then heading home.

See ya on the next trip wherever/whenever that'll be!


P.S. This is my 156th post since I started blogging seven years ago.  Some of you have been with me from the start.

Bozeman's American Computer & Robotoics Museum

Little, ole Bozeman, Montana, truly a city off the beaten path (unless you're crossing Montana on I-90) boasts one of the finest museums on the history of semiconductors (the invention & development of transistors & integrated circuits), computers (both mainframe & personal), consumer electronics and robotics.

Ironically, their website is as underwhelming as the museum itself is fantastic.  I'm hesitant to even send you there.  Oh, what the hell, here it is:  ACRM

I'm going to pass on the robotics, not part of my interest.

For the rest of it, I've been struggling for days trying to map out a post.  I even went back for more pics.

On one hand, the museum traces the evolution of electronics from tubes to transistors to integrated circuits.  But the presentation is both spectacular and uneven.

The same for computers, starting with the ENIAC up through the Apollo 11 system.

And the PC, from the Altair 8800 to the Apple II & beyond.

For software, the museum takes you from Ada Lovelace past Mr. Hollerith & his marvelous punch cards to compilers & COBOL.  (In the early '60's back at the university we threw those IBM cards away by the hundreds but at this museum store, they'll cost you 50¢ each.)

So rather than strictly tripping through history, I'm going to post some pics from here & there, but emphasize that if you're ever in the area, you gotta visit this place.  BTW, it's free but relies heavily on donations.

The invention of the transistor marks the beginning of the age of real electronics and the fulfillment of the 100 year old dream of developing a practical computer.  The invention of the integrated circuit and the refinement of putting a computer & computer memory on a chip cinched it.  Now both desktop and mainframe computers became practical.

What's wonderful about the museum is that it has the support of the scientists and the industry so many of the exhibits are the real deal, like this panel.

Fundamental to any computer is the basic unit of information called a bit.  It can exist in one of only two states, commonly called 1 & 0 (zero).  From the storage and manipulation of millions & billions of bits, computers do their work.

But it is fascinating to see what it takes, electronic component-wise, to produce one bit using emerging technology.  Note the very short time span to make the transition.

In the early '60's the integrated circuit was invented and from that, the microprocessor.

The museum does a wonderful job of tracing the evolution of the PC, the personal computer.  Here are the early guys.

Maybe the reason I resonate with the museum is that I lived this.  I remember lusting for the Altair but it was $600 or $800 in 1975 and & had just left secure employment to start a company with two other ex-Motorolans & was living off savings.

My new business was looking for companies to represent in Japan.  I was living in Bethel, Connecticut and in the summer of 1976, there was a Computer Faire (they loved fancy spellings) on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ, a few hours away.  So I piled the family into the car & headed off.  While they were on the beach, I was inside perusing the display tables.  I came upon the Apple table and behind it was Steve Jobs, an ordinary, hippyish looking kinda guy flogging the Apple I, a fully functioning computer processing unit in board form, featuring color output.  I introduced myself, he explained the system & I suggested representing him in Japan.  We agreed it was a bit (more than a bit, actually) premature but we should keep in touch.

(As it turned out, the Apple I as a board was impractical for the consumer market and was quickly followed by the Apple II in a case with a keyboard.  The former faded into total obscurity.)

Over the next 10 years, the PC was developed & sold by many companies.  Here are the early ones.

On the left middle shelf is the Altair 8800 (grey case with blue trim) and below it is the Apple II.  In the middle at the top (with the red Verbatim floppy disk) is the Kaypro with its detachable keyboard, my first PC.  It came standard with a built-in modem, at the less than blazing speed of 300 characters per second...so slow you could watch the words form on the screen.  Back then I paid $2,100.

Below it is the Radio Shack TRS-80 & below that is the Commodore PET.  To the right of the PET is the Apple Macintosh.

Before we leave computer hardware & move on to software, one more shot, dear to me cuz I lived it.  The Control Data Corp. PDP-8.

In 1973, I left Motorola Semiconductors in Phoenix to join a very small company in Danbury, CT that manufactured semiconductor test equipment.  Their top-of-the-line system featured  mini-computer control, first the PDP-8, then the PDP-11, but in those days, still with core memory.

Having just left Motorola, I told the engineering folks in the new company that the emerging microprocessor would make these CDC computers obsolete, which it did.

OK, on to software.  The museum had a special exhibit on 200+ years of women in computing.  They focused on three.  Of course, the queen of computer software is Ada Lovelace, who envisioned what programmable computers could do long before there were programmable computers.

A few shots.

Ada died of uterine cancer just before turning 37.  She accomplished much in those years but her writings were practically her only footprint.  Except, the museum has a fragment of a letter she wrote with her full signature, very rare.  Call me goofy, but being this close to actual Ada is kinda neat.

The next lady featured is Grace Hopper (1906-1992), whose education included earning a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale.  

After Pearl Harbor, she joined the Navy and worked on early computers.  She has two claims to fame.  In 1945, while working on a computer, she found a moth stuck in one of the relays.  She removed it, taped it in her notebook with the notation "First actual case of a bug being found."  And that was the start of the computer terms "bug" & "debugging".

In 1949, she joined Eckert & Mauchly working on the UNIVAC I & II.  In 1952 she was credited with developing the concept of a compiler which translates mathematical code into machine readable code.  She wrote the first compiler called A-O.  She came up with the idea of programming using words instead of mathematical symbols & was told it would never work.  Longer story short, she was among the group that developed COBOL & wrote a compiler for it.

There's lots more on Amazing Grace as her subordinates called her but you'll have to come to Bozeman to read about it.

The third lady honored is Katherine Johnson (born 1918, still alive), one of three black students chosen to integrate West Virginia's graduate schools.  She did mathematical work in the early space programs.  Come to Bozeman to learn more.

Now for some of the other stuff.

There's an entire room devoted to cryptography, most of it on the Enigma, the WWII German encoding/decoding machine that flummoxed the Allies until it was broken.  There's a video re-enacting the process of coding a message on the "send" side and how it was decoded when received.

Here's a reproduction of an Enigma.  And extra rotors, authentic.  Only by seeing this exhibit did I come to appreciate how complex & ingenious this machine is.

 

A little known (I didn't know) historical item.  Thomas Jefferson developed a wheel cypher although it is not known if he ever used it.

There are other bits & pieces I could include but you'll have to see the rest for yourself.

OK, a sliver of irrelevant & irreverent Bozeman foolishness before I post this.