1-May-2012 Trip - Pictures from Portales to Mescalero

[High Plains Thumper]

Hi,

I promised to send pictures of my trek with the 1987 Suzuki Savage. It
took a little while for me to find a USB hub that handled Micro-SD
cards, so I could download the pictures from my cell phone.

Here they are:

http://highplainsthumper.pcriot.com/2012-05-01_Trip/

--
HPT

[CS]

"High Plains Thumper" wrote in message
news:4fadb90e$0$24383$6e1e...@read.cnntp.org...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Nice. Good pics for a cell phone, too.

I hope you didn't go to the Roswell Alien Museum. You can go in for free,
and you'll still feel ripped off.

CS

[High Plains Thumper]

CS wrote:
> "High Plains Thumper" wrote...

>
>> I promised to send pictures of my trek with the 1987 Suzuki
>> Savage. It took a little while for me to find a USB hub that
>> handled Micro-SD cards, so I could download the pictures from my
>> cell phone.
>>
>> Here they are:
>>
>> http://highplainsthumper.pcriot.com/2012-05-01_Trip/
>

> Nice. Good pics for a cell phone, too.

Thanks. cell is a Samsung; appears optics are poorly or non-coated as
there is some washout when taking pictures toward the sun. I used Gimp
in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to edit; Color > Auto > Color helped to remove much
of the washout. It does a decent job without having to resort to a more
expensive commercial application like Adobe. To reduce file size, I used
Save As and downscoped jpeg quality to 28%.

> I hope you didn't go to the Roswell Alien Museum. You can go in for
> free, and you'll still feel ripped off.

Never visited there. Why do you feel it is not worth seeing?

--
HPT

[The Older Gentleman]

High Plains Thumper <h...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> > I hope you didn't go to the Roswell Alien Museum. You can go in for
> > free, and you'll still feel ripped off.
>
> Never visited there. Why do you feel it is not worth seeing?

At a guess, because there aren't any aliens there :-)


--
Honda CB400 Four Triumph Street Triple Yamaha Tenere
Suzuki GN250, TS250ERx2, GT500 x2
So many bikes, so little garage space....
chateau dot murray at idnet dot com

[The Older Gentleman]

WaIIy <WaIIy@(nft).invalid> wrote:

> On Sat, 12 May 2012 15:29:33 +0100, totallyde...@yahoo.co.uk (The
> Older Gentleman) wrote:
>
> >High Plains Thumper <h...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
> >
> >> > I hope you didn't go to the Roswell Alien Museum. You can go in for
> >> > free, and you'll still feel ripped off.
> >>
> >> Never visited there. Why do you feel it is not worth seeing?
> >
> >At a guess, because there aren't any aliens there :-)
>

> Not legal ones, anyway.

Now that *did* make me chuckle.

--
Honda CB400 Four Triumph Street Triple Yamaha Tenere
Suzuki GN250, TS250ERx2

[Rob Kleinschmidt]

Somebody once described motorcycle trip photos as
"and this is a picture of my motorcycle parked next to ...."

I do the same thing, but keep promising myself that I'll
figure out how to manage the time delay shots so that
I can at least put myself into the picture occasionally.

Nice pics though, and thanks for sharing.

[CS]

"High Plains Thumper" wrote in message

news:4fae47be$0$24385$6e1e...@read.cnntp.org...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm not a big time photographer, nor a qualified critic. If it looks good
to me, it looks good to me. Oddly, I have an old Canon 20D I got for taking
low light Halloween pictures, which somehow qualifies me to be pressed into
service as the Event Photographer at work. Seems their standards aren't
quite as high as mine, which are already exceedingly low. Fortunately I can
take several hundred to several thousand pictures before having to visit a
computer, so by numerical chance a few not-terrible pictures accidently find
their way into the memory card.

As for the museum, it's crap. Mostly pictures people drew of what aliens
might look like, old telephones possibly identical to those people might
have used to talk about the UFO their cousin's best friend's sister saw, and
a chunk of metal that looks just like the one that was found in the same
county as the Roswell UFO crash.

I thought there might be grainy pictures and shaky videos of UFO's, models
of UFO's, maybe some science stuff.

Silly me.

CS

[Vito]

"High Plains Thumper" <h...@invalid.invalid> wrote

Thanks. Casinos are new since we were last thru that way.

[High Plains Thumper]

Rob Kleinschmidt wrote:

> Somebody once described motorcycle trip photos as "and this is a
> picture of my motorcycle parked next to ...."
>
> I do the same thing, but keep promising myself that I'll figure out
> how to manage the time delay shots so that I can at least put myself
> into the picture occasionally.
>
> Nice pics though, and thanks for sharing.

Rob, don't know what happened to your message because it doesn't show up
with the Usenet providers, although it is in Google Groups. This is a
copy and paste of that.

All I had with me was a cell phone. It doesn't have a tripod socket and
I didn't have a tripod. Next time, I'll need to pack a tripod and a
regular digital camera for the trip. Then I can capture a picture of
myself with the bike.

I needed to get back before dark. My stops were short, to ask someone to
hold my cell phone was out of the question.

Thanks for the compliment.

--
HPT

[High Plains Thumper]

Vito wrote:
> "High Plains Thumper" wrote
>

>> I promised to send pictures of my trek with the 1987 Suzuki
>> Savage. It took a little while for me to find a USB hub that
>> handled Micro-SD cards, so I could download the pictures from my
>> cell phone.
>>
>> Here they are:
>>
>> http://highplainsthumper.pcriot.com/2012-05-01_Trip/
>>

> Thanks. Casinos are new since we were last thru that way.

How long ago was that?

There's one I passed by between Ruidoso and Inn of the Mountain Gods
Casino that I didn't capture. It is the smaller Apache Casino.

--
HPT

[High Plains Thumper]

CS wrote:
> "High Plains Thumper" wrote...

>> CS wrote:
>>
>>> I hope you didn't go to the Roswell Alien Museum. You can go in
>>> for free, and you'll still feel ripped off.
>>
>> Never visited there. Why do you feel it is not worth seeing?
>

> [snip good info on personal photography experiences]

>
> As for the museum, it's crap. Mostly pictures people drew of what
> aliens might look like, old telephones possibly identical to those
> people might have used to talk about the UFO their cousin's best
> friend's sister saw, and a chunk of metal that looks just like the
> one that was found in the same county as the Roswell UFO crash.
>
> I thought there might be grainy pictures and shaky videos of UFO's,
> models of UFO's, maybe some science stuff. Silly me.

Sounds like they need to redo their museum. OTOH, mebbe the info
regarding aliens is all folklore. Okay, unless I have a moment of
boredom, there are better places to visit.

One worth visiting is the Space Museum and iMax Theater in Alamogordo,
NM. SWMBO, daughter and I spent time there last year. Expect to spend at
least a half day or more there.

--
HPT

[The Older Gentleman]

High Plains Thumper <h...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

> mebbe the info
> regarding aliens is all folklore.

Maybe????

> One worth visiting is the Space Museum

Oh yes, absolutely. Blew me away, that did. Amazing.

[Robert Bolton]

High Plains Thumper <h...@invalid.invalid> wrote:

Mescalero...I like the name. Thx for the pix.

--
Robert

[@*o*@]

On May 12, 8:19 am, totallydeadmail...@yahoo.co.uk (The Older

Gentleman) wrote:

> Now that *did* make me chuckle.

I'll make you *gag* next time I'm in London.

[Twibil]

On May 12, 11:51 pm, totallydeadmail...@yahoo.co.uk (The Older

Gentleman) wrote:
>
>
> > mebbe the info
> > regarding aliens is all folklore.
>
> Maybe????

Well, there isn't much doubt that there are intelligent aliens out
there *somewhere* amongst all the billions of other galaxies, but
we'll never meet them.

(And they're extremely unlikely to look like the natives of Pandora
anyway.)

[Bob Myers]

On Monday, May 14, 2012 3:20:01 PM UTC-4, Twibil wrote:

> Well, there isn't much doubt that there are intelligent aliens out
> there *somewhere* amongst all the billions of other galaxies, but
> we'll never meet them.

Just curious, Pete - why d'ya think not?

Bob M.

[The Older Gentleman]

Ah. i thought you meant the aliens as relating to those 'supposed' to be
at Area 51. When they're not abducting and anally probing lone
travellers, that is.

[Twibil]

On May 16, 11:05 am, Bob Myers <bobmyer...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> > Well, there isn't much doubt that there are intelligent aliens out
> > there *somewhere* amongst all the billions of other galaxies, but
> > we'll never meet them.
>
> Just curious, Pete - why d'ya think not?

Time lag, Bob.

1.) Even if we were just communicating via radio or laser rather than
meeting them face-to-face, the closest planet with the means to carry
on a conversation with us is likely to be hundreds -or, more likely,
thousands- of light years distant, which means the time lag between
them saying "hullo" and us replying "who the heck are you?" is going
to be measured in centuries at the very least. Face-to-face meetings
are right out of the question unless there is a race out there which
has somehow evolved to live in much-slower-than-light intersteller
habitats..........if such things are even possible. ("Spaceship
Earth" isn't doing all that well itself, and the smaller the habitat
the more sensitive it is to the things that ruin life-support
systems.)

2.) If our world is typical, technological civizations are likely to
have fairly short working lifetimes before they collapse due to
overpopulation, industrial pollution, resource depletion,
environmental collapse, or some combination.

That means there is very likely only a window of a few hundred -or
mayhap a few thousand- years when both we and they would be capable
of intersteller communication, and they might well be extinct by the
time we reply to their message. Or -if they're very far away- they
might be extinct by the time their message gets here.

So if technological civilizations do rise and the collapse as our
appears to be doing, then the odds of another relatively nearby
civilization's working lifetime overlapping ours in such a way that we
could ever say more than "hello" and "goodby" before one or the other
went the way of the dinosaurs seems pretty close to nil.

Have a nice day! :)

[Bob Myers]

OK, I suspected it was along those lines. And since this is a more fun/interesting topic, IMHO, than the vast majority we see here, let's play with it a bit further.

>
> 1.) Even if we were just communicating via radio or laser rather than
> meeting them face-to-face, the closest planet with the means to carry
> on a conversation with us is likely to be hundreds -or, more likely,
> thousands- of light years distant, which means the time lag between
> them saying "hullo" and us replying "who the heck are you?" is going
> to be measured in centuries at the very least.

Granted, although the original question was about meeting the aliens, not having a long-distance phone call with them. It is certainly conceivable, at least to me, that we could "meet" extraterrestrial intelligences through means which do not violate the law of fizzix as they is currently knowed. F'rinstance:

1. Assuming it's possible to sustain acceleration for a good long time, Einstein does permit interstellar travel in reasonable shipboard time frames, as long as your travelers don't care that everyone back home will be worm food before they get back there. So someone from "out there" COULD come passing through any day now.

2. There IS still the longer-duration, slower option for interstellar travel which you mentioned. I agree it's less likely to succeed, but I can't call it impossible. Something like Arthur Clarke's "Rama" seems to be the best choice if you're going this route.

3. We could "meet" the aliens, at least in the sense of knowing of their existences and learning something about them, through the same way that we've
already made it possible for other species to "meet" humans - alien artifacts could make it here, regardless of how long it takes to make the journey. Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 all carry messages intended for whomever or whatever may someday find them. It may have been incredibly optimistic to do that, but they're almost certainly not going to be the last man-made objects to carry information about us to Out There Somewhere. It is at least possible someone else has done the same thing, and that we might find their version. Note that it's also possible that the artifact - which could take as long to get here as it needs to - might itself be intelligent.

>
> 2.) If our world is typical, technological civizations are likely to
> have fairly short working lifetimes before they collapse due to
> overpopulation, industrial pollution, resource depletion,
> environmental collapse, or some combination.

We don't know yet that our "technological civilation" is going to have short working lifetime. It certainly might. Or maybe Gene Roddenberry was right, and we all wind up being amazingly well-adjusted, singing "Kumbaya" as we explore the galaxy in sleek starships. (Or maybe we eventually evolve into the Q....or the Borg.) We just don't know.

On the other hand, you don't have to be as pessimistic about humanity's fate as you were for the "time lag" problem to arise. If technological civilizations DO tend to survive, we have to assume they continue to develop - and in that case, how many years have to pass before a given civilization gets to the point that it simply doesn't care to talk to those who are at the point they were long, long ago? A thousand? Ten thousand?

Of course, all of this moves to a whole different set of questions if it turns out that Einstein was wrong and the Star Trek/Star Wars/Babylon 5/etc. writers were right, and there IS a way around the speed of light limit. Then it becomes more a question of how far you can go in a given period of time, and how many others there are who are roughly at your stage of development within that volume. To be sure, that "roughly at your stage" makes for a very, very tiny percentage...but then on the other side we've got a very, very large number of stars, and presumably planets, out there. I don't think we know even a tenth of what we'd need to know, at this point, to hang a decent estimate on the product of those two numbers (along with a few others; the rest of y'all, see "Drake Equation" for more).

Bob M.

[Tom $herman (-_-)]

TMI

--
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