Author Archives: gaussling

About gaussling

Gaussling is a senior scientist in the chemical business. He occasionally breaks glassware, spreads confusion and has been known to generate new forms of hazardous waste. Gaussling also digs aerospace, geology, and community theatre.

Asymmetric Synthesis Cartoon

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I received an email from Academia.org stating that they could turn a research paper which they suggested into a cartoon. Well, what could I do but give it a try?

Cartoon based on a my paper of mine in JOC (long ago) on the facile synthesis of molecules with chiral, enantiomerically pure quaternary carbons. It was a synthetic methodology paper.

Considering that the cartoon has only 4 panels to it, this isn’t so terrible. The title of the paper did have some ordinary vocabulary in it like: the, of, and pure. Isn’t that enough for everyone? Crimony!

In truth this “service” is meant to tickle my funny bone enough to lower my cheapskate defenses, hopefully causing me to subscribe to their service. It didn’t work, this time.

The “facile synthesis machine” is up there with the “Wayback Machine” in terms of wishful thinking.

Latest Fake News

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For Release, 11/1/25.

Secretary of Defense Hegseth and the public affairs office with the Department of War in Washington, DC, announced late Friday that 2 policy changes will go into effect on January 1, 2026, both relating to the military dress code. First, unless otherwise specified, Fridays will become casual Friday. Second, ties worn by service members will be red and extra-long. This change has been in the works since 2016.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller was rushed from the White House outhouse to the hospital late Friday evening for a severe RCI, Rectal-Cranial Inversion. Members of his immediate family said only that this came as no surprise.

A spokesman for President Trump said that the East Wing conversion has already gone over budget owing to the late addition of state-of-the-art-secret doors and passageways. The secret doors are designed for the quiet removal of foreign guests who refuse to speak English.

The White House Office of Global Disruption has announced the decision to rename an offensive digit. It has been named “Trump” and it replaces the name “five”. MAGA rejoiced in the elimination of the Antifa-approved name five, e.g. trump, trumpteen or trump thousand trump hundred and trumptytrump. When asked whether or not this is a wise move, Trump replied that someone said that this will be the greatest change ever in mathematics.

Plum-Bummin in Leadville, Colorado, Director’s Cut

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This is an encore release of a much earlier post. –gaussling

After an insane week in the lab a road trip to the cool meadows of the nearby mountain range was just what the doctor called for. It was the last weekend before the family- one teacher and one kid-  return to school. Summer break 2009 is history.

We piled in the car and pointed it uphill towards Leadville, Colorado. The planetary atmosphere thinly blankets this insanely high mountain city. It was just what I needed to clear my scrambled mind. Nothing like blinding sunshine and mild oxygen starvation to reset a brain in chronic spasm from sensory overload.

Leadville sits at 10,152 feet above sea level.  If you doubt the effect on your stamina, just take a short sprint in any direction. Or just plod up the stairs of your hotel. Lordy.  All of those business dinners- all that lovely Cabernet and Crème Brûlée- and years of driving a desk have caught up with me.

Leadville is located in the Colorado mineral belt and began to populate with fortune seekers about the time of the Colorado gold rush in 1859. Some placer gold was found in the streams, particularly in what was then called California Gulch, but for the most part Leadville became a silver camp.

In 1874, two investors with metallurgical training, Alvinius B. Woods and William H. Stevens arrived in Leadville and analyzed the muds found in the local sluicing operations. According to A Companion to the American West, edited by William Francis Deverell, (2004, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 0-631-21357-0, p. 319)  Woods and Stevens found the heavy black mud so problematic for gold sluicing was in fact composed of lead carbonate with high levels of silver.  Woods and Stevens invested $50,000, quietly buying as many claims as they could and began hydraulic mining operations immediately.

By 1890 there were nearly 90 mines in operation employing 6000 miners. At its peak there were 14 smelter operations supporting the mines. Leadville was a genuine boom town with the expected mix of characters.

A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar standing at the top.

All mining towns have characters who go on to dominate local legends and stories. Among the well-known-for-being-famous rags to riches to rags players in Leadville are Horace and Agusta Tabor, along with Horace’s mistress and 2nd wife, Elizabeth “Baby Doe”.

To make a long story short, Horace was a struggling shop keeper who invested in a mine east of Leadville. Though it was salted by the previous owner to entice buyers, Tabor dug 25 ft further down the shaft and struck a rich and extensive vein of silver ore.  The operation was called the Matchless Mine, after Tabor’s favorite brand of chewing tobacco.

According to the tour operators, Tabor operated the Matchless Mine 24/7 for 13 years, pulling an average of $2000/day of silver out of it. At its peak, the mine is said to have employed 100 people. Miners were paid the common rate of $3.00 per day to climb 365 ft to the bottom of the shaft for 12 hour shifts.

Matchless Mine Surface Workings
Matchless Mine Surface Workings
Gangue Dump Detail
Tailings Dump Detail

The underground workings of the mine followed the vein structure and focused on sending concentrated ore to the surface. Buckets carrying approximately one ton of ore per load (my estimate) were tipped into ore carts and rolled into the ore house for hand sorting. The most highly concentrated and valuable ore was dumped down a chute for loading into a rail car and the gangue (or tailings) was dumped into the gulch.

An assay building (not shown) was on site to provide a continuous assay and accounting of silver sent to the smelter in Pueblo, Colorado. Unlike many other mine operators, Tabor owned a rail operation and had a spur at the mine for pickup and delivery of ore. Many mine operators had to employ mule-skinners to cart wagon loads of ore to a rail siding for transport to the nearest smelter.

In 1893 the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the collapse of the railroad industry bubble were part of a panic that lead to a crash in silver prices. Tabor lost everything and, as a respected public figure, was appointed postmaster of Denver for a short time. Eventually Tabor died at age 69 in 1899. Ex-wife Agusta had invested her divorce settlement wisely in Denver and lived comfortably. Widow Baby Doe Tabor was found frozen stiff in her shack at the Matchless Mine in 1935.

Matchless Mine Shack
Matchless Mine Shack

All of the digging from the boom time of Leadville has left an enduring legacy for those who live in the watershed. Much of the mining activity occurred uphill, east of the city and as a result, that area is pock marked with many large colorful tailings heaps. While the colors are interesting to ponder and sample, the ground and surface waters are greatly affected by aqueous extraction of metals from these piles.

If you stand next to one of these heaps, you can’t help but notice the smell of sulfur. The ore and tailings are enriched in sulfides and once exposed to air and water, oxidation occurs to make corrosive runoff. This is a kind of heap leaching phenomenon that will eventually exhaust itself, but only at the cost of water quality.

Boomtown Legacy
Boomtown Legacy (Copyright 2009 All rights reserved)

A Visit to Two Gaping Holes in Arizona

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Recently we flew into Albuquerque, NM, and then took I-40 to the Barringer Meteor Crater southwest of Winslow, AZ, and 5 1/2 miles south of I-40. This was a bucket list trip for me but maybe not so much for my long-suffering spouse. I’ll spare the reader of all of the obligatory selfies.

View of the Barringer Meteor Crater from the northern observation area. The brown roof in the foreground is a shelter with seating and with plaques commemorating those who own or have cared for the crater. Photo by Arnold Ziffel.

The meteor hit the AZ location 50,000 years ago and blasted a crater out of the local sandstone. The fellow who first bought the site, Barringer, believed that iron remnants of the meteor were buried within the crater, so he obtained the site by filing mining claims in 1903 that included the crater. He dug a 200 ft mineshaft into the center and drilled exploratory holes hoping to strike a rich lode of iron. Sadly for him, he found only sandstone. In fact, the fragmented remains of the meteor are scattered over the surrounding landscape. Daniel M. Barringer, a mining engineer and businessman, who bought the mining claims believed the crater was due to a meteor impact. It was many years later that professional opinions agreed that the crater was meteoric in origin. The Crater has been in in the hands of the Barringer family from the beginning.

Photo by Arnold Ziffel.

I thought this was amusing at first glance, seemingly warning that the Meteor Crater was out of order, but it was just for the water fountain. The visitor’s center has a large gift shop and an auditorium for a short video of the site and its history. The only path to the crater is through the visitor’s center. It is all private property.

The second big hole in Arizona is a whopper located north of Flagstaff. It is the Grand Canyon, of course. I had scheduled a helicopter tour of the canyon with Maverick Helicopter. at the Grand Canyon National Park Airport. They have 5 gleaming Airbus H130 helicopters that can carry 6 passengers each. Everyone gets headphones to speak in the noisy choppers.

View of the Grand Canyon looking northwest from the south rim. Photo by Arnold Ziffel.

Everybody has seen countless photos with all of the breathless descriptions of the canyon, and yes, it is definitely Grand. We took a ground tour with Pink Jeep Tours in one of their custom pink Jeeps. This was in the fall shoulder season for tourism so the crowds were manageable. Gawping at it from the rim was nice but to have a real canyon experience I think you have to go into the canyon.

Note: Some of the VLA pictures are duplicated from a recent post.

Once we completed our tour of Arizona’s two gaping holes, we pointed the car east and drove to the Very Large Array (VLA) near Magdalena, NM. They put on an open house for the public on Oct. 11, so I was obligated to grab another bucket list trip. Again, the spouse unit was luke-warm but I was impressed.

One of the 26 operating dishes at the VLA in New Mexico. Photo by Arnold Ziffel.

One of the 27 dishes is in the shop and 26 are in the field.

A view from under one of the dishes towards 5 more. Photo by Arnold Ziffel.
This is the machine they use at VLA to haul around the dishes when they need to be moved. When loaded it moves at 2 mph. Photo by Arnold Ziffel.

It takes the dish transport machine two weeks to reposition all 26 VLA dishes. The rails were installed to be rated for highspeed rail operations. This rating evidently ensures that dish transport is as smooth as possible.

One of the side effects of my 5 years of community theater experience on top of my beta-blocker high blood pressure meds has been that I tend not to get stage fright. I am likely to say things thar ordinarily I might not say. Beta-blockers have been successfully used to suppress the anxiety of stage fright. It works. The young radio astronomer tour guide kept referring to black holes in his spiel. Tired of this patronizing whizbang black hoIe talk, I asked him if it was possible for an astronomer to not mention black holes while speaking. He said he didn’t know. The younger VLA astronomers in the group were greatly amused by this blunt question.

When asked about the sensitivity of the VLA radio telescope system, the guide said that if you were out at the orbit of Pluto and used your cell phone, you would be the brightest radio object in the sky. Yikes.

A year ago atop Mauna Kea on the Island of Hawai’i we saw these radio telescopes. The photo does not show the howling, frigid wind. It was dang cold.

Radio telescopes just below the very summit of Mauna Kea on Hawai’i Island. Photo by Ginger Rogers.

After VLA we left for Albuquerque 2 hours to the north. The next day while waiting for our flight, we visited the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History. There was a similar museum in Las Vegas, but a bit smaller. This museum was packed with artifacts from the early nuclear age.

A mockup of an atomic pile used for Dragon’s Tail experiments aimed at finding the critical mass of the explosive pit. Lead bricks were piled up around a stack of what I believe are uranium cubes surrounding the fissile material. Some kind of radiation detector lies next to the pile.

At the time of the Manhattan Project, not much was known about the range of hazards of radiation exposure and dosing. And this may have been especially true for neutron exposure. Neutron activation was known, but the physiological consequences were poorly understood. Large doses of radiation correlates well with physiological effects, but in the low dose range, it begins to be sketchy. Radiation dosing tends to be stochastic in its effects.

Outside of the Nuclear Museum were numerous rockets and aircraft on display. Notably a model of the tower that held the Trinity gadget. On the lower end of the tower the gadget can be seen being hoisted up into the tower.
What a thermonuclear weapon looks like after it is dropped from a bomber by accident.
The actual cannon that fired a nuclear cannon shell and seen in film.
A photo after the nuclear cannon shell detonated.
Why a radium hair clipper? Because there is a sucker born every minute.
Early atomic age children’s literature.

On my 50th birthday I actually went uranium prospecting near Idaho Springs, CO. I had a tip that pitchblende had been spotted nearby. All I managed to do was contaminate the Geiger counter with natural radioactive material that spoiled the calibration of the counter. Pisser.

The top end of an ICBM with numerous MIRVs (the black conical objects).

A mockup of the top end of an ICBM with numerous MIRVs, Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicles.

Alert!! I spotted a Radio Shack store driving through Socorro. Driving by I could see shelves inside- it looked open for business. It was like spotting a wooly mammoth or a Dodo bird. I spent a lot of money at Radio Shack while in high school in the ’70s.

Drowning Gov’t in the Bathtub

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In this politically turbulent time, I can’t help but recall a quote from Grover Norquist in 2001. From Liasson, Mara (May 25, 2001). “Conservative advocate”. Morning Edition. NPR.

“I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”–Grover Norquist

The anti-government coup that is taking place presently resembles closely an attempt to convert the USA into a libertarian state. {How the Project 2025 elite will tolerate Trump’s authoritarian reflex is unclear.} More than just economics, there is also a component of Christian nationalism as well. From what I know about the John Birch Society, the combination of libertarianism and enthusiastic support from far-right Christian evangelicalism adds up to a theocratic-leaning anti-democracy regime. What’s wrong with minimal government? Some negatives are listed below. The six bullet points are copied directly from Google using the searched under libertarian negatives.

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  • “Increased inequality: Critics worry that with minimal government intervention and lower taxes, the gap between the wealthy and the poor could widen significantly. 
  • Difficulty addressing social and environmental problems: A philosophy that advocates for very limited government is criticized for being unable to effectively address issues like pollution, climate change, and other negative externalities that require collective action and regulation. 
  • Neglect of public goods and services: The libertarian ideal of minimal government may lead to underfunding or elimination of essential public services, which may negatively impact infrastructure, education, and social welfare programs. 
  • Conditional freedom: Some argue that a purely libertarian framework might make freedom conditional on an individual’s ability to afford certain protections or opportunities, failing to provide a baseline of security for everyone. 
  • Challenges in complex societies: The principles of libertarianism, which often rely on small-scale, community-based reasoning, may struggle to provide adequate solutions for the scale and complexity of modern societies and economies. 
  • Limited safety net: The minimal government model may not provide the necessary social safety net for those who are unable to work or are facing hardship, leaving vulnerable populations without support. “

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What’s appealing about libertarianism? Again, straight from Google and searched under libertarian positives-

  • “Libertarians advocate the expansion of individual autonomy and political self-determination,
  • Emphasizing the principles of equality before the law and the protection of civil rights, including the rights to freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of thought and freedom of choice.”

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What’s not to like about libertarianism in the above libertarian positives bullet points? In a more humorous mood, I might joke that libertarianism is the theoretical foundation which supports and normalizes greed. If not here already, we are approaching a new gilded age and Project 2025 will lock it into place. The lion’s share of natural resources and related industry is in the hands of fewer and fewer people and corporations. Theoretical question: Shouldn’t a child today expect that by virtue of being born on this planet expect to share in the resource wealth of this world? Every minute of every day, children are born into a world where its riches have already been hoarded by people or by entities far away.

The world is a hazardous place, and nature has many tricks to kill us. Our government in the US has been active in managing our safety and to construct frameworks to monitor infectious disease, dangerous weather, the actions of potential enemies, food safety, pollution, work safety, chemical and nuclear safety, air, land and sea transportation safety, and put in place and maintain the national highway system. Oh yes, and the US military is busy guarding our borders to protect commerce.

Over time our gov’t has identified ways to make life safer and healthier for all citizens, irrespective of race, color or creed. After WWII, the US became the global hegemon. While very far from perfect, the US has contributed to the health and wellbeing of countless people and countries. Where do so many people emigrating from their homelands want to go? To Russia or China? Until now the US was synonymous with opportunity and freedom. But the world has tired of US hegemony and new alliances are being forged.

The sly schemers at the Heritage Foundation who dreamt up Project 2025 seem to have put into play a populist movement that closely rhymes with Norquist’s idea. Make the unpopular cuts in the federal government during a conservative supermajority with a president who has risen to folk hero status. Presently, we are in a 2-year span between national elections. By the time the Democratic party has legislative or executive control, untying the MAGA/GOP web snugged into place will take a new Congress and a new president years to repair, if ever.

Trump is still in office partly because the bulk of the US population respects the national election schedule. In doing so, citizens are trapped in the stretch of history with him in office. This respect is in contrast to Trump’s disrespect for government institutions and the Constitution. His greed mentality, animated by his transactional approach to seemingly everything, keeps him pushing the boundaries of presidential norms. Instead of legislating his plans for the country, he rules by executive order and relies on the courts to validate his actions. The GOP strategy from years back of filling the courts with conservative judges is paying off by planting Trump-friendly judges in many districts. However, it doesn’t always payoff for the orange Jesus.

The viewpoint voiced by Michelle Obama saying to the effect of “if they go low, we go high” has fallen limp and become only a hopeful aphorism. The power of this statement seems inadequate to win many elections for liberal candidates. Part and parcel of the “Woke” accusation by MAGAs is the idea that liberals can’t stomach what needs to be done. It comes from the same playbook that includes advice to spank your kids and ignore the tragedy of gender misclassification. Dems, they say, are too soft headed to apply tough love.

In politics and religion, you find people who are devotees of particular doctrines that they perhaps do not understand clearly. If you are a devotional thinker, you strive to absorb doctrine. If you are an analytical thinker, you will make the effort to dissect an assertion and examine it for accuracy, clarity and implications. This is obviously a spectrum and “devotional” and “analytical” are the bookends of that spectrum. America is a mix of doctrinaire and analytical thinkers who may respond differently to a given idea or point.

The most effective way to outfox your political opponents is to make outrageous statements and repeat them endlessly à la Trump. An outrageous sentence takes only a few seconds to utter but can take many hours or days to research and prepare a rebuttal. Worse yet, the rebuttal isn’t guaranteed to get popular airtime unless delivered by a famous person like a late-night TV host, George Clooney or Gov. Newsom. We’ve become accustomed to outrageous statements paraded in the media in the form of a freak show. Everyone has watched satire and absurdism as entertainment. Superficially, Trump’s absurd statements seem to cray that no one could believe him. But people do take his ridiculous utterances seriously.

All of the legacy news organizations in the US media are owned by corporations. Corporations have both stockholders and stakeholders. Stockholders (owners) of a corporation can be the public, select individuals or the founder and/or upper management. The stakeholders are customers, employees, vendors and other organizations whose livelihood depends on the corporation. The management and stockholders of the major media outlets demand maximum quarterly profits (normal), so news directors have no motive to risk losing eyeballs to the competition for fear of losing their jobs. Newsrooms usually have a well-honed sense of what it takes to hold the flighty attention span of its audiences. Factually accurate and rational analysis, if ever delivered, are likely to remain on a hard drive unless there are some important heart strings to tug. News directors and editors are loathe to broadcast or print content that Dan Rather once called MEGO- My Eyes Glaze Over.

One of the attributes of stockholder ownership of a public stock is that the stockholders are very often like absentee landlords. They have nothing to do with the actual day-to-day operation of the corporation other than apply pressure on C-Suite management from a distance. To them, a given company is just a profitable parking spot for their cash irrespective of the merits of the company’s product to society. They have been given legal personhood but without the expectation of kindness and other human attributes. It’s hard to fathom how this might be different.

The popular news media are more accurately defined as semi-analytical show business.

While the news media have been bathing in the warm glow of its status as the 4th Estate, the inherent attribute of being a corporate entity with stockholders as absentee landlords is approaching the corporate bookend. That bookend can be found in the curriculum of any popular MBA program. Find the gap between the current state and the desired conditions and use KPIs, Key Performance Indicators, to close the gap. The more quantitative the KPIs, the more enshrined they’ll become in the C-Suite. It allows the accounting and finance MBAs to sit at their spreadsheets and plot impressive bar graphs with hockey stick projections of near-term EBITDA.

I will offer that if Trump somehow gets elected for a 3rd term, the USA as we knew it has collapsed. If a single party can manage to illegally keep a man in office for an extra term, then the government is very much out of control. At that point, what are the citizens to do? Sit and endure the new authoritarian state like so many have in history? Or do we take up arms and fight a tyrannical government? Isn’t that what the 2nd amendment to the Constitution is for? Something to think about.

Despite a Public A$$ Kicking, Putin Fights On

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The history of Ukraine’s abuse from Russia is a sad tale of starvation (Holodomor), banishment to the gulags and ethnic cleansing (1947). Newsletters are available from The Kyiv Independent and try to connect the present Putin-Ukraine war with regional history. This is an email publication that originates in Ukraine and is written by Ukrainians. They try to explain “WTF is wrong with Russia.”

One eastern European scholar, Timothy Snyder, has written extensively about Russia and its influence on Ukraine. The Bloodlands is especially enlightening. After much civil conflict with Ukrainians after the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin relented and allowed Ukrainians to have their “own” state with the proviso that the new Ukraine must be part of the newly forming Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR (or CCCP in Cyrillic alphabet).

Ukraine has a bad history with neighboring Russia dating back to near the beginning of the USSR. Putin’s goal is reclaiming the territory of the former USSR. including Ukraine, Because Ukraine has considerable productive farmland and minerals, and because it provides a land barrier to Moscow, Putin very much wants the land back.

Where are the Nazis that Putin claimed to be running Ukraine?

As of this date, Oct. 21, 2025, the Putin-Ukraine war is no longer dominated by Putin’s army on the Ukrainian battlefield. While Ukraine continues to gather sympathies from NATO countries and elsewhere, Putin has turned Russia into an international red-headed stepchild. Sanctioned into bankruptcy and pounded by the Ukrainian military, Putin continues to put on a brave face to the Russian people. The hybrid warfare conducted by Russia continues and is especially problematic for NATO states, USA included.

Even though Putin has won presidential elections in the past, the transfer of power remains very murky to those outside the Kremlin walls. Yes, a new Russian president could conceivably win an election but detaching Putin and the layers upon layers of nervous sycophants as well as his dark income streams will be a problem. It is a stretch to believe that Putin will leave office alive. Maybe they’ll find an apartment for him in Pyong Yang, North Korea?

Adding to the political complexity, there is considerable distrust between the Russian military and the security services, two of which in particular are the FSB and GRU. Some have claimed that the FSB would not allow a military coup owing to past animosity and distrust. Putin’s authoritarian state, while extensive, still is subject to the frigid winds of economics.

Revolution Underway in America

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Videos posted featuring a larger-than-life President Trump. A video was posted on Truth Social and appears to be straight out of 8th grade. Screen grabs are shown below.

King Donald flying a jet ready to defecate on his opposition.

Shit Bombs away!

This is straight out of National Lampoon. Way to show ’em GOP. Slam dunk those libs.

Is it even necessary to comment? I’m posting this primarily so my small international audience can see the adolescent work of MAGA. I doubt this was posted by the White House, though I’m sure it drew laughter there. To paraphrase someone at the McCarthy hearings, have you no decency sir? Trump loves stochastic troublemakers- when random followers do something political of their own accord.

For international readers, liberal and centrist US citizens are reeling from a rogue wave of an all-Republican power structure in Washington DC and in many ‘red’ state governments too numerous to list here, Plus a radical conservative majority in the supreme court and in congress who are implementing a strategy conceived of by a far right think tank called The Heritage Foundation. They released Project 2025.

Americans are trapped between elections with the majority Republican Party running things. Only the Republican Party doesn’t exist anymore. They have transmogrified into a movement for illiberal democracy. They are convinced that American democracy is a failure and are moving to install a government that is structured in favor of conservatives.

There is also a theocratic element built into the MAGA strategy. Conservative evangelical Christians are pushing to put supernatural forces into US government.

I can’t get over the feeling that the present revolution underway in the US is a libertarian maneuver aimed at privatizing everything in the US and putting into position a MAGA government workforce owing fealty to the MAGA President. MAGA libertarians (?) are convinced that every service provided by the government is a lost profit opportunity for some capitalist. This reminds me of John Birch Society ideas.

Democrats are engaging in politics, but the MAGAs are not. Theirs is a preplanned armored attack on liberal democracy and they don’t care who knows. This has been brewing since the Reagan years and has now been activated in a safe 2-year slot with a Republican super majority. Trump unified the people now described as “MAGA”. He promised to go after people targeted as responsible for “waste, fraud and abuse” of federal government services and money.

Democrats need to fight dirty for survival like the MAGA movement has, but I don’t think the Dems will. The MAGA movement was built on and is sustained by anger. Dems are playing by the norms of politics and are not resorting to the whole grab bag of dirty tricks the other side enjoys. That is my take on the matter.

Visit to the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico

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We had the opportunity to visit the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, VLA, near Magdalena, NM, last week. They hosted an open house for visitors on the 11th of October, 2025. After we visited the two famous big holes in Arizona, Barringer Meteor Crater and the Grand Canyon, we turned east to the VLA. Recently we toured the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawai’i and saw the optical observatories and NRAO radio astronomy dishes up there.

One of 26 radio telescope in operation dishes at VLA. Photo by Arnold Ziffel

Each dish has 8 antenna receiving elements clustered around the center of the dish, each detecting a different frequency. The continuous receiving range is 1 – 50 GHz. The dish antennas have 4 receiving configurations that they cycle through approximately every 16 months. Looking the secondary reflecting element of the dish in the upper left of the image, you’ll notice that there is a curved reflector. This reflector has a rounded surface that is designed to rotate, steering the focal point to the desired detector.

Looking at dishes in the distance from under another dish. Note the concrete pylons upon which the telescope rests. Photo by Race Bannon.

The rails on which the dishes move are of a “high speed rail” quality. The machine that moves the dishes is shown below. We were told by our astronomer tour guide that it takes 2 weeks to re-adjust the entire array of dishes. The “crawler” carrying a dish moves at 2 miles per hour.

The “Crawler” that carries the dishes into position. Photo by Quentin Quest.

Below is a shot of the proposed next generation of radio telescopes.

In the center of the photo is a prototype radio telescope successor to the dish design of the VLA. Photo by some jabbering old guy.

NRAO has an image gallery at this link. The Astronomer’s link at the VLA website has a wealth of information available. A link to the next generation VLA is found here.

Hamas Will Survive but Must Disarm

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Well, it seems that the Trump administration landed some kind of deal with Netanyahu and Hamas. Kudos to Trump. It took the intervention of a bigger a$$hole than the a$$hole Netanyahu to move the dial. In an opinion article by Shira Efron of the Rand Corporation in her opinion piece in the New York Times lays out some high-level thinking on the deal. (A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 13, 2025, Section A, Page 20 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump’s Peace Plan Dismantled Netanyahu’s Vision for Gaza).

From a Rand Corporation newsletter: “In Foreign Affairs, Efron says that the “tactical brilliance” of the U.S. plan is that its ambiguity affords each side a narrative of triumph. However, that deliberate vagueness cuts both ways. Sustained pressure on all parties will be required moving forward, she writes: “The most demanding work begins now.”

In the NYT piece, Efron concludes: “… that Israel’s longest major war in history, hostages held captive for over two years in unbearable conditions and many dying in captivity, some 2,000 Israeli casualties, more than 67,000 Palestinian deaths according to the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, Gaza reduced to rubble, Israel’s international isolation — all of it led not to the promised vision but to a negotiated settlement resurrecting the very ideas Mr. Netanyahu spent his career opposing. Their defeat is a victory for Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region who seek an alternative to prolonged bloodshed.” Shira Efron, New York Times, 10/13/25.

Shira Efron is the distinguished Israel policy chair and a senior fellow at RAND.