Advanced Directive New Mexico: Fill & Download for Free

Compared to 2018, technology in 1990 was downright primitive.In 1990, I was a grad student studying archaeology at the University of Texas in Austin. During the summer, I worked as an archaeologist doing excavations and surveys in New Mexico and Arizona. It is about 700 miles between Austin and Albuquerque, and we traveled extensively throughout New Mexico. Some parts of west Texas and of New Mexico were remote enough not to have radio reception, and in those areas the AM/FM radio in my car could not pick up anything. CD’s were still fairly new, and I didn’t have a CD player in my car, so I listened to cassette tapes while traveling those long distances. There was no satellite radio and digital audio or MP3 players were unheard of.GPS was just being declassified and released for use outside the military, but commercial GPS devices were still a couple of years off, and the thought of putting a GPS device in a cell phone had not yet surfaced. I stopped at the New Mexico rest area at the border with the Texas to pick up the latest New Mexico paper map. I also visited the National Forest Ranger stations in the areas where we worked and purchased maps of the National Forests to use for navigation in areas where we conducted surveys. I carried an extensive paper map collection, with state maps of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, as well as city maps of the larger cities in Texas that I traveled through such as Abilene, Lubbock, and Amarillo, plus a city map of Albuquerque. Cell phones existed, but they were exceedingly rare, and as a young grad student, prices were out of my reach.We spent a lot of time in the Gila National Forest and had our headquarters for a while in Reserve, NM. With a population of only 500, Reserve was the largest town in the area, the nearest larger city being Springerville, AZ 60 miles away. I’d had an ATM card for several years, but there was not a single ATM in Reserve. I remember rushing into town at the end of the workday and hurrying to the one bank in Reserve before it closed to take out an advance on my credit card, the only way to get cash for the weekend. The only way to use your ATM card was to get cash at an ATM at a bank as stores and restaurants did not yet accept payment except by cash, check, or credit card. One weekend, we traveled to Grants and had to conduct an extensive search for an ATM to get cash to eat in the restaurant. Although Grants was much bigger than Reserve, population 10,000, there was only one ATM in town, and it was only open from 8AM to 2PM on Saturdays. We luckily found it before it closed for the day. It was a treat going into Albuquerque where there were a lot of ATMs and some that were accessible 24/7.The internet was still used primarily for academic purposes, and there was not even e-mail, no texting, no Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram. The only time I had access to a phone was when I went into town and spent the night in a hotel. I would always call my parents on those occasions. To keep in touch with friends and other family, I wrote letters and sent them in the mail. I still enjoy writing letters today, although I seldom do it anymore.When I returned to Austin, Texas, I occasionally craved the famed New Mexico Hatch green chiles. New Mexico cuisine was just being discovered in Austin, and the green chiles were not readily available. Shopping by the internet didn’t exist yet, but I found a company in New Mexico where you could order chiles by mail and have them shipped in styrofoam container with dry ice. To order them, you could either call the company on the phone and tell them your credit card #, or send an order by mail along with a check.Today I live in New Mexico, and as I travel around the state, I can listen to music through ITunes or through Pandora or Spotify, all through my cell phone. The GPS on my cell phone can locate any store, hotel. gas station, restaurant, campground, or any other kind of place, give me directions, and then guide me there while I’m driving. I can go on the internet and order green chiles or almost any other item from places around the world and have it shipped to my house. I talk to my girlfriend who lives in Mexico daily, and send her texts or messages through Facebook several time a day. I was able to call her from a remote campsite in the Sacramento Mountains. Right now, I am on the internet answering this question on Quora. The change in technology between 1990 and today is mind boggling. If someone had told us the future back then we would not have believed it.

Oppenheimer was chosen by Groves to lead the research because of his ability to grasp the practical aspects and understanding of all of the interdisciplinary aspects of the project.“In June 1942, the US Army established the Manhattan Project to handle its part in the atom bomb project and began the process of transferring responsibility from the Office of Scientific Research and Development to the military.““In September, Groves was appointed director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. He selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory. This was a choice that surprised many because Oppenheimer had left-wing political views and no record as a leader of large projects. Groves was concerned by the fact that Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize and might not have had the prestige to direct fellow scientists.““However, he was impressed by Oppenheimer's singular grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb, and by the breadth of his knowledge. As a military engineer, Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering. Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" that Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. Isidor Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius".“Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On November 16, 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves and others toured a prospective site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. He then suggested and championed a site that he knew well: a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called the Los Alamos Ranch School. The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply, but otherwise felt that it was ideal.““ The Los Alamos Laboratory was built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, while many new buildings were erected in great haste. At the laboratory, Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries".“There were several leaders throughout the Manhattan Project. At first the research was based at only a few universities — Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. A breakthrough occurred in December 1942 when Fermi led a group of physicists to produce the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago.““After this milestone, funds were allocated more freely, and the project advanced at breakneck speed. Nuclear facilities were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. The main assembly plant was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer was put in charge of putting the pieces together at Los Alamos. After the final bill was tallied, nearly $2 billion had been spent on research and development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project employed over 120,000 Americans.”J. Robert Oppenheimer - WikipediaThe Manhattan Project [ushistory.org]

A2A. Though I’m not a naval architect, so you can take this for what it’s worth, the most obvious reason would be to maximize the forward-firing artillery capabilities of the ship, thus allowing the majority of her firepower to be brought to bear while she is on a direct course toward the battle.The Iowa-class is considered the pinnacle of US Naval artillery ship design, combining the armored battleship’s heavy firepower and as much armor as could be afforded for the weight with the battlecruiser’s relative speed and agility over the more heavily-armored capital ship classes.Compared to older battleship classes, such as the New York-class dreadnoughts of which the Battleship Texas is a notable surviving example:(USS Texas)… the Iowa-class actually carries one fewer heavy gun (aka “naval rifle”). The Texas, pictured above, had 10 main guns on 5 turrets, one more than the Iowa’s 9. But notice that amidships turret. In a chase situation, whether the Texas was the chaser or “chasee”, that entire turret was useless. These guns could only be brought to bear in a broadside confrontation, which required the ship to be alongside her target (thus having caught its prey), and also presented the largest profile of the ship to her enemies.This was addressed in the succeeding Nevada class dreadnoughts, the lead ship and her sister Oklahoma, ordered in the years prior to WWI. Both saw service in WWI, Oklahoma was sunk at Pearl Harbor and Nevada badly damaged, though Nevada was salvaged, refit and sent to the European theater as fire support for D-Day:(USS Nevada)No amidships turret, instead splitting that turret’s guns between forward and aft main turrets, with stepped 2-gun turrets behind each. Also notice the side turrets aka the “secondary battery”; these were smaller point-defense turrets capable of a variety of tasks including AAA and engaging smaller craft. It was long considered bad form in the Age of Sail for a larger ship of the line to engage a smaller frigate or sloop unless fired upon first, but such unwritten rules were largely moot by the outbreak of WWI; smaller torpedo boats and submarines had been designed and fielded specifically to take out larger ships. This secondary battery allowed battleships to engage lightly-armored cruisers, destroyers and surface-fighting submarines before they could maneuver to launch torpedoes and without taking one or more main turrets off of a larger target to engage the small target with extreme overkill.Less obvious but very important in the evolution of capital ships was the “all or nothing” armor concept; protecting the areas of the ship critical to its operation and combat functions with as much armor as could be afforded, while other areas received little or no armor (which would be useless against another ship of similar size anyway). This reduced the weight required to armor the ship stem to stern, allowing the maximum amount of armor to be placed where it would do the most good, while non-critical compartments could simply be sealed (if below the waterline) and left to flood if breached by artillery or torpedo.This basic pattern of 2 and 2 turrets either end of the mast/conning tower continued through the “Standard-type” battleship classes, including the Pennsylvania and her sister Arizona, both of which were larger and had 12 total main guns over the Nevada’s 10. The New Mexico and her sisters Mississippi and Idaho kept the Pennsylvania’s main gun arrangement with changes to the secondary battery of turrets aside the mast, and this continued into the Tennessee and California (considered their own class but primarily an improved New Mexico class), as well as the Colorado and her sisters Maryland and West Virginia, which reduced their total guns from twelve to eight in return for upgrading from 14″ to 16″ barrels.(The New-Mexico-class USS Mississippi)The primary successor class to the Colorados, however, departed from this philosophy. The North Carolina class, ordered after the initial South Dakota class was cancelled, went through several design iterations on paper, with much debate over the role of the battleship in the age of the aircraft carrier. At least one proposed design for the class was a hybrid, with two rearward turrets and no fore turrets, instead using three catapults to launch planes. It was eventually decided to keep the intent of the new class as primarily artillery-based, though the class did include two rear catapults for scouts and torpedo bombers. In the meantime, fleet admirals were also asking for a faster ship that could still survive against enemy armored battleships. The lightly-armored battlecruiser of WWI could dish out damage, but couldn’t take it, and the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 treated these ships as equal to battleships in limiting total “capital ships” of this size and displacement, so admirals currently had to choose between the ability to steam at high speed toward an engagement and the ability to survive said engagement when targeted by a heavier dreadnought-style battleship. That choice, argued admirals, was a false one; there had to be a way to get an acceptable combination of speed, survivability and firepower into one ship.The result was the “fast battleship”, a ship class blending the armor and survivability of a standard battleship, the speed of a battlecruiser and the firepower of both. The North Carolina and her sister Washington began the era of the fast battleship, commissioned just prior to the outbreak of WWII:(USS North Carolina in 1942)Notice the aft armament; the fast battleship gave up a rearward turret to save the weight required to armor the ship to true battleship standards. At first, this was simply written off as the cost of the increased performance, but improvements in rate of fire with advances in loading apparatus would eventually close the gap, giving the fast battleships much the same total firepower in terms of shells per minute in any direction as their predecessors.The fast battleship concept proved to be the wave of the future in both theaters, and while the aircraft carrier had proven its worth in the Pacific and made up the lion’s share of American capital shipbuilding of the war years, the North Carolina and her sister Washington would set the pattern for the remaining battleships of the U.S. fleet, including the reimagined South Dakota class (4 ships: lead, Indiana, Massachusetts and Alabama):(USS Massachusetts in 1944)…and their successors, the four-ship Iowa class, which would serve from WWII into the Gulf War years.(USS Iowa demonstrating her main guns in a broadside after being pulled out of mothballs in 1984)So, the summary answer is that the Iowa-class derived from the older two “fast battleship” classes of the WWII era, with the ship design being based on a combination of speed and armor, the firepower concentrated in fewer turrets and mostly forward of the conning tower. This arrangement of two forward and one aft turret saved weight (and deck space; notice the Iowa’s aft main deck with the helicopter pad for personnel and cargo transfers and ASW capabilities) which allowed the fast battleships to earn their title over the slower “standard battleship” of the WWI and interwar years.Despite numerous refits to the Iowa and her last remaining sister the Missouri up through the First Gulf War, main gun turrets are not just something you drop into a ship even if it looks like there’s deck space:The turrets themselves descend through most of the superstructure of the ship, which (not obvious while in the water) has a much shallower stern draft for a combination of hydrodynamic efficiency and less disturbed water flow to the screws. The main gun’s turret is a fully-self-contained weapons system including the loading apparatus and the magazine of projectiles and powder, and as such it doesn’t just sit on top of the deck. Putting a fourth turret where you think one might go would upset the crew quite a bit, as you’d be sinking a huge circle right into their mess and bunks: