Soccer and Pub Trivia

Ahhh, I am now settling back into my chair in my room, listening to "The Odessy" by Symphony X and writing of my first three full days at the bottom of the world. Let's get a few things straight right off the bat. A devorak keyboard setup rocks and you should all swithch over. Milk on tap is the most awesome thing ever. The Pope is Catholic. And the South Pole is cold. It has apparently been "very warm" according to the locals, with temperatures around -25 C. But it really doesn't feel that cold, first because you put on half a department store's worth of clothing, and second because it is so darn dry. If I don't cover my face with goggles and a neck gator it gets cold very quickly, but if I try to wear my full down coat on the walk to the telescope, I roast. Also, all of the scientists here works very hard. You pretty much eat, sleep, and work. As expected. And there are no penguines at the South Pole.

Ok, now that we have cleared some things up, I'll discuss my work a bit for those of you who are interested, then get on to the stories later. I am mostly here to get a feel for the telescope, see everything first hand, and maybe even be helpful sometimes. I am working on setting up the automatic processing software, which - you guessed it - automatically processes data from the telescope to make it easy to look and see if everything is working properly during the observation season. It should work immediately because it was used 2 years ago, but nothing works the first time so my employment is still ensured for the time being. Another major project that has occupied most of Carlstrom's time in the past few days is looking at fixing the azimuth bearing. This is the bearing that the entire telescope rotates on in a circle parallel to the ground - i.e. if you stay pointing at the horizon and turn in a circle, you would be turning in azimuth. This bearing started spitting out metal pieces a few months ago, which is VERY BAD. We have hired a company to design a way to jack up the entire telescope, remove the old bearing, and put in a new one. This will happen next year. But to get a sense of the magnitude of this project, the telescope above the bearing weighs 700,000 pounds. Yes, Seven Hundred Thousand pounds. Taking out the bearing will probably require cutting out the side of the building. The two guys who came down to look at the telescope and start making plans didn't seem phased, so that at least is good. I got to crawl around under the telescope on Tuesday looking at the foundation where they will jack from.

Yesterday I did software all day. Kind of a shame sitting inside all day in a location like this, but that was the work I needed to do. But there were guys working on the roof of the main station where I was working - not sure what they were doing exactly, but apparently it required a lot of violent banging. Whenever it became particularly ferocious, white crap from the ceiling would start raining down like snow, and we would all close our computers and go for a cookie break.

Today we needed to change some fans and change a hard-drive on the telescope. We docked the telescope to get access to the receiver. This is a pretty cool design; the telescope rotates down so the receiver sits ontop of the roof of the control building. Then all we have to do is open up doors in the roof and we can crawl directly into the receiver cavity, which is pre-heated by the warm air in the control building. I got to crawl around in there a bit and cause trouble.

Ok, STORY time. Tuesday after working all day in front of a computer and eating a steak dinner (the food is indeed pretty good), I felt the need for exercise. Remember that the South Pole is just over 9000 ft above sea level. And because we are so far south, the effective altitude is closer to 11000 ft. In the briefing sessions in McMurdo, they give you a scare talk to drink lots of water and recommend taking diamox, an altitude medicine. Anyway, there was a soccer game in the gym on the rec schedule, so I went. 3 on 3 indoor soccer. I launched into that game, and almost died in the first 3 minutes! Wow, I never realized how hard running at 11000 ft is! I guess that is because every other time I have been at altitude I have been in the mountains where you don't really run. I could start off sprinting, and after running the length of the court I would start seeing spots. I quickly learned to run sparingly. It was a fun game because we were all of a close ability, and the walls were in, so it became a lot like hockey. But oh man, by the time we had played for an hour, I was finished!

Soccer dovetailed nicely with the Pub Trivia event. There were 6 teams, and 4 rounds. In each round, the hosts would ask a series of questions and we would attempt to write down the answers on a piece of paper. Then we would switch papers with a nearby team, and correct them. The winning team of each round would get a 6-pack of beer. The event was $1 to enter, so all proceeds went to beer for the next trivia night. The first round was on money - curriency of India, how many dollar bills weighs a pound, how many dollars is an ounce of gold, etc. - and on names on NPR hosts. Unfortunately I could't remember anyone's name. Round 2 was on deserts. Oldest desert, percent of landmass covered by desert, the names of the planet and main characters in the movie Dune, etc. Thanks to Jared knowing the name of the co-star in Dune, we won that round! Given that there were only 4 people on our team, one was on dish duty and couldn't drink, and I don't drink beer, a 6-pack was pretty good for Jared and Dan! The third round was a series of 25 pictures. Each picture was from a movie, and you had to guess the movie. The catch was that in each picture, they had digitally removed everyone's faces - the clothes were "empty." Oh man, I was hopeless!! Jared did well, but was basically working by himself on that one. The last round was a set of 20 pop songs where you had to guess the artist and the name of the song. Again a trick - clips of the songs were all played backwards! I got Hotel California and The Distance by Cake, my proud contribution to the team. We ended up 3rd over all - not bad for the smallest team! Then back to work for a bit before bed.

The South Pole is probably one of the only places in the world where you can still stamp your own passport! I did exactly that, setting the date as my arrival date.

Today, after closing the telescope we made it back to dinner with 1 minute to spare. After dinner there was a lecture by Charles Bentley about when he came to Antarctica in 1957-1959 to do some climate science and mostly explore. They had to come in by boat because no airplanes had the range to make it. But the boats could only come in at the end of the season because of ice. So wintering over was mandatory. They spent the winter in these box-like buildings, then went out to explore the next summer. They actually found a mountain range that nobody knew existed before - the interior of Antarctica was simply largly unknown. Pretty interesting.

Thanks for your comments, and stay warm!