What I may or may not have done on Sunday afternoon

The post about Friday became long, so I have started a new post for Saturday and Sunday. I know how short an attention span you TV-loving Americans have... (for Tom: that was a joke) Man, have you all watched normal TV recently? I can barely even watch it - they jump around to the point of distraction and I'm always waiting, and waiting, and waiting for them to get to a deeper punch-line when the program ends. Screw that, I'll go back to books!

Saturday saw me turning off my alarm, rolling over, and sleeping for 2 more hours. Oops. Oh well. I worked all afternoon trying to get some matlab functions to run, which analyze optical pointing data. We want to use several small optical telescopes mounted on the telescope to look at prominent stars to see where our telescope is actually pointing. Our final maps are accurate to around 5 arc-seconds. This means the following: The sky at the horizon can be divided up into 360 degrees around, each degree is divided up into 60 arc-minutes, and each arc-minute is divided up into 60 arc-seconds. As you increase the elevation the az measurement gets scaled by a cos(theta)... Why couldn't they have picked a coordinate system that was base 10? That would have been too easy. Just like switching to the metric system would be too easy in the long run... Moral of the story, we need to know where we are looking very exactly. And the optical pointing telescopes should help us do that, if they work properly.

After dinner, the whole group of us went on a tour of the berms given by John Carlstrom. The purpose of the tour was to look for large bolts that we needed for the telescope but were missing. We walked around for a while and looked through several tractor-trailer sized metal crates but didn't find the bolts. Then some people lured us into a building with the promise, "come on! We have beer!" It was the smoker's lounge. As much as I hate cigarette smoke, I like hanging out with smokers. They are the most un-pretentious people, and are usually just having a good time. That place certainly had character. Writing all over the walls, people playing Wi-golf, blasting music, good times.

After the others finished their beers, we left and headed over to the next party. This outdoor-indoor party had it all. The first thing to notice was the BBQ grille, where they had previously cooked braughtworsts and some beef-steak thing. Then there was the whiskey-shot bong. Someone had taken a cylindrical piece of ice 2 ft in diameter and 1 ft tall and hollowed out a 1-revolutoin spiral tube through the middle of the block. A plastic tube was attached to the exit, making for beer-bong style ice-cooled whiskey shots.

Pretty soon, out came a lady with a pinata designed like the old dome that had just been taken down, complete with rivets from the dome. It was attached to a rope that a guy could use to pull it up and down, and blind-foulded participants took turns whacking at it with an axe handle. It finally broke and candy was distributed. After a bit I went inside, and they had started playing music. A few people were dancing, and I can't not dance if there is a dance floor! So we busted some moves for the next several hours. Oh man was I over dressed!! Wearing expedition-weight long johns, insulated carhardt overalls and a long-john shirt made me one sweaty dancing fool. Fortunately the air is so dry that sweat evaporates almost instantly. It is hilarious watching people dance in the huge insulated boots. They just sort of clump around. I was wearing hiking boots, so things were better for me. I turned in at 11:30 - no worries about getting lost walking back in the dark!

This brings me to what I may or may not have done on Sunday afternoon. Sunday morning was brunch and more work and more work on the optical pointing software, which is working now. Sunday afternoon I was going to play ultimate frisbee, when two people who may or may not work on BICEP2 walked into the science lab with large packs. After a one sentence explanation, my frisbee plans were dropped in favor of a new project. I got fully dressed, and Bob and Fred (aliased names, of course) checked out a snow mobile. Fred drove with Bob on the back, and me in the sled being towed. We drove out to the BICEP - SPT building and found a spool of that cheep yellow nylon rope.

After we left the building, the OFFICIAL record gets a bit hazy. We might have driven grid-north out of the station approximately 2 miles, until we could only see the top of SPT and the steam from the main station. I might have taken over driving, though we can't really say because I haven't taken my snowmobile training (that will be tomorrow morning). It is possible that Fred had a paragliding setup in the enormous pack. Some have guessed that he put on a full-body harness and clipped on the ropes to the paragliding kite. I could have tied the yellow rope into the front of his harness with a Munter hitch on a bight so it could be released by just pulling the lose end, and Bob might have put the spool in the back of the snowmobile and tied another Munter hitch to a beefy quick-link on the back of the snowmobile. One could then imagine me inching the snowmobile out until the rope was tight, at which point Fred could have started running and lifted his parachute. If we got going fast enough, Fred could have started flying up as we towed him from the snowmobile, in which case Bob could have slowly let out rope so Fred could get higher and higher. If this were the case, then the Munter hitch would actually be too much friction, melting the rope, causing it to stick then break. The remedy for this would be to switch to simply two wraps around the quick-link. In such a scenario a party like this would make about 15 attempts, breaking the rope 4 times, and Fred would have made it up to 50 or 60 feet above the ground. This group would have decided to call it quits when Fred got too far to the side and almost tipped the snowmobile over sideways. Fortunately in this case a practical driver like myself would have let off the accelerator and Fred might gracefully glide down to the snow. We are not really sure what happened, but I came back to the BICEP building with Fred and Bob several hours after leaving, toes frozen cold, and a coil of broken yellow rope.

Good times man, good times.