First light for BICEP2

Hello y'all. My apologies for not writing in a week. Let me catch you up. This past week Ross the winter-over from last year came in for a two week stint to catch up this year's winter-overs Dan and Dana on all of the things that they did last winter. Ross is british and very good with computers. Last winter he wrote a very good collection of programs that deal with automatically processing the data from SPT. For those of you who are interested in that kind of thing, I'll describe it briefly. The crontab job calls several bash scripts every couple of hours. The first bash script updates a Mysql database which keeps track of numerous meta-data things including which fields and sources in the sky have been observed at what times, and what of that data has been processed. The other bash scripts collect the appropriate arguments then call python scripts to process the data. These python scripts are really just wrappers over underlying IDL procedures, and they interface with the Mysql database to figure out what needs to be processed and collect arguments. The IDL jobs are then collected and sumbitted to a Sun Grid Engine, which handles queueing jobs, making sure the processors do not get overloaded, and collecting the output. Once data is processed, the output is written and the Mysql database is updated. It is pretty cool and works well, and it all makes sense once you wrap your head around it all. Ross is coming back to Chicago after being at pole to work as a post-doc for Carlstrom and the SPT group.



In terms of work for myself this past week, I have spent a fair amount of time looking at Ross' autoprocessing procedure to understand how it all fits together. One hinderance is that I have not worked with Mysql at all before, and have only written one program in Python 5 years ago. So I am learning those languages as I go. But as my uncle says, once you know a programming language well - which for me is C++ - you can pick up enough to understand programs in other languages pretty quickly.

Besides that, most of my time has been spent writing the new scan and schedule files for the next year's CMB observations. These are the files that tell the telescope where to point and how to move. The files are pretty high-level, meaning that there are already a bunch of functions that take care of the details and I just invoke commands like "acquire($source)" which tells the telescope to track a given source that is defined in a configuration file elsewhere. We will test out my programs at the beginning of this week.

Beyond my immediate work, the most interesting thing that happened this week was the BICEP science lecture last monday. As most of you know, I worked on BICEP2 last year, and they have been deploying the new instrument this season. Things are going well for them, and at the lecture on Monday they presented their first CMB field maps. It is pretty incredible to see how everything comes together to produce maps in the end. I think back to one year ago when I was still struggling to understand the gcp (Generic Control Program) so I could get it to talk to the detector-readout electronics. I remember how incredulous and excited I was the first time I saw data from the detectors actually propagate all the way up through the gcp and show up in plots in the Viewer in March of last year. Then I remember fighting data-frame packing last summer, which is required to match weather and position information from the Antenna side with data from the detector side. To see it all come together is pretty fantastic, even though I haven't worked on the project since September. It was especially cool to see the first BICEP2 CMB field showing temperature anisotropies that had been measured in 20 hours of observation side-by-side with the same patch of sky as measured by WMAP over 5 years - they looked virtually identical. Now this is not a fair comparison because WMAP had been measuring the entire sky in those 5 years where BICEP had spent 20 hours on that small patch, but it was still cool. The talk was dedicated to Andrew Lange (see last post).



Finally, the week in recreation! Did I tell you all that there is a climbing gym here? Well, there is. It is a small bouldering cave, but it is enough to have fun and stay in shape. And there one guy, Orin, who is climbing stronger than I am and puts up problems that I can make progess on but have to work at a lot. That is totally awesome, having people around climbing harder than you, which makes it easier to push yourself. I put up an awesome problem last weekend, and was finally able to send it this Saturday. The crux went from this small crimp to a spok-grip on a sloper to a thin pocket... Hmm, I need to include a beta video on this blog! Also awesome, Orin has time off in NZ at the same time that I do, so we are planning on climbing together for two weeks there. Hopefully some long rock routes and maybe some mountaineering stuff!

I've also been playing a bunch of volleyball and some soccer. We played volley ball for almost 4 hours on Friday evening! Soccer is a killer on the lungs, so less people play. Last Wednesday there were only 4 of us, so we played 2 on 2. Brutal! At this altutude, we played for 10 "quarters" followed by breaks - that was all that we could handle.

Every Wednesday is Pub Trivia. There are usually 4 rounds, and the winners of each round get a 6-pack of beer. It works out well because I don't know hardly any of the questions, but I don't drink our team's beer when we win either! Lots of pop-culture questions about movies and popular music, with some random questions like the round on robots last time. This coming week the SPT team is hosting, and I am putting together a round on mountains. I'll post my questions here, and see how many you guys can guess!

Back to work on this cloudy Monday morning. I hope that all of you have a brilliant day!

Darkness and Light

This is not a light blog entry. Life is not always happy.

I will start with the light. It is unnerving how well our experiment is going this season. We have finished all major maintenance jobs, and are already back to observing clusters. Though the foreground contamination for CMB fields is much larger when the sun is up, we can still get useful data by looking at specific galaxy clusters that we already know are there. It is especially useful to get data with out 90 GHz detectors, because these were not operational during our first full season (2008) and there are numerous clusters that do not have good 90 GHz data. We observe in three frequency bands: 90, 150, and 220 GHz. The reason for this is that the SZ effect (see older posts for explanation) acts differently at these different frequencies. The Thermal SZ (tSZ) has a null at 220 GHz, meaning that there is no effect there. By using a linear combination of the data at 150 and 220 GHz, we are the first group ever to successfully separated out the tSz power specturm. By using 90 GHz, we expect to be able to also separate out the Kinetic SZ (kSZ) power spectrum. Briefly, the tSZ is caused by Compton scattering of CMB photons by hot plasma gravitationally bound to massive, collapsed objects such as galaxy clusters. The kSZ is caused by a Doppler Shift when ionized matter is moving with respect to the rest frame of the CMB.

Also exciting in the realm of science is I just read a paper forwarded by a friend about phenomenological quantum gravity and possibilities of experimental tests. Quantum gravity is probably the one thing that gets me the most excited in all of physics, and the number one problem with figuring out how it works is the current lack of experimental evidence. Apparently, if the theory of quantum gravity violates Parity or Charge-Parity or time reversal symmetry, there could be observable consequences in the CMB spectrum, specifically in correlations in the Temperature and parity odd polarization modes, or B-modes. BICEP2 and Keck, which I worked on up to this past September are specifically designed to look for B-modes. This could be very exciting!

Yesterday was Saturday, and after working all afternoon the evening was fun. There was a film festival of films made by people here at the Pole. Some were artsy, which didn't suit the drunken crowd. But there were two thoroughly entertaining ones. The first was "I'm at the Pole," a music video that was a parody on a rap song that I believe is called "I'm on the boat." Don't know who the original is by, but those who knew it said that the pole video was darn close to the original. It was hilarious! The last film was also quite good. It followed 2 convicts coming to the South Pole, which in the film had been turned from a science base into a prison. They meet a sympathetic prisoner and try to escape, to no avail. It was quite good.

And sure enough, Saturday night meant there was a dance party to do to thrown by Ice Cube, the neutrino detector project. The theme was trashy euro club music, and some of the music took me straight back to a disco club in Grenoble, France. I love dancing.

However, Saturday was not all happy. I woke up late, at 11:40am in time to go straight to lunch. The 4 of us on SPT were sitting in the lunch room eating when Phil from BICEP came in and sat down next to us. "Have you heard about Andrew Lange? He committed suicide this morning." I am still shocked. Andrew Lange was the Principle Investigator on the BICEP and Keck-Array projects and the chair of the physics and astronomy department at Caltech. He was a close colleague of almost all of us, and Justus' graduate adviser. I have met him on several occasions during my trips to Caltech. Lunch was very quiet for the BICEP - SPT group.

I will never know the reasons behind Dr Lange's action. It has caused me some serious reflection for the past two days. Dr Lange was a career role-model for many of us. He has had a wildly successful academic career. So what went wrong? How can we learn from this? The first thought I have is about the necessity of a balanced life. Work is great. There is no substitute for hard work. But life is about balance. Being able to balance your work and your play. The world of academics does poorly at emphasizing the need for this balance. It always pushes for you to work harder, longer, more efficiently, better. I strive for the ever-illusive and undefined goal of perfection, and hence I thrive in this atmosphere where I can push myself to always improve. However, there is a limit that academia does not respect. There is a necessity for other things in life beyond the ivory tower of knowledge. There is a need for spiritual qualities - love, joy, peace. A need for personal time alone with your thoughts. In my current thinking, this is one thing that recreation and things outside of work, outside of science achieve.

Another thing that I have been thinking about is how much our lives are inter-twined with those of other people. Dr Lange's death has caused ripples to flow through our community here at the South Pole, and I am sure that I am seeing only the tip of the iceberg as to what effect this tragedy will have on the people that intersected with Andrew's life. I don't know what will happen to the BICEP and Keck-Array grants, thought presumably the other scientists on the project will take this over. Justus will have to get another adviser. Caltech loses a valuable faculty member. And this is all professional - I don't know anything about Dr Lange's family and personal relations.

This loss is such a waste. In the rest of Dr. Lange's life, what other good might he have brought about, how many students could he have inspired, what knowledge might he have unearthed for humanity? The Dalai Lama says that life is about helping other people, and the best way to do this consistently is to develop a global consciousness, and awareness of how your actions affect everyone and everything around you. By removing yourself from this life, you can no longer benefit others. So what do I take away related to this? I need to strive always harder to be aware of how my actions affect others, and modify those actions to benefit others rather than only serving my own self-interest. I don't mean to sound callous, I'm just thinking aloud.

How should we deal with tragedy like this? The response of the people here at Pole was to go back to work. In one sense this is just ignoring the situation, a form of denial. One of us lamented how working too hard may have been the cause of problems that lead to Dr. Lange's actions, yet when this happened we all just went back to work. Alternately, I similarly just went back to work, which for me was the best way to deal with it. This is because life moves on. I think that it is necessary to learn from what happened, but you must get up and keep on trudging. One thing in particular I have been thinking about is when/if I become a professor, how can I effectively advise those under me to take care of themselves and keep from backing themselves into a corner that they feel they have no escape from? I will always stress the importance of hard work, but I also want to impress upon those around me and myself the need to maintain balance, and the need to take care of oneself both physically and mentally.

Life is sacred. We tend to forget how fragile our grip on this experience is until that grip is broken in an instant. Please take care of yourselves, and do what you can to take care of those around you. May peace be with you.

Random snippets in the life of a Polie.

I sleep like a rock star. Well, minus the excess of loose women and the drug-induced haze. Ok, maybe I don't steep anything like a rock star. But I sleep like a rock. Apparently the altitude affects many people's sleep here at Pole - remember the effective altitude is usually above 10,000 feet. Many people complain, "man, I'm tired. I didn't sleep well last night - kept waking up every 3 hours." I always say, "I was sleeping like a champion until my alarm went off."

However, monday morning I slept like a champion even while my alarm was going off. I wanted to get up at 7:30, because I had a snow mobile test at 8:30. I have no sense of time in my room, because there are no windows (this is a good thing) and it is always dark when the lights are off. At some point during Sunday night I woke up enough to think, "I should look at the time." My watch read 10:30. Wait, 10:30pm? I went to bed after midnight! My mental gears strained to clear the fog in my head, following the light of my wrist watch in the distance. It gradually drew closer, and I could just make out the digits "10:31 am" AM!!!!!! What!? The fog lifted very quickly as I realized that I had slept through my alarm by 3 hours, and missed the snowmobile test. Well, that was dumb. From now on I will take my watch off of my wrist and put in on the desk where I will be able to hear it. None the less, 10 hours of sleep felt good! And I got my snowmobile training in Tuesday. It consisted of talking about what to check on the snowmobile before you take it out, how to operate it, and stating the 10mph speed limit. No driving, just talking. The driving part is easy.

So I have been working on the autoprocessing software, as I explained before. Yesterday I finally worked through the interconnected software web, and it seems to be working. All in all, it uses 5 programming languages (I am counting bash scripting as a language, which is debatable). First there is a crontab which automatically calls a bash script every 2 hours. The bash script employs perl and magic to write IDL commands to a file, then runs that file in IDL. IDL then processes a bunch of config files, and calls a mixed C and C++ program from the bowels of the GCP (generic control program - what I did last year for BICEP) to read in the archived data, which is then processed in IDL. Is it needlessly complicated? Well, you could probably write all of this with bash and one more language, but this collection of code uses each language where it functions best. So I am content with it.

People can mail stuff to you at the pole, and apparently people like mailing stuff to Liz. Liz is a grad student at Berkeley who appears to be crazy, but I have only met her once so I can't really say. But the people who like mailing stuff to Liz apparently think that she REALLY likes tea. There was a shelf full of tea that she left which I sorted yesterday while taking a break from looking at code. There were no fewer than 37 boxes of tea! The two winterovers had better drink tea 4 times a day all winter, or they will never get through it all.

I am going to leave you with a collection of quotes from our winterover Dan. Dan is Australian, and is doing well an maintaining my impression that all Aussies are crazy. In a good way, but crazy none the less. Here is a collection of quotes over one single evening, and he wasn't even drunk. Just talking. Try reading these out-loud in an Aussi accent.

- "I can't belive that you call a scone a buiscit. You are so barbaric!"

- "When I hear, 'biscuits and gravy' I think of something with chocolate and gravy. Hmm. I guess you could just wing that."

- "Dark matter sucks and Dark Energy blows"

- "I just inhailed some green tea. And it hurts. But I don't care."

- "Imagine if you were launched across the Grand Canyon. Like Evil Kanival. It would be kind of cool. With a cape!"

- "I got mugged by a gang of teenagers. They are getting bigger these days. They took my $20 mp3 player."

- "The context that I heard of Clifford Algebra was when the most beautiful woman I had ever met was explaining it to me. And I was drunk. It didn't make any sense."

- "She is one of those people who the world bends around. And she isn't very big!"

- "Dear Mom. I'm really dirty. Please send soap."

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.

Just greasin' the gears

It is Sunday, January 17, 9:41pm. I was trying to work, but Ken is moving the data around because he is messing with the raid arrays, and my programs can't find anything that they need. I give up. But fortunately for you, my dear reader, this gives me time to write a blog posting, which will go up tomorrow when the internet comes back.

Speaking of internet, on the information screens in the dining hall there is a daily quote posted. The other day the quote said something like, "The saddest thing I can think of is getting accustomed to luxury" - Charlie Chaplain. Well, apparently I had grown accustomed to the luxury of internet whenever I wanted it, served up on the silver platter of high bandwidth. Here at pole, on a good day we get internet in two 4 hour chunks during the day, which corresponds to when two satellites go overhead. Sometimes the blocks are broken up with small breaks in service. One satellite is slow, the other is glacial. Gmail works, but barely. Uploading pictures to this blog is VERY slow. And whenever the internet is up, I feel obligated to do work that requires the internet, so I don't take much recreational internet time.

Friday saw me climbing up onto the telescope deck to grease the elevation gears, the ones that lets the telescope look up and down. After the azimuth bearing started vomiting small pieces of metal last summer, we switched from azimuth scans to elevation scans. By "elevation scans" I mean that the telescope stays at a constant azimuth (points at the same place on the horizon) and scans up and down in elevation until the patch of sky that we are interested in rotates out of view due to earth's rotation. The reason for scanning back and forth is that we want to look at the same patch of sky for a very long time and it should always look the same, while the atmosphere and other foregrounds should change. This way we can get rid of foregrounds, leaving only the signal we are interested in - the CMB.

Greasing the elevation gears required two steps. First we had to scrape off most of the old grease with paint spatulas. The grease is very heavy, cold temperature grease. It is apparently really expensive, and it gets everywhere! It was very cold up on the deck scraping grease in the wind, and we had to go back into the observing cabin every 10 min or so to thaw our hands. We would scrape the visible gears, then rotate the telescope and scrape more gears that had become reachable. After the gears were mostly clear, we painted more grease right back on, using paint brushes. Man, that job is going to suck in the winter when it is -80 C!

We rushed back to the station to catch dinner, then headed out to take a picture with everyone at the station of the old dome. The new station that I have been staying in was completed in 2007 (CHECK). Before that, there was a large metal dome that had smaller heated sections inside of it, which served as the main station. By the time I got here, there were only a few pieces of the dome left. Now the dome is completely gone, and some people are sad. The new station is certainly much plusher than the old dome.

There are a number of people who come here to work every summer season. I get the impression that it is similar to seasonal workers for the Forest Service in MT. This leads to an interesting mixing of cultures: seasonal blue-collar workers and scientists. At the pole, these cultures seem to mix nicely without much conflict. I got the sense that at McMurdo it is not always as congenial, but that was just an impression. Some people have been coming here for years and years. I cleaned the bathroom with a guy who was not in that category - he looked like he had stepped straight out of Sturgis to the South Pole and was wearing a Harley Davidson tee-shirt, jeans, sunglasses (inside - we were cleaning the bathroom) and a black leather du-rag to compliment his grey hair and beard. He said, "Some people come down here because they just like it. Other people come here for reasons you will find out. I don't want to get caught up in all of that. It is nice to have a woman back home, you know?" He was a heavy machinery contractor from Colorado, around Durango. But indeed some people just like it. Dana is one of our two winter-overs, and this will be his fifth season. He said, "I like the dark. When the sun starts to come back up in early October, I say, 'Oh man!' " Stephan is the winter-over for BICEP2, and I know he wintered last year - he may have wintered over even before that. John Carlstrom is on his 15th season this year, and John Kovac, the de-facto lead on BICEP2, said that this is his 18th season.

Do you know what friday night at the pole is? Volleyball night! At 7:30pm after the picture, a crowd gathered in the gymnasium, and we put up the net. The gymnasium is almost exactly the size of a volleyball court. The games were mostly 6 on 6, with some subs at the beginning. It is a very congenial atmosphere, where you play hard without being too competitive. I was amused by a big german? guy who works on Ice Cube, the neutrino detector. He is a classic alpha-male character type - he liked to hit the ball really hard and always kept score, but wasn't actually very good. Fortunately kept himself under control and it was all just fun and games. After each game, we would say, "one more?" and ended up playing until after 10pm.

Ice cream!

Here is an email that I got from one of the logistics coordinators, and I had to share!

Hello South Pole,

As many of you will soon know, ice cream arrived this afternoon and will be available tomorrow for your consumption. First, let me share some information with you about this ice cream. It is from NZ and in limited quantity. You may ask "why is it in limited quantity?" excellent question; here comes the answer.

I purchased the ice cream bars, sorbet and popsicles one month ago because frosty boy was having serious issues and I wanted to give you something delicious while we waiting for the vessel to arrive with 660/3 gallon containers. (11 different flavors)

Remember one thing..the faster you eat the ice cream currently on station, the faster all 5,100 pieces will be gone. If everyone on station has two per day, we will be out in less than two weeks.

The key is to enjoy slowly so we can enjoy it longer,

[Name removed to protect the innocent]

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!

Arrival at the South Pole

Holy crap!!!! I am at the south pole!!! Holy crap!!! How can I convey to you, my dear reader, my excitement when I stepped off the plane and there was the South Pole Telescope, just a kilometer away? Well, hopefully you all know me well enough to how excited I get about the science I do. I have been working on projects at the South Pole for a year and a half, and have seen hundreds of pictures of the SPT, and then all of a sudden, THERE IT IS!!! I couldn't stop smiling and almost started jumping up and down right there on the snow runway.

But I am ahead of myself. This morning, we left McMurdo and boarded the airplane at 8am. The planes that they fly into the South Pole are military propeller planes with skis instead of wheels, C-130's. They hold around 30 people seated around the outside of the plane interior, and when we are dressed up in all of our ECW (Extreme Cold Weather) gear, the quarters are quite tight. The ECW consists of the following: white Mickey Mouse boots, insulated Carhart overalls, massive down coats with huge, fir-lined hoods, gloves, hats, and goggles. In anything above 15 deg F you start sweating in a hurry just standing there! The flight took about 3 hours. There were some breath-taking views of the Antarctic interior. Just incredible vast expanses of snow and rock. The sky blends with the ground in a seamless cocoon of white and blue.

At the South Pole station I was met with many familiar faces - colleagues I have worked with on the BICEP2 experiment (which I worked on for my first year of graduate school) and my current coworkers on SPT. It is a funny feeling to step off of a plane in one of the most remote places in the world, and be immediately surrounded by people you know and buildings and structures you have dreamed of. My friend Justus who works on BICEP 2 and has taken me climbing in CA during my visits to Caltech to work on that project met me when I got off the plane. The first thing he said was, "did you bring your ice axes? Because there is a 20 ft ice face that we could climb if we had gear!" All my climbing stuff is in Christchurch, so I will try to get Chris Sheehy to bring it in when he comes in later in January. The landscape is completely flat snow in all directions. The sun circles around the sky, but always at virtually the same elevation in its slow regress towards the horizon where it will eventually set after this six month day.

After eating lunch, we immediately headed out to the telescope. The first thing I did when I got there was charge the outhouse because I had to go to the bathroom so bad I couldn't think. But then ... WOW! WOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!!! They weren't kidding when they said that the primary mirror is 10 meters in diameter! The telescope is huge. The first time I was standing on top of the observation building watching the telescope turn and nod, I just started laughing hysterically with glee! The entire telescope can rotate at several degrees per second and can almost look like it is dancing. It is indescribable, just amazing. I still can't believe that I am here.

In addition to scientists, there were several media people and "Distinguished Guests" (DV's). The media people include Dan, a meteorologist for a tv station in Alabama that partners with CBS, Ann, a science writer for the Washington Monthly, a camera man from CBS, a science writer from the Wall-street Journal, a reporter from NPR and another science magazine, and perhaps a few others. The DV's were top people from the NSF, which is the organization that funds the whole Antarctica program along with the military. It is very important that the DV's have a good trip and return with favorable impressions, and they have certainly been treated as first-class citizens during the entire trip. Both groups were given tours of the science experiments including SPT, BICEP, and Ice Cube. I listened to Carlstrom give the tour three times in all. Even though I know most of what he said, it is always incredible to listen to John talk about his science. He has a crystal clear grasp of what the science is and how our experiment is achieves these goals. He explains his work concisely, clearly, and passionately. Without exception everyone on each of the three tours were visibly excited by the time John finished talking about dark energy, structure formation, and finding new galaxy clusters. I got excited, and I was hearing the exact same thing three times in a row! I came away with the realization that the experiment I work on, SPT, is the best instrument of its kind at virtually the best location on earth directed by one of the best scientists in the field right now. I know I have told many of you this, and I will say it again; there is nowhere I would rather be, nothing I would rather be doing right now than working as a graduate student on the SPT under John Carlstrom. If I were independently wealthy, I would be doing exactly what I am doing now - ok I might have a car to go climbing but ... I love it. I absolutely love it!

May you all be living out your dreams.

The Southern-Most Rugby Game in the World

[Written Sunday Jan 10]

The posters were everywhere - Mt Terror v.s. Scott's Base. Wait, rugby in Antarctica? Snow for a playing field? Team uniforms? Actual rugby goal posts? No problem mate - let's play!

But first, more penguins! This morning, there was a "penguin tour" Unfortunately by the time that I went to the board to sign up for it, the sign-up sheet was gone. So I just dressed anyway and went out to the meeting place just in case there was extra room. There was.

We drove back out on the road going to Pygasis airport about 20 min onto the ice shelf, and the 20 of us unloaded. A group of 4 emperor penguins was standing about 100 feet away. They were molting, and had apparently been there for 4 days without moving. What impressive animals - way out in the middle of the snow just standing. It was a stunning day with a blue sky and temperatures around -8 C.

After lunch, I piled into "Ivan the Terrabus" and drove out to the field. Sure enough, there was a full rugby field complete with goal posts and flags for the sidelines! Mt Terror was the US team and Scott's Base was the New Zealand team, and each had actual team uniforms - red, white and blue for the americans and black for the kiwis. The players all actually had cleats! The kiwi team looked just like the NZ national rugby team, the All Blacks, who are infamous in the world rugby circuit - apparently whenever they don't win it is a bit of an upset!

The fans lined up on both sides - many more American fans than kiwis, simply because the McMurdo (US) base is a lot larger than Scott's (NZ) base. there were large flat-bed trucks on each side to serve as bleachers, and a kiwi announcer talking through a speaker system. The national anthems were played, and and the teams lined up. But before the game began, the NZ team performed the Haka. The Haka is apparently a traditional Mauri dance, one form of which is performed to show that you have no fear going into battle. The All Blacks perform it to intimidate the other team before the game begins. And yes, it is terrifying! Go look for it on youtube.

Then the game began. It was a fun game and they all played pretty seriously. There were a few girls on each team, who whenever they got the ball or went for a tackle the crowd went wild. The first quarter went scoreless, then things went down hill for the good-ol' USA. We ended up losing 18 - 0. Ouch. But what a random, crazy experience! Pictures to follow.

----

McMurdo is a funny community. There are several hundred people living here, and many come back year after year. I was talking to a couple of women who are on their 12th season. It is a very community based atmosphere - much more than in the states. I guess this is because people need each other and if you seclude yourself you will probably go crazy. The age demographic is dominated by people in their late 20's or early 30's. There are significantly more blue-collar type workers than scientists at McMurdo; I will be curious to see if that changes at the pole. There are a surprisingly large number of recreational options - cross country skiing, easy snowboarding, hiking, a gym, yoga, a big screen (~100 inch) TV, and ... wait for it ... drum roll ... a climbing wall!! Unfortunately you have to get certified to use it or go with a group and talked to the guy who is in charge of it on the phone then emailed him later and he hasn't gotten back to me about times to go :(

The dining hall seems surreal - it feels just like a dining hall on a college campus. Various different food options and the ever-present cereal bar, and ENDLESS SUPPLY OF MILK, an ice cream machine. The food is quite good. My one complaint is not enough vegetables. Then again, I am in Antarctica, and veggies are expensive to ship here.

Antarctic landing

[Written regarding Friday, Jan 9]

Here is a photo taken from the airplane window of mountains in Antarctica on the way to McMurdo.

After three days of delays in NZ, we finally made it to Antarctica on Friday. As I mentioned in the previous post, I was out partying with kiwis and only got 3 hours of sleep, so the plan ride went fast because I was spacing out staring at the back of my eye-lids. As we got close, you could see vast expanses of snowy mountains poking above the all-encompasing ice. Just amazing!

We landed on the Ross Ice-shelf, and stepped out into Antarctica. Cold? No, not really; it was actually only -5 deg C and relatively calm. All of us were then loaded up into these bus things that are jacked way up to accommodate massive snow tires. It is called "Ivan."

McMurdo Station is what I imagine a mining town looking like. There are no plants growing at all and all of the buildings are mostly colorless. McMurdo is on the flank of an active volcano called Mt Erebus (~12448 ft), and the ground is all black or dark-brown volcanic rock. I hiked up Observation Point, a 500 ft hill on the edge of the town, and got a great view of McMurdo and the surrounding bay. The most noticeable thing the vast-ness; open expanses of white in all directions with some mountains.

Our flight to the South Pole was supposed to take off Saturday morning, however it was cancelled because a plane on the Wais Divide had run into mechanical issues and our plane was needed to fly in mechanics to fix that plane. I hiked Observation Point again with three other guys, and spent the afternoon catching up on email, creating this blog, and reading an SPT paper. I ate dinner with John Carlstrom (my adviser), went out to Scott's hut with him, then had a few glasses of wine before going to bed. Tom Crawford, a senior scientist on SPT back in Chicago had told me that the best way to get time to talk to John was to be in Antarctica with him. So true! I spent over 5 hours with him yesterday, and in Chicago I have to fight tooth-and-nail to get 15 minutes!

And the moment you have all been waiting for - PENGUINES! At Scott's hut there was a group of 7 or 8 penguins pretty close out on the ice. They were mostly just laying on their stomachs not moving much, but still very cool. I got a few pictures, but I need a zoom lens to get good photos. There was a seal swimming around there too, but apparently not the kind of seal that eats penguins. I'll post some photos when I can download them to my computer.

we like, we like to party!

A'ight, this should be the last post-dated post for the time being.

Thursday morning I got a call at 5am saying that the flight had been delayed for 3 hours. So I got up at 7 and worked out at the gym, with the plan of grabbing breakfast in time to make the 9am shuttle. But when I got back to my room from the gym, a notice under my door said that the flight had been delayed again until Friday. Grrr!!! I ate breakfast and decided to go find the campus in Chirstchurch, where my friends Jeanine and Joe from Cornell had studied abroad. The University of Canterburry was a 10 minute bus ride from down town where I was staying. It felt like a normal small college campus. I was hoping to get on the internet and do some work, but I went into the library, and the wireless network was password protected. I asked if there was any way to get on the network seeing as I wasn't a student. They said no, as expected. What surprised me was that they charged their own students to use the wireless. Weird.

After lunch I went into the book store and ended up buying a map and guide to NZ, and a picture book of mountains in NZ for $20 (NZ dollars = 0.75 american dollars). After bussing back to down town, I went into an outdoor store and spent an hour drooling over the climbing and mountaineering guidebooks. I found the same picture book I had just bought on campus, except in the outdoor store it cost $89!!! What!?! Also, all of the climbing gear was really expensive - climbing shoes that in the US cost $130 were on sale for $300 NZ.

I got kicked out of the store (they were closing for the evening) and I was bumbling around down town looking for and internet cafe. I dropped into an All Blacks Rugby store, because I was thinking of getting an All Blacks jersey to take home. Well, the official jerseys cost $180, so screw that! But here is where things get interesting. The lady working there asked me a few questions and it came out that I was going to Antarctica. She asked me about my research there and I told her that I was trying to understand the big bang. She said that was "interesting" and I soon found out that she was a Jehova's Witness. They believe something along the lines of the earth being several thousand years old and being created by God, and that Jesus is going to come back to earth some day soon and set up an everlasting government. It always surprises me when people like this tell me that they are thinking rationally or scientifically. They speak of the Bible as "proof" of things because they were written in the scriptures. Something that caught my interest was that in reference to something else she mentioned that education was the solution to many of the world's problems, and I wanted to say that education is probably what turns people away from believing in things like Jehova's Witnesses. But I kept my mouth shut. In any case, she was not prostletizing, so it was bearable and the conversation moved onto other topics. She did by far most of the talking.

As I was getting ready to leave, the other younger guy who was also working at the store joined the conversation when he found out that I was going to Antarctica. He is a native Maori, and his name is something complicated so he told me to just call him Kay. He is in college and is interested in becoming an environmental lawyer. Very outgoing and personable guy. So he ended up inviting me to a party that he was going to have later that evening, and gave me his telephone number. He then pointed me to a very good Thai restaurant for dinner.

The Thai restaurant was indeed very good. As always, whenever I see a new napkin folding pattern I take it apart and try to learn it, I was going this for their pattern, when the mother of this family owned business came out of the kitchen and her and her son taught me how to fold the napkin. :) I had fried shrimp with sweet chillies and cashews, and it was really good.

Then back to the hotel, where I saw that the shuttle would leave for the Antarctica station at 5:45am Friday morning. I called Kay back and said I'd be excited to go to the party as long as I could be back at my hotel by a reasonable hour. The plan was to go to his house and party there for a while then to come back into town an which point I could split for bed. So Kay picked me up at my hotel, and off we went.

It was exactly like I was expecting a Kiwi party to be - my Kiwi friend in Chicago complained that our parties in the US were lame. Lots of drinking, lots of smoking both tabacco and weed, and people listening to loud music that they were really into. The current fad is a music type called Drum and Bass, or D&B. It is a mix of hiphop, techno, and funk. I couldn't tell if the music was completely computer created and mixed, or if there were people actually playing drums and bass. The music is completely about groove, and there is basically no melody. It is good party music.

We drove up to his house where the party had already started and there were probably 15 people there. The reason for the party was Kay's friend's 22 birthday. Kay introduced me to his friends with something along the lines of, "This is my bro Kyle from the United States. He walked into my store this afternoon, and I invited him to the party. He is going to Antarctica tomorrow at 5 in the morning, and he is an astrologer or astronomer or something and he studies the big bang." Whew, that is one way to get a bunch of mildly drunk people excited! They were cool people and I enjoyed hanging out with them. They started a fire, but didn't have a fire ring so they used an old shopping cart. I'm not sure where the wood came from, but just before the fire started I saw them passing a bureau over the fence from the back-door neighbor's yard...?? Fortunately they put down a board under the cart to catch the ashes and protect the rubber of the drive way. That was especially important when the plastic child seat started to burn and trip molten plastic... Then the fire department came and we had to put the fire out, but no one was cited; they were very reasonable. Good times.

I talked to one guy Ethan, who seemed a bit older than his other friends. He was really excited that I was going to Antarctica, and was trying to figure out how he could go eventually himself. He was studying environmental studies with a focus on climate in order to try to get down to the ice. Apparently he started college a few years ago, but as he said, "I spent too much time partying with these guys, and dropped out." He took a year off, worked, and is now back in school and much more motivated. A lot of the guys there new a fair amount about astronomy and such, and one guy had read "A Brief History of Time," the book that originally got me excited about physics way back in high school. We finally headed back into town at 1am. One guy who was so drunk he could hardly walk was trying to drive and the tried to take his keys from him. They couldn't get the keys, so one friend decided to stay and sit on the hood of the car until the guy got out and handed over the keys. We took a taxi into town, and I walked back to my hotel from there, a 5 minute walk. I only slept for 3 hours last night, but that was totally worth it! Then this morning we all shipped back to the Antarctic center at 5:45am. Psyched!

Definition: Boomerang

boo⋅mer⋅ang

 [boo-muh-rang]

1. Spending 9 hours on an airplane when you land in the same place you started.

Here is a photo of the interior of the plane.

I was supposed to fly out of NZ to McMurdo in Antarctica on Jan 5, but the flight was delayed for 24 hours and I spent the day at the beach. Wednesday Jan 6 started well, with me waking up before my alarm went off at 4:45am. We all shuttled over to the Antarctic Center, put on our clothing and had our briefing. We boarded the plane at 8am. The airplane is a military plane that had a so-called "comfort pallet" put on, which is basically a removable insert of normal airline seats. There were 117 people flying, plus the normal aircraft crew, so pretty much every seat was full.

The flight from NZ to the McMurdo station takes about 4 hours. I am used to being able to look out the window during takeoff, but there are only a few small circular windows in the plane, so I just had to sit tight during takeoff. The flight was uneventful, and 4 hours later they announced that we were circling McMurdo waiting for the weather to improve so we could land. I should have hopped up to look out the window, but I didn't - some other people got some great pictures of the mountains of Antarctica. An hour later we were still circling, and they announced that we couldn't land and were heading back to NZ. So 4 more hours of flight. We landed again a but after 6pm, 9 hours after taking off.

Back in the Antarctic station, we picked up our "Boomerang Bags" and changed to go back into town and to our hotels. We get a carry-on bag and 2 checked bags, one of which stays on the plane in the case of a boomerang and the other which we get back for the night. I have been hanging out with two friendly and interesting people, Dan and Ann. They are here because they put in for a grant through NSF to visit Antarctica. Dan is a weather man for CBS out of Arkansas, and Ann is a writer from Washington DC who works in environmental writing and education. Dan put his shoes in his check bag, and so the only thing he had for footwear was his huge white Mickey Mouse boots that they issue for walking around in the severe cold. Fortunately I had put both shoes and flip-flops in my boomerang bag, so I lent Dan my shoes. The three of us went out to dinner, at which I ate a good chicken and mango-chutney pizza.

Then off to bed in expectation of flying the next day... which would be cancelled :(

Fish and Chips and grease

As expected, just getting to Antarctica depends on the whims of the weather gods. I arrived in NZ on Jan 3, and was supposed to fly to the ice on Jan 5. That flight was cancelled by bad weather, so I took one of the hotel's bikes and biked 30 min out to the beach. Remembering that my Kiwi friend has said that a local classic was fish 'n chips, I decided to buy some for lunch. I went into a fish 'n chips joint, hoping to see something on the menu called "fish and chips: $xxx". However, I was confronted by a bewildering array of fish options, and no obvious parings with chips. Then I noticed a hand-written board on the side advertising "$12 meal deal." Awesome! No thinking required. So I ordered that. As I was waiting for them to make my order, I read the meal deal more carefully. It involved 12 bites of fish, 5 potato plates, 2 scoops of chips, and 4 hot-dogs. When it came out, the package was the size of a textbook and weighed a couple of pounds. I went back to the beach to eat it, and when I opened it, there was an enormous amount of fried food, WAY more than I could possibly eat!! I ate maybe a quarter of it. Fortunately, there were a couple of German tourists who were watching the sea gulls circle around me, and they agreed to eat some of the food. I fed at least half of the food to the gulls. By the end, I could almost feel grease coming out of the pores of my skin. Next time, I'll be a bit more conservative on the quantity that I order!

Welcome

Well shucks, here I am at the bottom of the world, and blogging for the first time ever. So many of you nosey people want to know what I am doing, that I figure blogging is the easiest way to reach you all. :) It is going to take a while to figure out how to write a good blog post, so your patience is graciously requested ;) Here goes nothing...

I flew into the McMurodo station in Antarctica yesterday afternoon. We were supposed to fly to the South Pole this morning, but the flight was delayed. I believe that there were other flights that got moved back on-top of ours, and ours was simply cancelled. Today is Saturday and there are no flights on Sundays, so we will try again to fly in Monday. Fortunately, most of the work that I need to do is software, so I can do a lot of work from anywhere that has a power plug, and even more with an internet connection. The internet blows my mind sometimes. Speaking of internet, the plug here is extremely flakey, so if I even touch it or move my computer, I get disconnected.

I am planning on writing a few post-dated blog posts to describe some of my adventures already, and will try to update this blog somewhat regularly while I am in the Antarctic. Your comments are welcomed and encouraged!!

Love and Laughter