Bubah update - pure apathy

Hello All,

In the pursuit of getting Bubah back, the SPT team appears to be bogged down in pure apathy. Since I am leaving the South Pole in 3 days, I am following our fearless leader Dan's lead. And his lead has been the stance, "We don't deal with terrorists." After a complete lack of response from us to the first email, they sent a second email saying that there was a note in "Catcher in the Rye" across the hall in the library with further instructions. Our plan is to go over there and take a photograph of the note, then put the note back in the book so they think that we never even looked at it.

It is amusing that the Ice Cube team seems more interested in the Bubah case than we do; they bring it up at meals, and sometimes come over to our side of the Science room to talk about it. I was even accused by one member of running an inside job! Suspicious? Perhaps...

Bubah's place in our shrine has been replaced. "What could possibly replace Bubah in the shrine," you might ask? None other than a can of Kraft Easy Cheese. Well, we weren't actually going to eat it!

As a random inserted side note, as usual there was a party last night (Saturday night). It is very amusing watching the social dynamic at a dance party when there are 40 guys and 5 girls.

Bubah taken hostage!

Breaking news! Bubah has been taken hostage! Bubah is our mascot, a small purple stuffed alien who talks when you bob it on the head. It has three phrases, which we have interpreted as "yes," "no," and "I'm not answering." As you can see, Bubah in crucial to our decision making process as a collaboration! He is also the only creature to actually ride on the boom of the telescope while taking observations, and this has critical insight that no one else on this planet of beyond possesses!

He went missing last night. This morning in the place where Bubah usually sits in the Justin Beeber shrine, there was just a laser-printout of a picture of Bubah with a blind-fold on, and a cryptic message saying Bubah had been taken hostage and we needed to check our email.

Dan checked his email, and there was a message from a fabricated account, something like "doyouwantBubahback@gmail.com" that contained a picture of Bubah under a snow-roller (think steam-roller for snow) with the message, "If you ever want to see Bubah again, acquire 2 unmarked 6-packs of beer. We will contact you with further instructions." We are formulating a plan as we speak to rescue Bubah and I will keep you updated. For now, keep your eyes peeled!

Pub Trivia

Welcome to Pub Trivia! The SPT team hosted Pub Trivia this past wednesday, and I was given complete control over one of four rounds. After sitting through numerous rounds of lame questions about movies and pop music in past weeks, what category did I pick? Mountains! 2 teams clearly had climbers, and 2 teams clearly did not. Out of 21 points, the team scores were 2, 3, 9 and 11.

Here are the questions, see what you would have scored (that means no looking up questions until after you have finished...) If you want, you can email me your guesses and I will email back answers. Or you could just look the answers up, for which Wikipedia is amazing!

Mountains.

1) [2pt] What is the highest peak in the contiguous united states, and what is its height to within 100 feet?

2) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain face in the world? 2 pts, mountain and name of the face.

3) [1pt] This country has produced well knows climbers such as Chris Bonnington and Mick Fowler. It's strict anti-bolt ethics brought about the climbing style "head-pointing" on its famous grit-stone. Name this country.

4) [2pts] What is the second highest peak in Antarctica, and when was it first climbed? Year +- 5. 2 pts.

5) [1pt] What peak has the greatest continuous rise from base to summit in the world?

6) [1pt] How many 14000 ft peaks are there in CO? Must be within +- 5

Extra spontaneous bonus point: Who skiied all of these peaks within one year?

7) [1pt] This asthetic mountain lies in either Angentina or Chile, depenting who you ask. It has been described as "The hardest mountain in the world." It's easiest route is the controversial "Compressor Route," put up by Cesare Maestri in 1970. What is the name of this mountain?

8) [2pts] What is the tallest mountain in Montana? 2 pts, name of the mountain, height to within 500 ft.

9) [1pt] What is the death rate on Annapurna, the deadliest 8000 meter peak? This is defined as the ratio of the number of people who die on Annapurna to the number of people who try to climb it? Statistics are as of January, 2007.

10) [1pt] Mt Everest is the tallest mountain in the world. What is its Nepalese name?

11) [3pts] What is the tallest mountain on the Oceania continent? For an extra point, what country is it in? For a third point, what man-made environmental disaster lies at the foot of the mountain

12) [3pts] Name the 6 Great North Faces of the Alps. 1pt for 1, 2pts for 3, 3 pts for all 6. See pictures below: - - The internet connection is too slow to upload these pictures right now. So you are going to just have to guess off the top of your heads. If you are concerned, please write a letter to your senator or representative asking them to support more satellite coverage for scientists at the south pole.

Fire Alarms and Saunas

Well, yes, both fire alarms and saunas, fortunately not at the same time! But first for a work update, which I know is why all of you read this blog. The past few days have been good, and I am starting to realize that I have less than a week left at the pole! We ran the schedule that I wrote for the telescope earlier this week, and after fixing one typo it seems to be working as advertised. That means that we will be running this schedule on three patches of sky between RA=0 to RA=5 hours and scanning over and over theses patches all winter. Cool! Now I am spending time learning how we actually process our data, and trying to understand an analysis pipeline in C, which is an alternate to the standard pipeline in IDL.

Here is a picture of the 150 GHz map. It doesn't look like much yet, but this is only 3 scans of 2.5 hours each. The patch is 17 deg across and 10 deg high. If you click on the picture and look in the bottom right corner, you can see a small white spot which is "point source," which is probably a star:


Ok, I realize that we need fire alarms, sure. And I also realize that in order for fire alarms to work reliably, the system needs to be tested. But do you really need to test them every other day for a month?! A fire here would be a very, very bad thing - we can't exactly just go to another building if the main station burned down. There is a dedicated fire crew of 4 people here to ensure our safety. They have automatic announcements which I can recite to you by memory: "BBBEeeeeepppp!!!!! BBBEEeeeeepppp!!!!! May I please have your attention. May I please have your attention. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. There is a fire emergency in Cryo. Disregard, disregard, disregard." Well, the disregard part is not part of the alarm, but it might as well be, because in the approximately 50 times that I have heard that alarm, I think every one without exception has been followed by a "disregard." Today after dinner we were working, and at 7pm the fire alarm went off as part of a test. It continued to go off for 18 minutes without stopping, complete with flashing blue lights. It was loud enough that I went and got ear plugs!

As advertised in my blog title, we do indeed have a sauna at the station! Apparently they even had one in the old Dome before the new station was build. It is a small sauna, but if you have ever seen how many people you can pack into a phone booth... well you get the point. Sunday night we packed 7 people in there and cranked the heat. There is something called the "300 club," which is where people in the winter get the sauna up to 200 deg F, then run outside when it is -100 F. I am now a proud member of the "267 club." We got the sauna up to 240 deg F. This required some trickery because there is a safety switch on the bottom of the heater in the sauna that pops out and disables the heater if it gets too hot. Apparently they are worried about baking people alive or something... In any case, if you reach down there and pop it back in periodically, you can manually override the temperature control and keep the thing cranking! 240 is really hot - remember that water boils at 210 F. Then we ran outside and around the geographic south pole in the -27 F weather. Wearing shoes of course. The people who wore only sandals suffered, but I was great! Well, my hands got a little cold. Ok, fine by the time we went back in I was pretty cold... Oh yeah maybe rolling in the snow wasn't such a good idea either... The think that is super cool is that any exposed hair on your body almost instantly freezes and turns frosty white. We won't mention that my legs looked like an open meadow after a heavy frost. Needless to say, I slept very well that night!

Oh yeah, and on sunday Bob and Fred might have shown up again for a repeat attempt at the tow-in paragliding adventure with a stronger rope, accompanied by a dedicated photographer Joe on a second snow-mobile. Let's just imagine that everything worked really well this time, and Fred got up the full extent of the rope, probably 150 feet off the ground. But I'll leave it up to your imaginations - bug me when I get back to Chicago.

Here I am out in the open:

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."