Actual work on the ARA experiment

Most of the posts here so far have been about the travel and about the station, rather than about the work we're doing. There are four of us here working on the ARA antennas & electronics at the moment: Peter Gorham, Bryan Hill, and Christian Miki, all from the University of Hawaii, and myself. Two other folks, Albrecht Karle and Jim Haugen, are working on logistics and support for the project. And there is a LARGE number of drillers working on the ARA hot water drill, some of them I know from Wisconsin, and some I've just met down here on the ice.

So far, we've installed a set of shallow antennas for the array, sealed up the electronics, gotten the cabling out to the site, and are ready for more holes (deeper ones) and antennas come Monday.

Christmas dinner at the South Pole

Well, Christmas dinner is a big deal at the Pole, lots of folks dress up, and there's a trio of meal sittings with a set table, and yule logs burning (on the overhead monitors). The meal was Beef Wellington, lobster tails, a couple of different mashed potatoes, and stacks of desserts on trays coming around. The science grantees buy the wine for the whole station, and volunteers keep the wine glasses full. Before dinner there are appetizers in the hall outside, duck on a quacker, baked brie, scallops, etc.

Station images

The saltine challenge

It appears that I have tied the current South Pole station record by eating six saltine crackers in one minute with no liquid. There are rumors that some Kiwi may have done seven last year. No video available.

My berth in the South Pole Station

That's my desk, laptop, books, South Pole VHF radio, my radio scanner, and cameras. There's a bunk right behind me, and a pair of small dressers under the bunk. That's it. About a six foot wide room by about eight foot long. Cramped, but comfortable enough. Got to be quiet though as there are night shift folks nearby.







But, only a hundred or so feet away...













The middle of those windows is mine.













Hallway near the mail room.

Flying to McMurdo

Aerial shot of some ice features.


Little spots of open water and sea ice.


Of course before that we flew over open ocean, the Southern Ocean.


The scene inside the plane. PAX (passengers at the walls) and cargo down the middle of the C-17.


Another interminable briefing. With cold weather gear scattered about.

Okay, this is skipping back a few days in time, but there was a lot to fill in and I got busy as soon as I got down to the station.

Here's the CHC (Christchurch) to MCM (McMurdo base) drill:
- Wake up early
- Take shuttle bus/van to the Clothing Distribution Center
- Leave any bags you need to leave, pack you checked bags, and have a carry-on bag
- Get your cold weather gear on
- In your big boots and heavy gear, go get some breakfast
- Come back, go through security, and take a bus over to the plane where they hand you a bagged lunch
- You sit in the paratrooper mesh jump seats along the side of the plane
- It's extremely loud, hearing protection is required on the flight
- Take off, fly, and land
- Then offload onto a bus, drive into town, get a boring talk (oh yeah, there was a boring talk just ahead of the security screening in CHC as well), get your room key, pick up linens, get your checked bags, move into your room, have dinner, and haul your bags (checked and carry-on) (called bag-drag) up to be weighed, take your carry-on back with you, and get some sleep before your Pole flight the next day

The Clothing Distribution Center

This is the warehouse with the massive amounts of ECW gear for Antarctic use. It's much reduced from what it must have been at the beginning of the season, lots of empty spots.

No size 14 or 15 Baffin boots for me. No Carhartt overalls to fit me either.

Extreme Cold Weather clothing (ECW)

This is the gear that we get issued for Antarctica. You can bring your own stuff, and most everyone does, but many of the items you get from the Clothing Distribution Center (see the next blog entry). Here's the gloves, hats, and boots: top boot is the Baffin (a new, much in demand boot), middle is the FDX (pretty warm and fairly usable), and the bottom is the "Bunny Boot" (think Disney, which I've always found to be too warm and have not enough traction).

The cap, insulated gloves, and all are good. The first time I went to the ice we had to have our Mitten, Gauntlet on for the flight. They're ridiculously warm and clumsy.







Balaclavas, more hats, goggles (am using them at Pole, but never did at McMurdo, sunglasses worked fine there), neck gaiters, and hats. On the left edge is a wind jacket in red with the US Antarctic Program logo, and thermal underwear tops and bottoms (I brought my own of the latter).








And the final items, "Big Red" on the left is the Canada Goose heavy parka, super-warm, and ubiquitous on the ice. Next up is the Carhartt parka, and then the wind pants/overalls (or Carhartt option). Carhartts are more rugged and preferred for outside work.

First full day of work today

Okay, that's me with a large wrench, extreme cold weather pants and boots, but just a heavy fleece on top, and a helmet on my head. It's an active construction site, so you need to wear head protection. The wrenches are for other folks' work though, we spend the day indoors working on electronics instead of large bolts.

Am now at the South Pole...

...beginning my altitude acclimatization. There's a lot going on here at the moment, will post some details soon. Unpacking, and will post photos soon as well.

In the meantime, do go to the IceCube homepage and see the excellent news updates there.

In McMurdo, more news and photos to follow

It's been a tiring day, going to get to bed a bit early. Got lots of good photos, and will post some soon.

Arrived McMurdo early afternoon, after the (long,slow) drive into town and many dull briefings, we got our room keys, linens, and bags. Then after dinner redeposited bags with cargo to load tomorrow's airplane, and explored a little. Realized that the coffeehouse is closed on Mondays. Went and looked for interesting fish in the fish tanks, but there weren't any fish, just some invertebrates.

Off to the Pole tomorrow...

More images from the Canterbury Museum

Modern boots for Antarctica:


Old boots from the gallant explorer era, made of reindeer hide:


Transport from the first motorized overland, British Antarctic Expedition:



Weddell Seals (stuffed):

Canterbury Museum Antarctica exhibits

Diorama of the Scott expedition, manhauling their gear:


Adelie penguin (stuffed):


Rockhopper penguin (stuffed):


A quick view of why Christchurch is the launching point for heading to the ice:

A slight glimpse into the Christmas music charts

So, in the United Kingdom and in New Zealand (in fact, perhaps all around the Commonwealth) there is a tradition of popular bands producing special songs for the Christmas season. These are often ridiculous versions of classic Christmas songs, or even more absurd new songs. Was watching the television in my hotel room last night (as I don't have a TV at home, they do catch my attention...) and saw a number of strange music video sights. A few of them appear here...

- The Darkness, Christmas time (YouTube link)
- Billy Mack, Christmas is all around (YouTube link)
- Elton John, Step into Christmas (YouTube link)
- No Doubt, Oi to the world (YouTube link)
- Run DMC, Christmas in Hollis (YouTube link)
- The Killers, Don't shoot me Santa (YouTube link)

Okay, there's a real mix of sublime and ridiculous in there. We return to physics, Antarctica, and travel soon...

Christchurch Magnitude 7 earthquake back in September

Back on the 4th of September this year (2010), there was a large earthquake here in the Canterbury region of New Zealand. See wikipedia for full details. There is a little bit of damage still visible from the quake here in Christchurch, mostly in the form of repairs and supports on older buildings.

While I travel to the Pole, work there continues...

They're completing the installation of the IceCube strings. Some photos from the final deployments are here.

What does one take to Antarctica?

Well, there are online instructions for what to bring, and you can check the weather online to verify that the clothes you have are warm enough, but here's what I took with me:

- one small bag not to be opened until I get to Pole
- with thermal underwear, wool socks, and some general purpose clothes
- good pair of ski gloves and a thinner pair of gloves
- polypro sock liners (really nice!)
- dress up clothes for Christmas (relatively formal meal) and New Years (costume party)
- one large bag with clothes for Christchurch (it's summer here, and record high temperatures today, about 85F) and some additional clothes I may take to the Pole if I have room

Then I'll get issued to me a big coat, Carhartt insulated overalls, and some hats and gloves.

Plus I take a small backpack with some important items, my laptop, camera, notebooks, passport (there's a good story in there...maybe later), books to read, and one change of clothes in case my checked bags disappear into the morass of airline baggage handing (MANY stories in there).

The trip so far

Wednesday, 15 December 2010:

Flight 1: Minneapolis (airport code MSP) to Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW)
Flight 2: DFW to Los Angeles (LAX)
Flight 3: LAX to Auckland, New Zealand (AKL)
Flight 4: Auckland, New Zealand (north island of New Zealand) to Christchurch (CHC, south island)

18 hours on planes, 10 hours in airports waiting for flights, and still a long way to the Pole.

That got me in on Friday, 17 December 2010 in local time. That is, I am across the international date line, so it's one day "later" here than back in the States. Time zones (and the date line) are things that seem initially simple, but the more you think about them, the more complicated they get, until all of a sudden it makes sense again.

So here in Christchurch, it's 5 hours earlier in the day than it is in Minneapolis, Menomonie, or Madison, but it's also a day later. Or that's 19 hours later...

In Christchurch

So, I made it here, but haven't been online much. The hotel network is expensive and keeps kicking me out. Am in a little Internet cafe down the block from my hotel.

That's my hotel, the Novotel, in the background. In the foreground, building construction. There's a lot of construction and repair work going on in town due to the earthquake back in September. Earthquake damage and repair photos coming soon...

Going to get my cold weather gear tomorrow, and then fly southward the day afterwards.

Packing for the South Pole

Pulled everything together this past weekend to take with me to New Zealand (summer, misty, warmish) and then Antarctica. Am striving to pack light as there are a number of times when one has to haul all of their baggage across town, onto buses, and onto planes. We get issued the ECW (extreme cold weather) clothing down in Christchurch, New Zealand, but a lot of the gear is, frankly, pretty bad. We get these huge, wonderfully warm (too warm even for McMurdo Base on the coast of Antarctica with temperatures above zero F) Canada Goose parkas and good cold weather Carhartt overalls, but the socks, fleeces, and gloves aren't as good as you can pick up at your local REI or Gander Mountain (upper midwest hunting/fishing/camping supplier).

Photos coming soon, when I pack everything up into the airline bags.

Old Photos from the 1959 "Deep Freeze" Antarctic expedition

From Huffington Post, of all places. The slideshow is a set of fifteen images from a recent book. Haven't seen the book yet...

LInk to a high school teacher's blog from South Pole

Katey Shirey, a high school physics teacher, is now at the South Pole.
Here is a link to her journal:

http://www.polartrec.com/expeditions/icecube-in-ice-antarctic-telescope-2010/journals

More on IceCube and ARA science

Let me send along the following, layperson explanations of the two experiments.

ARA and IceCube are both looking for neutrinos from high-energy systems in the universe. Neutrinos are small, nearly massless subatomic particles that pass through material with only the rarest interactions. In fact, IceCube is most interested in neutrinos which have already gone through most of the Earth and happen to interact in the ice near the detector going upwards. IceCube looks for the light emission from the neutrino interactions in the ice. ARA looks for a coherent pulse (lasting on order of a billionth of a second, a nanosecond) of radio emission. We use the ice because it is both light transparent and radio transparent. The remoteness of the site, the South Pole, reduces the anthropogenic backgrounds so the real physics signal stands out more clearly. In detail, the two experiments are optimized for different energy ranges: IceCube for lower energies, and signals associated with supernovae, and ARA for higher energies, and signals associated with the most energetic particles in the universe (the so-called GZK cosmic rays).

There is a lot more, at layperson, general scientifically trained audience, and technical levels on the IceCube website. There are a couple of less technical explanations of the ANITA experiment which is a balloon-borne experiment which is the intellectual godmother of ARA: for example, http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/~anita/web/science.html.

Some Antarctic links of direct interest

I am going to Antarctica to work on different projects, the Askaryan Radio Array (ARA) in which I have a large role, but it's a small startup project, and IceCube for which I am a small part of a large project.

ARA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Askaryan_Radio_Array
http://ara.physics.wisc.edu/

(Not much there, more as the detector gets built.)

IceCube:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory
http://icecube.wisc.edu/

My blog:
http://duvernois.blogspot.com/

Currently it's not South Pole specific, but will be once I head out. My flight out of the US is on December 15th, will be at Pole on December 21st, and will leave the ice around January 14th.

IceCube blogs from Pole:
http://blog.icecube.wisc.edu/

My info will likely be appearing there as well. Remember that the bandwidth back from the South Pole is limited, so most of the photos will have to wait until I return from the ice.

Some second- (or third-) hand notes from Airshow China 2010

Aviation Week has the best coverage, as usual, see the left sidebar. My personal favorites are the very weird diorama showing a 1970s US carrier, plus F-22s, sailing up river into China. These sorts of exhibits are often very revealing as to the (hopefully irrational) fears of the builders and perhaps their military bosses and funding sources. Also of note is the stealth geo-engineering/cloud-seeding unmanned aircraft. You know, those clouds can be dangerous, better avoid their radar emissions, and the range, does that get the drone over Taiwan? I think it does...

Antarctic web cameras

See the bottom of the linked page. Palmer Station is out on the Antarctic Peninsula, mild weather, lots of animals, and some ocean traffic including cruise ships. McMurdo Station is the logistics hub for Antarctic operations, looks like a cross between a run-down college campus and a run-down mining town. Balloon flight operations are out of "McTown." The South Pole webcam is currently pretty dull...but there will be more activity there soon.

Materials for students to learn about Antarctic science

The US Antarctic Program homepages:
http://www.usap.gov/

The University of Delaware (Bartol Research) site talking about IceTop/IceCube construction:
http://www.expeditions.udel.edu/antarctica/building-icecube-icetop.html

Dispatches from Polar Scientists (Exploratorium):
http://icestories.exploratorium.edu/dispatches/index.php

Teachers & researchers on the ice:
http://www.polartrec.com/

Some IceCube videos (three of them, available in different formats):
http://www.icecube.wisc.edu/~malkus/Video/MMSDVideo/

IceCube Project Homepage:
http://icecube.wisc.edu/

ARA Project Homepage, but there's not much here yet:
http://ara.physics.wisc.edu/

Rental car reviews: Kia Soul

I have been considering doing this for quite some time, and now that I'm traveling on business again at a decent rate I will finally begin this project.

Car reviews of cars you won't buy but do rent

How was that for a title? Well, in Hawaii last week I rented a Kia Soul, sort of a boxy little wagon/hatchback/micro-SUV-looking thing. I parked it at one point next to a VW Golf four door and the two are the same size, though the front interior of the Kia felt smaller as did the truck/hatch area. I assume the backseat of the Kia is larger than the VW, but at 6' 6" I spend VERY little time in the backseat of any smaller car.

So, how did it drive? Relatively well actually. On Oahu it's hard to get up to much speed (okay, excepting late night runs up or down the Pali, but that's wrong, man, wrong!) but the Kia felt stable and secure at the speeds that were available. There was an odd hesitation, and a bit of a dead zone around 30mph, maybe a bit too much space between gears? I wouldn't buy one, but it was an excellent rental car for the confined parking spots and streets of Hawaii. Oh yeah, except for one annoyance, the rental didn't have a cargo cover, so you couldn't leave items in the back of the car (at least not in tourist areas with the attendant thefts). Should have caught that back at the National Rental Car Emerald Aisle and picked a different one.

Well...haven't updated recently, but...

will be having a blog, probably cross-posted here and on the official IceCube blog, during my South Pole deployment. Look for photos and videos...all will be school-aged children appropriate as I work with my daughters' science teachers.

The Mike Book Club

Listen to me, not to Oprah! Get your modern American literature here...

William T. Vollmann: You Bright and Risen Angels, Rising Up and Rising Down (7 volumes if you can, 1 volume if you must), Imperial

Don Delillo: White Noise, Mao II, Underworld, Libra

Thomas Pynchon: Crying of Lot 49, V, Gravity's Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, Against the Day (okay, I'd really recommend it all, so add Vineland and Inherent Vice)

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian, The Orchard Keeper, No Country for Old Men

Philip Roth: American Pastoral, Portnoy's Complaint, Zuckerman Unbound

Saul Bellow: Herzog, Seize the Day, Adventures of Augie March

John Updike: Rabbit novels

John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany, Water Method Man

Vladimir Nabokov: Ada, Pale Fire, Lolita, Pnin

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Sirens of Titan, Galapagos, Breakfast of Champions, Player Piano

Tim O'Brien: Going After Cacciato

William Gaddis: The Recognitions, Agape Agape

Jack Kerouac: On the Road, Visions of Cody, Big Sur

William S. Burroughs: Western Lands, Naked Lunch, Nova Express

Okay, I was just venting a little bit...

Why is there a lack of humorous reviews of this?

State of the music industry

I know it's a couple of years old, but I was just reading the Wired magazine article by David Byrne (relatively) optimistically addressing the future of music. You might as well, while we're on the subject, look back at the famous Steve Albini and Courtney Love articles on the music business economics. Makes one think twice about what is music piracy.

An odd form of advertising

While sitting outside for dinner last night near the Honolulu commercial port, a large roll-on roll-off ship pulled up in the channel. It came to a stop and a large searchlight lit up the advertising for the shipping line. pashahawaii.com

Smart phones appeared at nearby tables to check out the website. Inexpensive car shipping to/from Hawaii.

Television: Drug of the nation*

Here are a few things I have learned from three weeks living with a television (my room at Lincoln Hall at UH-Manoa):

1. SyFy? The science fiction channel appears to have a new name which is different from any abbreviated form of "science fiction" that I've ever seen previously.

2. There are an impressive host of "ghost hunting" shows on SyFy, see above. The guy using an old HP spectrum analyzer with no input was especially amusingl.

3. Infomercials about a colon cleaning system? (I admit that was due to working with a postdoc here who works late nights, and then turning on the TV when I got back to my room at 2am.)

4. Paddling Hawaii and Hawaiian Skindiver shows. Never seen either before. Pretty cool.

5. That's who Glenn Beck is.

6. Corollary to #5. The man's insane.

7. Adult Swim is funny. For a few minutes at least.

8. Chef reality shows? The segment I saw had the "I want to be a chef" folks try to make bread. Few of them ever had, and the results were pretty dodgy. And someone was kicked off the kitchen island as a result.

9. MTV now shows four videos per day. And it's the same four videos each day. Silversun Pickups have a good name, but are pretty dull.

10. There are three Peanuts/Charlie Brown Christmas specials.

I admit that writing about TV reminds me of priests talking about sex or shipwrecked sailors discussing navigation, but what else are blogs for?

* Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.

Rewards in parenting

This weekend, my daughters and I worked on a new super-crazy fast snow sled (built up on old cross country skis) and an ice boat (sail, mast, seats, and runners). Sylvia was working with me and asked "how did you learn to build stuff?" I answered, truthfully, "by working with, and watching, my dad." She smiled broadly. Mara reports that with the sled and boat that "this is going to be the best winter ever." I melt.

Things which should exist, but don't seem to

A right angle adapter for an IEC power connector. You have lots of those power cords in a box in the basement, but sometimes you need a right angle power cord. Sure, they exist, in both right angle "sideways" and right angle to the back, but how about a universal adapter? Should cost cents to make, sell for a couple of dollars. I could use a few. And right angle USB adapters?

Want to add to your Netflix queue?

Every Doc Film shown through 2008. (It's an Excel file.) Doc Films is the University of Chicago "Documentary Film" society which shows, well, films of all sorts. Relive the Jackie Chan festival of Fall 1994 if you like. Good stuff!

IKEA's Secret Annex

Inspired by the discovery of the IAEA's secret annex of documentation of Iran's nuclear weapons program, we have the first reports of the contents of IKEA's secret annex.

1. Meatballs gone very bad
2. The guy who makes the 59 cent superbags (which turn out to be excellent inflatable kayak bags by the way)
3. The remains of the store employee who installed the shortcuts through the showroom
4. ABBA
5. The 1970s
6. The springie in my bungie

Darn, this is hard, why oh why can't I come up with more?

A true Craigslist classic

1,325 Pope Hats

Because of this terrible economy, I'm having to shut down my business. I have OVER 1300 Pope hats (replicas) that I REALLY need to get rid of. The pope hats came from China and are a little too small for most adult heads and are also irritating to the skin, so you would need to have long hair or wear a smaller hat underneath (just like the REAL POPE). Dogs do not like to wear these pope hats, but maybe a large cat or maybe a nice dog would wear one. My dogs will not but they are not very nice and always hate being dressed up like for Halloween when we tried to dress them up like batman but they became very very agitated and bit a neighbors kid. I will lock the dogs up when you come get all of these pope hats.

My wife is a devout catholic and she finds the presence of all of these pope hats all over the house to be blasphemous. I have pope hats in every closet, pope hats under the sing, pope hats full of other pope hats. She will not stop talking to me about getting rid of the pope hats and has started lighting candles all over the house for my soul but these pope hats are extremely flammable so its a problem in my house (there are pope hats everywhere)

I payed 10x what I'm asking for when I bought these pope hats. I still think there is a market for them maybe when the economy turns around. Act NOW! Don't miss this great deal! I have 1,325 total (I counted this morning). 3 of them have some dog bites and one of them is burnt to a crisp, but you can take that one or leave it. Bring 2-3 strong friends.

• Location: Tempe
• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Mathematics of body surfing

This was the result of a long, and odd, series of searches for a completely unrelated topic. PDF article.

Cornelius Cardew's Treatise

One of the most impressive scores ever produced, Cornelius Cardew's Treatise is 193 pages of graphical notation hinting at music to be performed. The instructions for the ensemble are "for any number of musicians with any instruments, may be performed in whole or in part." Sonic Youth and the Ensemble 303 have recently popularized this piece to some extent. An early, 1967, recording by the QUaX Ensemble (highly regarded by Cardew) is now available again as well, see amazon link below.

I won't repeat information easily available online from A Young Person's Guide to Treatise, probably the best single spot for information both on Cardew and Treatise itself. You should check your local library for a copy of Treatise and Treatise (Handbook).

The Cash-For-Clunkers (CFC) scam

Okay, I have to admit that it initially sounded like a plausible scheme to me, even if it was obviously intended to help out the car dealers and manufacturers since it was limited to purchasing new cars. But what's also happening is that perfectly reasonable used vehicles are being deleted from the used car inventory. The engines in the traded in cars have to be destroyed and then the vehicles scrapped. Okay, maybe this makes sense if you're picturing a clapped-out Buick with a bad exhaust being destroyed, but that's not all that's happening...

A BMW 735i engine being run to destruction to comply with the requirements.
A Volvo S80 T6 hanging on to life for a while.

So here it is, relatively recent cars are being destroyed with our government's money to give a discount to the purchase of new, slightly more efficient cars and trucks. But what about the environmental and economic costs of the new construction? Move along now, nothing to see here.

A large fraction of the so-called clunkers are actually modern, relatively non-polluting, and well-running vehicles. This isn't getting rid of the nasty polluting old cars, just thinning the good used car market. That's a newer, nicer car than mine (the Volvo) and gets better fuel economy than most any SUV or truck out in suburbia.

If you had a 17MPG pickup, you could use the money to buy a (new) 19MPG SUV.

Absolutely insane. Next up, a bailout for the US insurance and glass industry by handing out rocks to be thrown through windows.

One of the strangest marketing tie-in items ever.

Blast from the (weird) past

An email I received today...
----
Hi

I found on the internet a note you posted about a tunnel from Puerto
Rico to Spain. (http://webusers.physics.umn.edu/~duvernoi/tunnel.html)

You were requesting more information and you mentioned a lady from
Cabo Rojo had given you an article about it.

I live in western Puerto Rico and never heard of such tunnel. I
passed your link to a colleague from Cabo ROjo and he doesn't know
anything about it.

Do you have more details on this?

Just curious....Miguel

--
---------------------------------------
Miguel A. Pando, Ph.D., P.Eng.
Associate Professor, Geotechnical Group
Civil Engineering Department
University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez
Mayagüez, PR
00681-9041
787-832-4040 Exts. 3434 or 3718
* New e-mail address: miguel.pando@upr.edu
----

It's been very surprising to me how often folks get in touch with me about this... :)

Research advisor genealogy

My Ph.D. thesis (1996 Chicago) adviser was John A. Simpson (1943 NYU) whose adviser was Serge Korff (1931 Princeton) whose adviser was John Quincy Stuart (1919 Princeton). He was a student of H. L. Cook and Karl Taylor Compton (1912 Princeton), the latter of whom studied under John Whitmore.

Da word

On hiking with seven ten year olds

Man, they have a lot of energy! We did part four (or maybe five) of the twins' birthday party with a picnic, games, and a hike at Hoffman Hills State Park in Wisconsin. We hit all of the high points: raging fire, two different cakes, hot dogs, jalapeno slices, and a climb to the top of the observation tower. Some of the gals gave the big people a lesson in fieldcraft when they successfully hid, let us pass, and then shadowed us on the trail back from the tower.

On race and pets

So, my next door neighbor got a little white yappy dog early this Spring. It's sometimes tied out in the yard during the day making little yap sounds and snarling ineffectively when someone walks near. A couple of weeks ago, I was outside when the owner was there along with the dog. I asked the name of the dog and reached over to pet it. "Whitey" was the answer and "the dog bites." I've noticed that the owner frequently kicks the dog and throws things at it as well. Today I heard her calling to the dog, not "whitey" but "honkie." I burst out laughing, but am still annoyed with her treatment of the dog.