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.