Science in Antarctica

Richard writes "Just to prove that science is cool; Tania, the editor of Nerdling zine has travelled to Antarctica just to publish some interesting reading material on her blog. Apparently there to calibrate a bunch of physics equipment she appears to spend most of her time marvelling at ice bergs and penguins, abseiling around the continent, and giving us explicit details of the everyday ordinary stuff. Advanced technology in an extreme environment, fantastic stuff!"

A Picture Says a Thousand Words

[fembots]

At time like this, isn't it better to have a videolog [slashdot.org] or photolog [slashdot.org]?

I'm not very well-travelled, so it's a bit overwhelming for me to imagine "The sun came out for the first time in a few days and turned the smooth ocean into a mirror which reflected the bergs" without linking it to DiCaprio.

And how do I decode "sshhhhhHHHHHH" or "KSHHHXXXXXX" or "CRACK CRUNCH GCKKXX"?

Yellow snow

[Linuxathome]

Publish a picture of yellow snow in the antarctic and I'll look at the photolog.

Re:Yellow snow

[nerdling ed]

I've already done this -- see the weblog post 'deep musings'

Yellow snow is impossible..

[khrtt]

Publish a picture of yellow snow in the antarctic and I'll look at the photolog. ..in the Antarctic - the piss freezes on the fly, and drops to the ground in little yellow piss-ice-balls - didn't you know?

Re:'abseiling'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Abseiling: Lower oneself with a double rope coiled around the body from a mountainside

Re:'abseiling'?

[dukoids]

In German it means to rope down but also to steal away.

Re:'abseiling'?

[AndroidCat]

Any relation to Albanifest [wagenschenke.ch]?

Re:Wow. Wow. Just WOW!

[Hatta]

Jesus, Richard, that's quite the story description. Have an orgasm over this, did you?

I wouldn't be surprised. Tania is damn hot [nerdling.net].

Re:Wow. Wow. Just WOW!

[Hatta]

Say what you want, if she worked in my lab I'd be all over that. And yeah, I prefer maryann to ginger too.

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[KillerCow]

...just another self-obsessed, self-promoting, intellectually challenged blogger.

But... you said that you liked my blog. You said that I was very talented. Was that just to get into my bed?

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[dan dan the dna man]

No, you just offered me the highest traffic linkbacks...

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[IO ERROR]

And that's why I used to hate blogs [slashdot.org]. Now I have one of my very own. And my first rule is, I don't talk about myself on my blog. Nobody really wants to read about me anyway. See below [ioerror.us] for what I do talk about.

This definitely was not front-page material. In the Science section, maybe. After all I did learn how to make friends with penguins, and that's an important life skill!

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[IO ERROR]

I met my girlfriend through a 'blog, largely because I was open about myself and my interests.

by Anonymous Coward

This is some serious industrial-strength irony.

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[yorkpaddy]

With regards to the concurrently running poll - "What will kill the internet?" it's a shame "Blogging" isn't one of the options.

It won't kill the internet just as commercial sites haven't killed the internet. What it will do is add extra noise to the internet. It will make it harder to find useful, interesting sites. I have a blog and I talk about myself there a lot. I don't expect my blog to be interesting to everyone. If someone finds it interesting, great, if not there are plenty of other site

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Blogs will "peak" just like free web space like GeoCities is on the way out. Blogs will reach a point where the only people "blogging" are 13 to 15 year old teeny-bops.

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[metlin]

I think it would be the other way around - blogs will only be used by serious people, and the teeny-bop generation will just lose interest and move on to another fad.

Just like the teeny-bop generation lost in webpages and moved on to Blogs. They've a very short attention span, and there was a time when every other teen had a website about herself, her dog, her boyfriend and Britney. Now that's changed and it's a Blog.

When teeny-bops started having websites, people felt that websites would go out of fashio

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[athakur999]

I feel your pain. Every blog story here should be prefaced by why exactly we should care about the blogger in question. Something like:

You should care because author...
( ) Was on Star Trek
( ) Is a Linux kernel developer
( ) Is a Mozilla developer
( ) Is a hot girl
( ) Has pictures of hot girls in their blog
( ) Other (you should not care)

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[metlin]

While I agree with you that this is definitely not Slashdot material, I can see why someone might want to keep a blog of their expedition.

Back in the days, the captain kept the log of the journeys and the happenings - today anyone can keep a blog of what's going on.

If not anything, it'll provide the future generations with lots of (albeit mostly boring) historical material :)

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[T.Hobbes]

Anybody at any time could keep a log of anything. The parent poster's beef, and my own, is that bloggers put their log on the web and expect other people to care about it.

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[metlin]

I think it's just a human thing for others to take notice of what you are upto. Just that Blogs provide people with the illusion that there are *actually* people who read your Blog and are interested in what you're upto.

And that feeling encourages people to write logs in situations where they otherwise wouldn't have.

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[pritchma]

I actually found it quite interesting. Having never been to Antartica, I learnt quite a few things:

* China has a base there
* Ships take 10 hours to get into "port" with much crunching of ice along the way.
* Penguins aren't even remotely afraid of people.

Your post doesn't really add anything to the discussion. If you don't have anything useful to say, read the next article!

Re:Mmm Blog Linkage

[yorkpaddy]

Blogs are one of the best things about the internet. They give the little guy a voice. Granted many of the may be boring, biased, or stupid, so are many stories posted by maintstream media. I would much rather have the problem of searching through a lot of bad articles hoping to find a good one as opposed to hoping the only articles that are presented to me are good.

Firefox unfriendly :(

[Richard_at_work]

Unfortunately her blog renders badly on this install of firefox, anyone else getting overlapping between the two panes?

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[Anonymous Coward]

I get it too. I don't really care anyways, if she can't have her page render on Firefox then 1) she is not a nerd (hence this is not a nerdling article) and 2) I will not read it.

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[momerath2003]

It doesn't work on safari either.

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[jacksonj04]

Yep, I see the same. How hard could it be to use some real CSS and check it in something other than IE?

I haven't been there...

[leehwtsohg]

But I could imagine circumstances in antarctica in which it would be very hard.

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[LiquidCoooled]

Unfortunately, from other comments, this one is worse than slashdots bug.

It doesn't fix itself with a redraw.

I don't know who to be pissed off at here really.

I don't know enough about css style sheets and rendering to be able to identify the problems in the page, and I don't know enough about how firefox handles problems like this.

All I know is it happens too fucking much.

Can somebody please show the site owners the primary failure points in their code so the owners can fix the problem without having a

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[jacksonj04]

Basically, Firefox should try rendering pages in an IE 'quirks' mode if they have no doctype definitions, or certain definitions. What I see increasingly is pages proclaiming themselves (through doctype definitions) to be XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant when in reality they're still in HTML 4.0.

This causes Firefox to go "OK, we will render this page completely according to the specs" and it duly doesn't get it quite right.

IE in these situations goes "Oh, i know it *says* it's XHTML 1.0 Strict but *I* think it'

It's still codable in Notepad

[ccmay]

The web used to be codable with notepad

It's still codable in Notepad, or BBEdit in my case. Content rules!No dancing teddy bears in Flash for me.

-ccm

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[c0p0n]

Also on Konqueror and Firefox under Linux.

Re:Firefox unfriendly :(

[isorox]

It caught a virus of slashdot, but dont worry, apparently its HTML 3.2 comapatable!

Drinking at the southpole

[yorkpaddy]

Here is an interesting story I read about drinking at the south pole. Modern Drunkard South Pole [moderndrun...gazine.com]

Re:Drinking at the southpole

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

No, no, no. You have to make your write-up sound like a second or third rate wanna-be Hemingway penned it.

Re:Drinking at the southpole

[yorkpaddy]

I don't understand what you mean? I didn't write the modern drunkard article.

Why I should never go to Antartica

[MagicDude]

I should never go down there, because I would probably torment the penguins. Am I the only one who's curious about what it would be like to run through a flock of penguins to see if it would it be anything like running through a flock of pigeons?

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[leathered]

You're a very brave man to admit on Slashdot that you have the urge to torment penguins.

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[legirons]

"You're a very brave man to admit on Slashdot that you have the urge to torment penguins."

Walks up to a penguin: "Excuse me, are you Gentoo? I'm looking for some KDE programs" Penguin stares blankly back at the scientist. "Ok, nevermind". Scientist tries the next penguin

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[MagicDude]

Too bad Polar Bears are only in the arctic. The only place you'll polar bears and penguins together are in a zoo.

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[cvdwl]

Been there [calstate.edu], done that [calstate.edu], they (emperors) didn't care much, though we weren't in the group responsible for tackling and imprisoning them. Nor do they care about 2-cycle snowmobile motors or large red Snow-Cat like vehicles. The penguin research group actually had several wander up to their enclosure, wait patiently, then walk in when someone opened the door.

Adelies were a bit more skittish, but even they would stroll up [calstate.edu] and give you a good looking over from a range of a few feet.

DISCLAIMER: No penguins were harmed in the filming of our research!

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[kevcol]

Fantastic photos- especially at Shackleton's hut.

Thanks for posting those links.

Re:Why I should never go to Antartica

[meringuoid]

Am I the only one who's curious about what it would be like to run through a flock of penguins to see if it would it be anything like running through a flock of pigeons? As a wise man once pointed out, ever seen a angry penguin charging at you in excess of 100mph? You'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.

Lake in Antarctica?

[Gary Destruction]

Isn't there an underground lake in Anarctica that yields the possibility of life on Europa?

Re:Lake in Asia?

[Gary Destruction]

Europa is one of Jupiter's moons.

Re:Lake in Asia?

[The Cydonian]

Indeed, but from another poster's link [nasa.gov]:

Like Lake Vostok, Jupiter's moons Europa and Callisto may hold liquid water beneath a thick, icy crust. Lake Vostok may hold clues to whether life could survive in a dark extraterrestrial ocean, and may allow scientists to practice looking for it.

Some weirdo analogous situation reasoning, it appears.

Re:Lake in Antarctica?

[mmontour]

You're probably thinking of Lake Vostok [nasa.gov].

Re:Lake in Antarctica?

[icebattle]

Yes, the Europans moved there when global warming rendered life impossible on their own planet.

"Just to"

[oexeo]

Just to prove that science is cool; Tania, the editor of Nerdling zine has travelled to Antarctica just to publish some interesting reading material on her blog.

I don't think "just to" means what you thinks it means.

Re:"Just to"

[0x20]

the first "just to" doesn't refer to Tania.

Re:"Just to"

[rodrigo_braz]

On the contrary, the semi-colon is precisely the reason why it doesn't refer to Tania.

didnt know that abseiling was a verb

[Hank Chinaski]

ab = german down
seil = german rope
abseilen = german verb

Re:didnt know that abseiling was a verb

[dukoids]

According to http://dict.leo.org "to abseil" is an English verb (with the same meaning = to rope down). In German, "abseilen" also means to steal away.

Re:didnt know that abseiling was a verb

[Thwomp]

Well in English [oed.com] it is! :-)

wait a tic...

[Anonymous Coward]

...isn't that the same bitch who claimed to jump her kawasaki over the chernobyl reactor or whatever?

Re:wait a tic...

[kandela]

No, it's not.

Scientific Indeed.

[DeathByDuke]

Advanced technology in an extreme environment, fantastic stuff!

Yeah when are they going to get to finding Atlantis? I want a cool puddle jumper thingy.

Re:Scientific Indeed.

[Linker3000]

They've done that recently (again) - here's the BBC news article from 15th November:

New claim on location of Atlantis [bbc.co.uk]

6000 male scientist blogs go un-noticed

[Red Moose]

In other Slashdot news, 6000 other web logs by male scientist reporters continue to be unimportant due to their lack of being female.

Next up: a girl called Kristin installs Linux.......hold off whacking it just yet.

Re:6000 male scientist blogs go un-noticed

[kandela]

And I suppose you're one of those nerds who wonders why there aren't any girls interested in what you're doing and wonders why nobody talks to you at parties.

If you'd read the blog without making a pre-judgement you'd see why it was getting attention when some others aren't and it's not because she's female but instead because it's beautifully written and inspiring.

In the early days of Australian exploration, the relevent European powers counted a poetic ability as one of the requirements for an explore

Re:6000 male scientist blogs go un-noticed

[Red Moose]

I would have read the bloody thing if it wasn't slashdotted, so rather than leave a post go uncommented I just went with the usual meaning behind such front page news.

The Best Site on Antarctica: Big Dead Place

[Nova Express]

To my mind, the best web page on the reality of an everyday working stiff's life in Antarctica is Big Dead Place [bigdeadplace.com]. It casts a rather cynical eye on the dubious glories of "working for science" there.

And there's that great review of John Carpenter's The Thing [bigdeadplace.com]: "The most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower...In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers."

Sail on, etc.

[Trailwalker]

most of her time marvelling at ice bergs and penguins, abseiling around the continent,

Abseiling is descending via a rope, i.e. rappelling.

Poster must have thought it was some sort of boat.

need link to picture

[anonymous21]

There needs to be a new rule: Whenever linking to a story by a chick, please also include a link to a picture of her. This will save countless hours as every male slashdotter tries to search for a pic of her on their own.

Science in Antarctica will be worthwhile...

[CodeWanker]

when we find a life form that evolved there from scratch instead of adapting from warmer climes. If there's a beasty of ANY level of complexity there that originated in the icy south, we'll have a MAJOR leg up on looking for life in non-human-friendly biospheres on other planets.

Cynical Slashdotters

[kandela]

I'm sorry, but this is one of the most beautiful and personal accounts I've ever read about science. I can't believe that the people who read slashdot, who are apparently lovers of science and technology can't see this blog for what it's worth. Somebody wrote that 6000 blogs by male scientists are being ignored - well I'm a male scientist and the reason I read this blog and not others is because apart from being witty in the way us science types like, beautifully written in a literary style, it's informative and most of all it's INSPIRING. No other blog out there that I've seen gives so much of the blogger. Tania is a most inspiring person, she's a person who LOVES science and if you guys can't see past the fact that the page only loads properly in IE and read the love of science then, as far as I'm concerned, you can't call yourself nerds!

Re:Cynical Slashdotters

[mevets]

I agree; although I had hoped for pictures of her joining the 300 club.

Particle physicists are waaaay ahead of you

[cstepan]

Ice makes a pretty good Cerenkov radiator. Just ask the folks on AMANDA [uci.edu] and RICE. [ukans.edu]

The Ubernerdling

[vulcanrob]

Wow! Tania is on slashdot. This is how you can tell a nerdling has arrived. Do check out her site when the traffic dies down, her main thing, or internet thing is her fabulous 'zine, the nerdling. It is really inspiring, makes you want to put on a lab coat, mess up your hair and wander around the campus bumping into things. You will love her account of iceland, I still laugh about it, but then I still laugh about Kirk saying "this increases it's power by one to the fourth power" As a disgruntled forme