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There's no ice on the ground in Antarctica as soon as you move away from the shore: only snow. And it's either mushy snow in some areas near the shore (~100km) or crusty snow with continuous sastruggi. Which lead me to say that their wheels are way too small. Even with boots with soles of the same surface area as their tires I was breaking the crust. We'll see how it goes, I wish them all the best in this great but unforgiving land, but I wouldn't bet on them.

Soon we can turn Antarctica into a useful human settle-able land with farming and cities. Maybe Al Gore Warming isn't so bad.

Well, even if you melt off all the ice, there isn't actually all that much _land_ that is above sea level hidden under Antarctica. Because of the weight of the ice, most of the continent is under sea level. Once you melt the ice, it will slowly rise, like Canada is currently doing after the northern ice sheet melted at the end of the last glaciation. It's called an isostatic rebound, but I wouldn't buy land down there yet.

The "known challenges" aren't technological, but social (economic and political).

Right they are, but not only. For a good lead on social aspects, I recommand reading about winterover missions to Antarctica. My own site or, must better, Big Dead Place.

Going to spend a winter in Antarctica...

"What would this be like if this happened in deep space, with no possibility of rescue or even airdropped (space dropped?) supplies?"
Is there an age restriction on astronauts

That's probably the root issue. As someone who has worked for the french, italian and (indirectly) US antarctic programs, and also applied for astronaut, I can say that the tests are very different in the different projects, and weed out a lot more applicants on the astronaut side (no surprise here). At the same time, you can't ask for someone who applies to a mechanics or cook position in Antarctica to be as fit as an athlete. Also the american polar program must follow non-discriminatory guidelines when hiring, meaning there'll be be a lot of obese or other borderline medical issues. It's no surprise that most of the medical problems I've heard about were on american stations. But they also employ a lot more people, so read this with a grain of salt. After all, during my first winterover, the guy who became insane and had to be restrained was the doctor himself... Fun times.

They should do it with emperor penguins (that my own pic), that's the only way they feed their chicks, so you'd gets loads of that stuff. And to add to the 'Eeeew factor', it's bright green !

Yeah in fact I wonder about carbon dioxide in the coldest parts of Antarctica too. Wiki says it melts at -78 degrees C. I recall a weather station I was involved with managing reported -75 one day. I wonder if you get CO2 frost in conditions like that?

Disclaimer: I've worked in Antarctica at -78C !

You won't get to see CO2 snow for the simple reason that it forms a perfect mix with air. For the same reason that if you mix water and pure alcohol you won't end up with cubes of water-ice floating (or rather, sinking) in alcohol if you put i in a mild freezer.

"information superhighway" became mainstream (I hated that term at the time, and still hate it now.)

Then you must remember this

I never understood people who are conformists. If you want to be like the others, then why should you be chosen for... anything ? Isn't the other conformist just the same as you and just as likely to be chosen ? Conformity seems so stupid to me. All I want to do is things that nobody or hardly anybody else has done or has the guts to do. Fuck sheeples, they are useless waste of meat.

I never understood people who are conformists. If you want to be like the others, then why should you be chosen for... anything ? Isn't the other conformist just the same as you and just as likely to be chosen ? Conformity seems so stupid to me. All I want to do is things that nobody or hardly anybody else has done or has the guts to do. Fuck sheeples, they are useless waste of meat.

Well, see this image ? It was taken with an El-Cheapo compact camera, handeld, in the place with the clearest sky on earth. To answer your question: it's so bright that it appears like it's painted on the ceiling in fluorescent paint..

Well, see this image ? It was taken with an El-Cheapo compact camera, handeld, in the place with the clearest sky on earth. To answer your question: it's so bright that it appears like it's painted on the ceiling in fluorescent paint..

For those who'd like to configure a multi-button mouse on Linux, it can be tricky. I have a little writeup here for 2 models. Hmmm, server seems to be down at the moment...

media/pictures/family (with various subfolders like "zoo", "picnic", "christmas 2010", etc.)

I'll expand on that. The very best way to sort personal pictures is to put them in dated directories with dated filenames, then add relevant info to the folder/filename. For instance 20100201_SkiEverest/20100201_064554_Ascent.jpg. It's sometimes hard to remember how you named a file, but it's easy to remember more or less the date (or the month if not the year). I use a script to date the images according to the exif info.

You are right on the money. I've spent a year in Antarctica twice for a winterover, meaning 9 months when you have no way out, 13 people sitting in a building with -80C temperatures outside. You HAVE to cope with minor issues. And indeed the only fight broke out on the day before the arrival of the first airplane of the summer. Also you have the feeling of doing something important [research] while there, which is not something you'd get from sitting in a tuna can with nothing to do for 500 days... I'm amazed they've made it so far.

I spent a year drinking recycled water using reverse osmosis, and the water was so pure we actually had to add salts to it to make it drinkable. The desalination plants you refer to must have been pretty shitty.

Closely related to maps are satellite images, and they are in serious need of a cleanup as well. I was recently asked to find some images for a specific area in Antarctica and do specific processing on them. I'll pass on how hard it was to find images (for free or fee), the USGS was the best source but with other commercial satellites it was simply impossible to get samples. Not, the problem was in the format: basically every generation of satellite has its own data format and/or associated geolocation description file, and even 'standard' formats such as GeoTIFF (a TIFF file with embedded geolocation information) were hardly ever read by GIS softwares. I must have tried 10 packages and it's a nightmare, particularly if you want to do processing in addition to visualisation.
Photoshop/Gimp can open and enhance GeoTIFF files. Google Earth Pro can overlay them on the globe. But call one after the other and the geoloc info is lost. It's all like this. Last time I had to do this I ended up writing my own image processor in C, that was almost a decade ago. Nothing has changed. Of course big vendors tell you that their 10k$ software can do it, except that from my trials I have no faith in that, that's too expensive for processing 10 files, and it takes 3 months to get a handle on the software.

Closely related to maps are satellite images, and they are in serious need of a cleanup as well. I was recently asked to find some images for a specific area in Antarctica and do specific processing on them. I'll pass on how hard it was to find images (for free or fee), the USGS was the best source but with other commercial satellites it was simply impossible to get samples. Not, the problem was in the format: basically every generation of satellite has its own data format and/or associated geolocation description file, and even 'standard' formats such as GeoTIFF (a TIFF file with embedded geolocation information) were hardly ever read by GIS softwares. I must have tried 10 packages and it's a nightmare, particularly if you want to do processing in addition to visualisation.
Photoshop/Gimp can open and enhance GeoTIFF files. Google Earth Pro can overlay them on the globe. But call one after the other and the geoloc info is lost. It's all like this. Last time I had to do this I ended up writing my own image processor in C, that was almost a decade ago. Nothing has changed. Of course big vendors tell you that their 10k$ software can do it, except that from my trials I have no faith in that, that's too expensive for processing 10 files, and it takes 3 months to get a handle on the software.

Same criteria as for volunteers for Antarctic winterovers: you have to be crazy enough to want to spend a winter in Antarctica, but sane enough to do productive work down there. Individualistic enough to not miss society at large, but social enough to not want to kill the rest of your group. Good luck with that. Been there done that.

-78 C? I don't think I'd trust anything with moving parts in those conditions. Materials don't behave the way you expect in extreme cold: steel cables become brittle, lubricants freeze and shatter, thermal contraction messes with tolerances, and everything gets coated with ice.

Correct. We stopped using snowmachines below -55C. And the only mechanical thing we kept using outdoors was the (Caterpilar) loader for the snow melter (to produce water). Even the soles of our special shoes would turn hard as rock below that. Sorry about the bad link in the previous post.

Fixed that for you.

What I find even more impressive is how NASA, ESA and others manages space probes I think, that's really extreme conditions in every way.

Antarctica can be meaner in several ways: - you don't have a direct line of communication with the rest of the world (space probes do). Hell, you can't even have a direct comm with geosync satellites. - water ! Take thin crystals of ice, add lots of wind and you end up with water deep inside even sealed boxes; hence shorts and very quick rusting of components. - temperature changes. In space you surround your satellite with some heat conductive sheets and the temp basically never changes (unless you go into the earth shadow). In antarctica you can have -80C in winter, -10 in summer. To say nothing that the cold has unforeseen effects on materials (dielectric changes, materials becoming brittle...) - unstable power: the power comes from big diesel generators and is shared between experiments, people, etc... It goes out, the temp of the room where your computer is falls to -60 in 15 minutes. Power comes back, computer tries to boot. Bye, bye hard drive. - budget: experiments for Antarctica have much less than 1/10 the budget of equivalent space experiments. And most of it is eaten by logistics. So you end up with standard computers and a few hack and a guy standing nearby (me) to kick it if necessary.

I'll give this guy the Uber geek crown if he adds a 200 foot vertical climb to his trip to the "datacenter"

Well, let's see if I can take that crown: I managed a bunch of experiments (and their associated computers and comm systems) at Dome C in 2005. It's higher than South Pole. And colder to boots (we had -78C). And some instruments were atop a 100ft tower (now raised to 200ft) were it was windy as hell in addition to being as cold as stated. In winter it was physically next to impossible to climb: hard-packed snow covered the scale (you had to clean every step), your breath would freeze your clothing solid around your head, your glasses would fog in a few seconds turning you blind, and if you exposed a blip of skin it would feel like a knife went through it immediately. Gosh, I miss that place: the view was fantastic.

If all you want is transfer + batch renaming (it wasn't the original question), then there are plenty of solutions. Here's my own script for whatever OS (I first wrote it on Windows+Cygwin).

An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling

Disastrous idea. I've had to accelerate hard a few times to avoid a collision, and you do that by flooring it, no time to think further. Unfortunately once I couldn't do that because there was a car right in front of me and we were both stopped. The resulting fireball resulting in 8 cars looking like this... Way to end a honeymoon.

The most impressive cold engine start I've seen was on big Caterpilars and such in Antarctica, at the end of the winterover. With the truck having just spent 10 months unused at temps down to -80C, and a current temp of -60C. One guy gets inside and turns the key in the ignition while the other sprays some 'start pilot' (whatever that is) in the air intake. Broooom! There it goes. I've never been so impressed by hardcore mechanical engineering.

[disclaimer, I've worked 15 years in climate research, acquiring hard data].

You mean you're one of those lying liars, right? So why should we believe anything you say...?

Unfortunately at this point of time claiming to be a scientist is not an appeal to authority. That's what this whole discussion is all about--not whether or not man-made (influenced?) climate change exists, not if you're educated on the subject, but whether or not lay people will accept your results as being unbiased and worthy of import. The question is whether or not science as a whole is now perceived to be worthless by the average person, man on the street.

Hint: The answer is yes. To the average person science is now just another avenue for politics and hence breaks down along party lines. It has become dogma. Noise.

By self-identifying as a scientist you are not stating you are knowledgeable about the subject and thus worth listening to, your opinion backed by research "proving" it to be true. All you've done is declare yourself a politician. A liar.

--bornagainpenguin

If you are going to cry wolf on such a biblical scale as the AGW theory does, you really should make every attempt to be open and above reproach.

You can't because it's been brewing for some decades, with newer models and hard facts (like antarctic cores) trickling in slowly. At a certain point you are able to say that you have enough data to conclude, but if you wait until you have perfect data, it'll be FAR TOO LATE. We need to act now.

Put the full raw data, the adjustments with detailed explanations

That's exabytes of data and tens of thousands of publications and it's already out there for who wants it. What are opponents (who can't even understand basic statistics) going to do with it that scientists haven't already done anyway, except nitpick that there's a comma missing in a sentence and therefore the whole thing must be wrong like they did in this email fiasco ?!?

Free speech is one thing, but when talk-radio (just one example) come out with completely made up 'facts' and statistics on the fly to please their listeners, they ought to be fined hard if the study they pretend their stats come from doesn't exist in peer-reviewed form. I've listened to them 'debate' the current climate problems, and it would have been a good laugh if it hadn't made me cry first.

You're free to talk all you want but it's not going to change anything. Discussing it online is nothing but a waste of time unless your intentions are to embarrass Linus.

Well, I certainly hope that my various posts and talks against Diana whatever contributed somehow to her not getting it. Everybody likes baby seals and nobody likes land mines, but being a rich idiot bitch princess who likes the former and not the latter doesn't entitle her to the prize. I remember getting into a rabbid frenzy whenever I heard idiots discussing her chances at the time. Well, this being said I still think the Obama prize is some kind of joke and I'm waiting for the punchline. Linus deserves it more than anybody I can think of.

A couple years ago while looking at my apache logs, I noticed some ridiculous searches. And indeed, after doing a quick grep "^who|^what|^when|^how" I was able to compile a pretty damning selection of searches. I should do it again.

There's actually one very good reason to go to Vegas: to climb the excellent sandstone of Red Rocks, just a couple miles off the city. But for all I care you could nuke the city; it would certainly lower the amount of car break-ins while we are out climbing.

I had my own telescope, but my pitiful attempts at seeing anything were thwarted by the vexatious cold and my own incompetence at astronomy.

I had my own telescope, but my pitiful attempts at seeing anything were thwarted by the vexatious cold and my own incompetence at astronomy.

I had my own telescope, but my pitiful attempts at seeing anything were thwarted by the vexatious cold and my own incompetence at astronomy.

Dude. You're in Antarctica and it's September. You've got bigger problems than Slashdot moderation.

I'm not there right now. My pages refer to my previous missions.

Are you receiving resupply yet? Mobile Internet service must really suck down there. What kind of bandwidth do you get? It may interest you to know that it only gets 11C colder on Mars than it does there.

Supplies won't arrive before november. No mobile, although I think they should set up a tower, if only for local GSM use. Bandwidth was limited (in 2005 but I don't think it's changed) to two connections a day for email. Irridium throuput was abysmal. Avg temp at Dome C is actually the same than on Mars (-53C).

Moderation annoys me now and then, but if a moderation is really abusive you can just follow up with another post that's topical and interesting, and mention by-the-way that the parent was abusively modded and another moderator will fix it.

Apparently it works !

Awesome pics on your website by the way. I've got that bookmarked now. Probably beat up your webserver with wget this weekend building a local mirror.

Thanks. It survived a slashdoting once, so go ahead.

The answer to your question is: be patient. [...]

Well, I wasn't... Maybe when I upgrade my wife's phone, I'll have an excuse to get her a Linux phone to play with. I'm a little bummed that I can't get a bash prompt on Android, although the platform works great. Trying to compile my first 'hello world' right now.

Dude. You're in Antarctica and it's September. You've got bigger problems than Slashdot moderation. Are you receiving resupply yet? Mobile Internet service must really suck down there. What kind of bandwidth do you get? It may interest you to know that it only gets 11C colder on Mars than it does there.

Really, don't let it get to you. The moderation here is pretty spotty - it works in the general case, not the specific. But it's the best moderation system I've seen yet because it's self-policing (low maintenance) and uncensored (browse at -1 and you can see everything, no matter how it's moderated, and posts can't be edited or deleted). Some of us find an amusing game trying to grab attention (interesting) and be controversial enough to garner as many moderations to a single post as possible. That's a tricky game because nobody downmods the +5s, or upmods the -1's usually. Moderation annoys me now and then, but if a moderation is really abusive you can just follow up with another post that's topical and interesting, and mention by-the-way that the parent was abusively modded and another moderator will fix it. Now and then I'm deservedly down modded and I have to take my lumps. Sometimes I do it on purpose.

Awesome pics on your website by the way. I've got that bookmarked now. Probably beat up your webserver with wget this weekend building a local mirror.

The answer to your question is: be patient. There isn't a special repository that I know of for mobile-optimized apps, but remember - the mobile platforms that are truly open really aren't shipping in volume yet. Once they are, a repository will be set up, Debian (and hence, Ubuntu) will have thousands of apps, and you'll be able to search for it on apt-url with the name of your platform and the type of thing you want to do. And it will be free because that's how this stuff works.

The Intel Moblin platform will be just like all the other linux platforms I've seen. Users will buy it because it's known to be Linux compatible and wipe that Silverlight and other bundled crap off it - to replace with a really open platform like Debian or Ubuntu before operating it at all. It's just like businesses that wipe the OEM install of Windows with the preinstalled crudware in preference for a clean install of XP with their own apps. Don't worry - it will come.

I got my own balloon pics. It wasn't in space but in a pretty interesting place anyway.

If you want to know what 365 days in real isolation in a tin can feels like... At least we had: (1) plenty of things to do, (2) the pressure that if we failed bad we'd most likely die. They had: (1) nothing to do, (2) the possibility to open the can if things got bad...

I'm a climber and I can relate this story of a mountain guide I know who used a whistle to navigate on a glacier while in a full whiteout. He knew more or less the topography of the cliffs nearby and would blow short whistles, time the echo and estimate the distance to the various cliffs while continuing to walk with his clients. It was in the time before the GPSes, but those aren't very accurate on mountains anyway.

I, for one, welcome custom camera firmwares

I would too. I'm a photographer and a pro embedded software writer, but I have no idea how to write (or, better, 'correct') a firmware for a camera. I have written out long lists of suggestions to the makers of my cameras, obviously to no avail. Some things would be trivial one liners in the firmware code. But how do you get started ? Can you decompile a firmware update ? Probably not. Can you get the source code of a Nikon/Canon/Ricoh/etc firmware ? Probably not.

...what color is penguin poop before. It's slippery and stinky and either green or red...

One simply has to watch a bodybuilding competition to see the difference in potential.

How is this relevant to anything but the ability to soak up Anabolic Steroids without dying immediately before the competition ? At least you should compare sexes in a real sport (one that uses brains and muscles, there are so very few of them).

Can he swim underwater like a real seal?

I know attempting a serious answer to a discussion riddled with baby seal jokes is rather useless, but baby seals can't swim until they lose their bay fur which provides insulation only against cold air, not cold water.

The thing that bothers me with newspaper and TV news is that many stories need information from a specialist and they insist on putting a non-specialist, a journalist, between you and the person who knows what they're talking about.

Yes. One the one hand I have a lot of respect for the job of journalist (war stories and all), but on the other hand I was interviewed several times in 2005 while doing some new kind of scientific mission in Antarctica.

Every time the articles were full of shit, completely misrepresenting what was said. Even the videos: they would cut at the most meaningless moments and keep the stupid stuff (me slipping on ice, very funny) !

It was up to a point that many of my colleagues would point blank refuse to talk with journalists... while (one) other absolutely loved the exposure, no matter what ended up being written.

Let me be the first to say that you have a really cool job.

Let's see if I can best that... C;-)

In Antarctica we can't use CAT cables because their dielectric properties change at extreme cold temperatures (-80C) and they run like crap. The cables also turn to raw spaghetti and break at the slightest touch.

So we use wireless (absolutely no interferences there !), or fiber, which doesn't change properties with the cold. Usually both as a backup in case a snowmachine runs in a cable (we can't put them in the 'ground' or they would disappear under the accumulated snow over a few years, so we place them on rows of low poles).

When I was young, the library was where I used to hang out.

Couple years ago I took a climbing road trip of the SW US, and on rainy days we would just go hang out in small town libraries. I was really surprised to see them often crowded by very varied crowds (bums, students, kids, tourists, old timers, etc...)

I've seen plenty of penguins and even been bitten by one: came out behind me as I was chatting with a friend, decided I was in _his_ path and bite me on the knee tendon while hitting me very hard with his bony flippers. I jumped 10 feet in the air. He ended up as a football before I could think about it. I had a limp for a week but he just walked away (fat is very good protection...)

I was initially afraid of the flicker factor [...] especially when it's cold

I noticed that too: they flicker and take much longer to ramp up to full brightness when it's cold, even normal winter room-temperature cold. The problem is that I often work in Antarctica and I wonder how those would fare at -80C !

Then let me tell you what I want on the next generation cameras: more dynamic range, the Fuji S5 paved the way but they can do better. Then a better signal / noise. Then a raw file format with at least some (lossless) compression (Jpeg2000 anyone). Then full 24x36 frame sensors on a tiny compact cameras (they used to fit such a film sensor, plus a roll, plus the winding space in much smaller cameras than the current crop of 7x9mm sensors). Then a self-detection when there is dust on the sensor and a warning on the camera. Then physical buttons to change the settings, not just menu functions. A hyperfocal distance setting (I've been claiming for that ever since the start of the 'D' line of Nikkors 2 decades ago and it's only a fucking simple software fix). Enough ? Get crankin'