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Century Old Antarctic Expedition Notebook Found Underneath Ice

Posted by samzenpus on from the thawed-writing dept.

An anonymous reader writes During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements. Over 100 years after their deaths, an artifact from his journey has surfaced. New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust reports that they have found a notebook which tracked Scott's last Terra Nova Expedition. According to the Antarctic Heritage Trust, the notebook belonged to a surgeon, photographer and zoologist named George Murray Levick, who accompanied Scott at the unfortunate Terra Nova expedition. Executive Director Nigel Watson said, "It's an exciting find. The notebook is a missing part of the official expedition record. After spending seven years conserving Scott's last expedition building and collection, we are delighted to still be finding new artifacts."

63 comments

  1. 100 Year Old MacBook by DrunkenTerror · · Score: 4, Funny

    It doesn't even have an ethernet port.

    1. Re: 100 Year Old MacBook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      Yea but the frequent contributor Bennett might be able to offer some way to optimize the MacBook so it doesn't need an Ethernet port for ice delivery

    2. Re:100 Year Old MacBook by antdude · · Score: 1

      Haha. I read that as a lap(top/py) too. :)

      --
      Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
  2. Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Has anyone asked preeminent mathematician Bennett Haselton if this notebook has any insights into optimizing the ice lines at Burning Man? I will not listen to anyone else's opinion of the importance of this notebook unless Bennett weighs in on it. He's a frequent contributor.

    1. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.

    2. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by OzPeter · · Score: 1

      At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.

      While I laughed at the joke, this is actually a serious problem.

      If you don't explicitly transfer electronic data from one generation of media/format to the next then it becomes so much harder to recover it with each technical generation that you skip. Which means that in the future when people digital media hidden away in some shoebox that belonged to their great-grandpa, they are more likely to throw it away than to try and figure out what it is.

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    3. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      Let this be a warning to all you Etruscans out there. Oh, wait...too late.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    4. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by OzPeter · · Score: 1

      find .. when people find digital media

      --
      I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
    5. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      They'll open up gramps' USB key full of JPEGs, and they'll be shocked when most of them are of trannies. You know, chicks with dicks and that sort of thing.

    6. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Oh stfu kid, systemd is not that bad. Yes, it goes against a deeply rooted ideology of doing one thing and doing it right, but it also bridges a lot of things together (thus breaking the boundaries between many distros) which most of you ignorant fucks fail to recognize.

      Out with the old, in with the new and if you can't deal with it, then die!

    7. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      See: Vast amounts of data from the moon orbiter era and Apollo, stored on magnetic tapes whose readers are (were) no longer functional. Now they're the subject of multi-million-dollar efforts to return a single device to a functional state in order to read the original master data out...

      However, we should be careful about extrapolating from this. We need to remember that we're living at or just after the steepest part of the electronic technology S-curve; It's a unique, one-time abberation that media capacities and speeds are increasing so fast that things from ten years ago are obsolete and those from thirty years ago are historical artifacts.

      The changes of the past occurred when the "utilization" of silicon's potential switching speed and pattern size was effectively zero percent, whereas today we are within 10 years of the limits. Even if we replace silicon (e.g. with exotic heterojunction devices, or graphene, or diamond, ...), if nothing else they're going to hit the same brick wall that displays did when they stalled at 1080p ten years ago: Good Enough Syndrome...

    8. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes, it goes against a deeply rooted ideology of doing one thing and doing it right, but it also bridges a lot of things together (thus creating a gigantic attack surface on PID 1)

      FTFY

    9. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by CODiNE · · Score: 2

      I hear they're planning to change it to XML for easy reading and parsing, here's a preview of it:

      <11101100>
          <10101101>
            <00101101>0011101101</00101101>
            <011101101>0110101101</011101101>
          </10101101>
      </11101100>

      I think the readability is much improved with the upcoming plaintext file format.

      --
      Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
    10. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by snakeplissken · · Score: 1

      whoops, wrong mod, sorry :(

    11. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Dorianny · · Score: 2

      At least the notebook's logs weren't written in a cryptic binary format like systemd's logs. Because they're in plain text, we can still easily understand them over a century later.

      Language's themselves are abstract constructs. We still can't decipher many extinct languages and there is no way to be sure that in the future anyone will still have knowledge of English or any other human language currently in use

    12. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I >am Good Enough, you insensitive clod!

    13. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by JasonGoatcher · · Score: 1

      If nothing else they're going to hit the same brick wall that displays did when they stalled at 1080p ten years ago: Good Enough Syndrome...

      1080p is far, FAR from good enough when you're talking about working on a monitor. Double or triple it and maybe give us more monitor space and we'll maybe agree that it's good enough.

    14. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by gl4ss · · Score: 1

      harder? maybe.
      maybe not.

      you can play pretty much all, even very obscure, arcade games with information taken from them being ran in your modern computer. in the long term, things tend to work out for this stuff. once you can easily train some algos to run emulation of old sw and "manually" move over data you wont even be having trouble with spreadsheets, databases in crazy formats or any of that. I'd worry more about the short term readability and preservation.. like, currently I can't run most of programs I wrote for living only ten years ago on anything buyable from the shop today(as brand new items). which could have been said for the amiga circa 1996 I guess - now getting amiga stuff written in say 1990 in almost perfect quality on modern pc's is pretty easy.

      (so, maybe someone writes a series60 emulator in the next 10 years - the so called emulator that was used for developing was actually a win32 shim.. so it was useless for developing, since it involved a different memory model and compilers, haha. there wer some rumors of some true real arm emulator research projects though.. ).

      and i someone finds digital stuff from today 100 years from now, they might find it interesting. howerver if they find a memory card from today 5 years from now it's worthless, the same card 10 years from now is a curiosity, like the 32mb sd card I keep around, and the same card in 50 years is a rarity and in 100 years an artifact..

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    15. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by segin · · Score: 1

      Or like Windows NT's logs, ka-zing!

    16. Re:Bennett! Bennett! Rah! Rah! Rah! by segin · · Score: 1

      Ezekiel 23:20

      Now I know the kind of porn you're into :)

  3. Is overexposure worse than exposure? by Progman3K · · Score: 1

    Inquiring minds want to know

    --
    I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
    1. Re:Is overexposure worse than exposure? by pla · · Score: 4, Funny

      Obviously! It not only kills you, it leave your body all bright and washed-out, with poor saturation and contrast balance.

  4. Re:President Obola isnt done trying to be a maoist by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can see you need to hug something incendiary.

  5. Captain Scott by JSG · · Score: 5, Funny

    In Britain he is generally known as "Captain Scott" or "Scott of the errr is it the Artic or the other one?"

    We deify people who try really hard but come second and Scott is no exception being beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian Amundsen, but he cheated by knowing more about the environment and being properly equipped.

    1. Re:Captain Scott by excelsior_gr · · Score: 0

      How is knowing more about the environment and being properly equipped cheating, exactly? It just sounds that Amundsen was just a better explorer and leader, to me. He knew that the dogs were the best option and focused on them, instead of coming up with a ridiculous combination of dogs, ponies and motorised vehicles. The motor vehicles were not robust enough and Scott had to carry the horse food all the way. Scott also relied on his orders being followed to the letter, and he got properly screwed by his mates that completely ignored him and left him freeze to death. If you want to accuse Amundsen for anything, accuse him of designing an expedition with the sole purpose of reaching the pole first with only a bare minimum of science. Cheating, however, is a totally empty accusation.

    2. Re:Captain Scott by ledow · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Welcome to British Sarcasm, lesson 1 (not 101, this ain't fucking America).

    3. Re:Captain Scott by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      If you're not cheating you aren't trying hard enough.

    4. Re:Captain Scott by excelsior_gr · · Score: 1

      I blame the Slashdot mods for not moderating the GP as 'funny' in a timely fashion, thereby letting me ridicule myself.

      I think 'Whooooosh' is in order.

    5. Re:Captain Scott by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Scott of the Antarctic == OMG PONIEZ!!1!! (or, ponies? WTF?)

    6. Re:Captain Scott by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      Amongst the mountaineering and seafaring communities he's as often remembered as the leader who killed his team through inadequate planning, in contrast to Shackleton who brought his men back, despite a considerably more technically difficult expedition.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  6. Extracts from the Notebook by AchilleTalon · · Score: 3, Funny

    March 18th 1912: We got Pete for dinner.
    March 19th 1912: We got Pete again for dinner. He was a little bit more frozen than yesterday.
    March 20th 1912: Pete is good, but now it is three days in a row and I am starting to think Tom could be a valuable replacement and upgrade to our diet.

    --
    Achille Talon
    Hop!
    1. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A) there was nobody called Pete on the polar party
      B) not actually very funny IMHO.

    2. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by lgw · · Score: 2

      Actually, that was more or less the problem. With no understanding of nutrition (just like today, nutrition experts knew nothing), they packed in a bunch of protein and few calories. Meat was thought to be more foodly than veggies, more food per pound, but they effectively starved to death on their Atkins diet.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    3. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by tomhath · · Score: 1

      Shouldn't the 19th and the 20th say dinner was a Repeat of the day before?

    4. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      Not a fan of morbid humor?

    5. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      That's why I insist on meat AND potatoes.

    6. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "I'm so sick of these rePetes."

    7. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

      Perhaps he misspelled paté?

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    8. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by PPH · · Score: 1

      Dear Sir,

      I am glad to hear that your studio audience disapproves of the last skit as strongly as I. As a naval officer I abhor the implication that the Royal Navy is a haven for cannibalism. It is well known that we have the problem relatively under control, and that it is the RAF who now suffer the largest casualties in this area. And what do you think the Argylls ate in Aden. Arabs?

      Yours etc. Captain B.J. Smethwick in a white wine sauce with shallots, mushrooms and garlic.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
    9. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by khallow · · Score: 1

      Protein has about the same amount of calories per gram as carbohydrates do.

    10. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Experts understand plenty about nutrition, but like all science stories in the press, the coverage is horrible and worse than useless. Veggies? Freshies are nice, but not worth the weight. You're right, they should have brought a mix of carbs and protein. Which isn't their worst mistake, by far. Still, I wouldn't call carbs veggies. I've worked in Antarctica and you have to pay attention to keep the furnace fueled. Carbs, especially sugar are great for that quick burst, but protein and fat are nice for the long haul. I always carried a cookie or other sweet in my pocket in case I got cold and tired, but I ate a hell of a lot of calories at meal time. If you haven't worked hard in the cold, you have no idea how much energy it takes. It's insane. If their diet was so bad they were ketotic, that's going to be rough, because they probably aren't drinking enough water either.

    11. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      No, no, stop that: this is getting silly...

    12. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Reziac · · Score: 1

      I've read Amundsen's account. The problem with Scott's party wasn't the type of food (Amundsen's party largely ate their surplus sled dogs on the return route, which was planned as a way of not having to haul as much weight on the return leg) but that Scott simply didn't bring =enough= food, and they were unable to find some of their caches on the return route. More than that, their clothing was inadequate, especially their footgear.

      --
      ~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
    13. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      March 21st: Cold
      March 22nd: Damn cold
      March 24th: My butt has frozen to the floor of my tent. I can't move. Very cold.
      March 24th. Still frozen to the floor of my tent. I'm cold. I'm starving. I'm dying.
      March 25th: I have died.
      March 26th: Why am I still cold?!

    14. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by PPalmgren · · Score: 1

      It does, but it also takes the most calories to digest. In that sense, it's the least calorie dense of the three.

    15. Re:Extracts from the Notebook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Humour yes, morbid humour yes.

      This was just morbid.

  7. re: Except for the slashdotters by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 2
    But the descendants of the slashdotters would find that their prescient great grandpa has not only documented the format of the files, and a flash drive with a fully self contained OS, with a raspberry Pi computer, with all the necessary drivers and codecs and some plain text instructions on how to juice up the machine and the communication protocols. Only they will be able to retrieve information from this era.

    Since historians work with whatever data is most prevalent, they would conclude this era was full of nerds who were pissed off when someone talks about optimizing the queues for ice in desert.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  8. It's always ... by jamesl · · Score: 1

    ... the last place you look.

  9. Actually.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    "During his second expedition to Antarctica, British explorer Robert Scott—and most of his team—died from overexposure to the elements."

    "Most of his team"?

    Actually ALL of the polar party - Scott, Oates, Bowers, Wilson, PO Evans - died, but this was far from the majoirity of the team that went to the Antarctic.

    And they almst certain died of scurvy, not exposure.

    Good try.

    1. Re:Actually.... by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

      And they almst certain died of scurvy, not exposure.

      So basically, they didn't die of overexposure to the elements, they died of underexposure to the compounds?

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    2. Re:Actually.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Precisely.

      Even though vitamins had yet to be discovered, it was well known that fresh food and meat would protect against scurvy.

      Amundsen knew and acted on this.

      Scott may have known, but certainly didn't act on it.

      Roland Huntford's "The Last Place on Earth" (orig. Scott and Amundesn) is essential reading for anyone interested in Polar exploration - he was the greatest explorer of all time - and the safest to be exploring with.

  10. And inside the notebook... by kenh · · Score: 1

    ...is a clue that leads to the FreeMason treasure! (Hint, it's behind Mt. Rushmore. ;^)

    --
    Ken
  11. I bet the tale of the expedition... by SeaFox · · Score: 2

    was a pretty cool read.

    1. Re:I bet the tale of the expedition... by amiga3D · · Score: 1

      Oh that was cold.

    2. Re:I bet the tale of the expedition... by SternisheFan · · Score: 1

      Sad to say, the conversations done at Reddit on this subject were far more enlightening as to this topic. What the hell has happened to Slashdot?

  12. Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 4, Funny

    The British fondly revere those who can maintain a stiff upper lip under trying circumstances.

    Captain Scott's upper lip was decidedly stiff at the end of his expedition, as was his lower lip and the rest of him for that matter.

    --

    Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!

    Vote for Bernie in 2016!

    1. Re:Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The British don't like to make a fuss if we win. "Oh, well glad that nonsense is all over. Game of cricket, anyone?"

      To quote Dambusters:

      "You say you need a Wellington Bomber for test drops. They're worth their weight in gold. Do you really think the authorities will lend you one? What possible argument could I put forward to get you a Wellington?

      Barnes Wallace: Well, if you told them I designed it, do you think that might help?"

      But we also don't mind to see people lose. But only if they do it with the same kind of style. And that's "classy" style, not over-the-top "WOOHOO!!" American "style".

      Hence, Scott wins because even though he lost - he managed to lose saying "Things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint" where everyone knows his internal monologue is saying something more akin to "Oh, bollocks, we're fucked. And I'm all out of dogs."

      Also, Oates' "I may be some time" is up there with "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" and "Hang on lads, I've got an idea.... Erm..." (and if you know where that one's from... Frankly, my dear....)

      We don't care if we win or lose. So long as we do it with style. Amundsen didn't have style. He's just a winner. It's an entirely different class of person.

      To understand that, you probably have to be British.

  13. One thing is certain by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They kept their cool. (Sunglasses ON)

  14. A good start for a Lovecraftian story by GuB-42 · · Score: 1

    An expedition to Antarctica that didn't end well, a notebook left behind. It's all too easy to make parallels with The Mountains of Madness.
    And just in time for Halloween too.

  15. A Century Old Notebook? by tmjva · · Score: 1

    Adds a whole new meaning to Blue Screen of Death, eh?

    (Or was it a palm device like a Newton?)

    --
    Tracy Johnson
    Old fashioned text games hosted below:
    http://empire.openmpe.com/
    BT