Antarctica

A wonderful website based out of the McMurdo Science Station in Antarctica. The author details the culture and living conditions there with a very jaundiced and wonderfully kind-of-snarky tone. Check out Big Dead Place Here is their intro on Science from the introduction and Welcome page bq. Science Science is the process of describing the universe through physical observation. Here are some things that are not science: distributing money to scientists, dispersing press releases to the media, inviting Congressmen to stay at Building 137 (that's a nice apartment for DVs, or Distinguished Visitors), and influencing your contract or your contract-completion bonus. Science is a rational approach to existence, and its true practitioners are, for lack of better words, on the right track. However, to unconditionally bestow respect on scientists is like emptying your wallet for each street musician. And to bestow respect on an agency that funds scientists is like giving your wallet to a bus driver with instructions to give it to a street musician. bq. Science, as an intellectual process, is not owned or orchestrated by any particular person or agency, nor is the funding of science a scientific act. The National Science Foundation is the manager of American Antarctica much like your department manager is the manager of your department: he or she has a lot of influence, but there are other forces at work. bq. In fact, the main purpose of the United States Antarctic Program, as stated by an external panel report published by NSF, is to establish a physical and political presence. This presence is kind of like hopping out of the car to stand in a parking space so no one nabs it while your friend drives around the block. (Our friend in this metaphor would be the as-of-yet nonexistent technology to cost-effectively extract minerals or hydrocarbons from Antarctica.) Now, imagine all the trouble that would arise if there were a bunch of people standing around in parking spaces, and bringing their friends and families to stand in parking spaces too, and they said they were just waiting for their friends to arrive. The biggest families would get the most spaces on the street, even if they were a bunch of lowlifes! To avoid this, the Antarctic Treaty was arranged, which meant that anyone who wanted to hold parking spaces for their friends had to perform substantial scientific activity. bq. In Antarctica, science is a parking permit, and those who want to stand in the parking spaces must first be able to afford the permit to stand there. These affairs do not reflect on the value of science as a sensible process. But science keeps many friends, whose close association with science is often overemphasized, sometimes with zeal, sounding less like science than like religion, which has little to do with understanding the universe through physical observation. Also, someone from this website was interviewed at Modern Drunkard Magazine: The intro for the interview: bq. When we think about Antarctica we tend to think about vast tracts of frozen wastes, of desperate men whipping dogs toward to lonely deaths or international glory, of Kurt Russell taking a flamethrower to shape-shifting aliens. bq. What we don't think about are bacchanalian orgies and non-stop drinking. Which proves how badly we've been misled, because that's precisely what's going on. Not only is there plenty to drink, there's plenty of reason to drink, as the following interview with a resident of the southernmost point of the world reveals. Wonderful stuff... I had the pleasure of visiting the continent about 12 years ago as part of an early eco-tourism effort from Lindblad Travel. We were not able to get into McMurdo but we had a wonderful afternoon at the French station -- Dumont d'Urville. I have some photographs of icebergs that are amazing -- all sorts of colors (from the algae) and shades of blue that are so intense, it burns the eyes...