taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Antarctic: Happy Midwinter’s Day!

I’ve just finished reading Big Dead Place , Nicholas Johnson’s book about life at McMurdo Base and the US South Pole Station, with anecdotes from his time there in the early years of this decade.

It’s a fantastic book — very illustrative of how life really goes on on a distant research base, once you get beyond romantic notions of exploration of the wild frontiers. (Like many geek kids, I spent my childhood dreaming of space exploration, and Antarctica is the nearest thing you can get to that right now.) A bonus: it’s hilarious, too.

Unfortunately it’s far from all good — as one review notes, it’s like ‘M*A*S*H on ice, a bleak, black comedy.’ There’s story after story of moronic bureaucratic edicts emailed from comparatively-sub-tropical Denver, Colorado, ass-covering emails from management on a massive scale, and injuries and asbestos exposures covered up to avoid spoiling ‘metrics’.

Here’s a sample of such absurdity, from an interview with Norwegian world-record breaking Antarctic explorer, Eirik Sønneland:

BDP: I was working at McMurdo when you arrived in 2001. I remember it well because we were commanded by NSF not to accommodate you in any way, and were forbidden to invite you to our rooms or into any buildings. We were told not to send mail for you, nor to send email messages for you. While you were in the area, NSF was keeping a close eye on you. What did the managers say to you when you arrived?

They asked us what plans we had for getting home. The manager at Scott Base (jm: the New Zealand base) was calm and listened to what we had to say. I must be honest and say that this was not the way we were treated by the U.S. manager. It was like an interrogation. Very unpleasant. He acted arrogant. However, it seemed like he started to realize after a couple of days that we didn’t try to fool anybody. He probably got his orders from people that were not in Antarctica at the time. And, to be honest, today I don’t have bad feelings toward anyone in McMurdo. Bottom line, what did hurt us was that people could not think without using bureaucracy. If people could only try to listen to what we said and stop looking up paragraphs in some kind of standard operating procedures for a short while, a lot could have been solved in a shorter time.

One example: our home office, together with Steven McLachlan and Klaus Pettersen in New Zealand, got a green light from the captain of the cargo ship that would deliver cargo (beer, etc.) to McMurdo, who said he would let us travel for free back to New Zealand if it was okay with his company. At first the company was agreeable, but then NSF told them that the ship would be under their rent until it left McMurdo and was 27 km away. Reason for the 27 km? The cargo ship needed support from the Coast Guard icebreaker to get through the ice. Since, technically, the contract with NSF did not cease until the ship left the ice, NSF could stop us from going on the ship. At which point NSF offered to fly us from McMurdo for US$50,000 each.

He also maintains an excellent website at BigDeadPlace.com, so go there for an idea of the writing. BTW, it appears the UK also maintains an Antarctic base. Here’s hoping they keep the bureaucracy at a saner level over there.

Tags: antarctic, base, book, exploration, happy, life, manager, nsf, story, time, way

Politics: Global Guerrillas: ‘Networked organizations, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging marketplace of violence. An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century.’

This stuff is scary — and I think it’s right; the author thinks Bin Laden sees the US as an over-stretched 1980’s Russia, vulnerable to economic collapse; his last communique talks about what he calls the ‘bleed-until-bankruptcy plan’.

Bruce Sterling says ‘You ever read my 80s novel ISLANDS IN THE NET? The one with a sinister, imaginary book of military strategy in it called THE LAWRENCE DOCTRINE AND POSTINDUSTRIAL INSURGENCY? Well, this blog feels a lot like I imagined that book would have felt. Kinda floods the mind with creepily subversive 21st century insight.’

Definitely worth reading.

Tags: book, century, disruption, epochal, global, infrastructure, marketplace, networked, notebook, politics, violence

TV: A choice quote from NBC’s Olympics coverage: ‘This girl (one of the US beach volleyball team) reads a book a week!’ (delivered in shocked tones.)

Tags: beach, book, choice, coverage, girl, nbc, quote, team, tv, volleyball, week

Social: LOAF is ‘a way to share your address book without abandoning your privacy.’

A nifty use of Bloom filters to share your address book in a one-way manner — when you receive a mail, you can query your LOAF db to see if any of your correspondents previously corresponded with the sender; but they cannot look up the LOAF file to determine your correspondents, unless they know that correspondent’s email address in advance.

This, BTW, would be a very good way to implement a ‘Do-Not-Email’ list — although the other two problems with those still apply.

Interesting stuff — although I wonder how acceptable the 4-8Kb MIME part overhead per message will be…

Tags: address, bloom, book, email, loaf, mail, manner, privacy, social, use, way

Books: Smartypants, the book! I’m there.

Tags: book, books, smartypants

Drink: George Orwell: A Nice Cup of Tea (Evening Standard, 12 January 1946)

If you look up ‘tea’ in the first cookery book that comes to hand you will probably find that it is unmentioned; or at most you will find a few lines of sketchy instructions which give no ruling on several of the most important points. This is curious, not only because tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country, as well as in Eire, Australia and New Zealand, but because the best manner of making it is the subject of violent disputes.

(thanks Leon!)

Tags: book, civilization, cookery, cup, drink, evening, january, nice, ruling, standard, tea

Neal Stephenson’s new book upends geek chic — Paul Boutin, Slate. Three thousand pages?! Yeesh.

Tags: book, geek, slate, yeesh

When you move from one country to another, you often notice some details of the taste and texture of the local foodstuffs. For example, pretty much everything in Thailand tasted slightly fishy to my western tastebuds, due to their widespread use of nam pla, a fermented-fish sauce seasoning.

In the US, there’s a very definite gooey texture and strong sugary flavour which crops up in lots of foodstuffs — right down to salad dressings and soft drinks. Eventually I figured it out — it’s corn syrup, which isn’t really used at all in Europe. According to this review of Fat Land, here’s why it’s everywhere:

According to Critser, a leading journalist on health and obesity, America about 30 years ago went crazy sowing corn. Determined to satisfy an American public that ‘wanted what it wanted when it wanted it,’ agriculture secretary Earl Butz determined to lower American food prices by ending restrictions on trade and growing. The superabundance of cheap corn that resulted inspired Japanese scientists to invent a cheap sweetener called ‘high fructose corn syrup.’ This sweetener made food look and taste so great that it soon found its way into everything from bread to soda pop. Researchers ignored the way the stuff seemed to trigger fat storage.

The book’s thesis seems to be that corn syrup and palm oil are largely to blame for the obesity epidemic. A quick google shows up this LA Times story which covers the book in more detail:

‘High-fructose corn syrup is a really low quality, really cheap sugar,’ the 38-year-old (Robyn) Landis says dismissively. The syrup starts out as cornstarch, which is then made sweeter by converting some of its glucose to fructose; the more fructose in the end product, the sweeter it is. ‘It is not something our bodies should be dealing with. It’s completely unnatural.’ She also objects to the fact that high-fructose corn syrup turns up in unlikely places, such as ketchup, baby food and baked beans. ‘Even chocolate tastes more like sugar than chocolate when it is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup,’ says Landis …

… Dr. George A. Bray, an obesity researcher and professor of medicine at Louisiana State University Medical Center, also singles out high-fructose corn syrup because the meteoric rise in its consumption closely parallels the jump in obesity rates. ‘Nothing else in the food supply does this. It’s a very, very striking relationship.’

… Ironically, fructose, which is also known as fruit sugar, was once considered a healthier, ‘more natural’ alternative to sucrose, that is, old-fashioned table sugar, because of its presence in fruit. In addition, diabetics thought it was healthier for them because it does not raise insulin or blood sugar levels as high as glucose does. However, animal studies and preliminary human studies have found that a high-fructose diet leads to some of the same health problems that are rampant among overweight Americans, including insulin resistance and elevated triglyceride levels, a marker for heart disease.

(I still plan to get my teeth into a corn dog pretty soon though ;) Gotta get that low-grade meat product fix!)

RSS: Ben Hammersley points at this really wierd posting from Adam Curry. Points and laughs, in fact.

As far as I can see, AC wants development of (N)echo to stop, because he dropped 10,000 dollars getting a year’s paid placement in the Radio Userland aggregator, or something like that. Well, that was a smart investment. I’m sure all the people thinking about (N)echo are dropping tools right now, accordingly. ;)

Ireland: P45.net now has MT blogs. Cool.

Tags: book, corn, everything, food, fructose, obesity, sweetener, syrup, texture, way

William Gibson, talking about why he uses all-caps book titles, gives a short history lesson regarding the rendering of book titles, back in the age of the mimeograph:

Much of my earliest typewriting experience had to do with mimeography, a pre-thermocopy form of reproduction once fairly universal in the world’s offices. You typed, once, on a waxed paper ’stencil’, clipped this over a silkscreen device with a moving pad or drum of ink behind it, and your mimeograph ran off (or silkscreened, really) as many copies of your document as you required. Owing to the physical peculiarities of the medium, though, it was unwise to underline too frequently on a mimeograph stencil: the single unbroken line was particularly prone to tear, producing leaks and smudging.

People who liked books, and frequently wrote letters, on typewriters, to other people who liked books, tended, free from the constraints of an academic stylesheet, to render titles in all-caps. People who wrote about books for publication in amateur journals (mimeo was an authentic medium of the American samisdat) rendered titles in all-caps in order to avoid stencil-tears. At various times, I was both.

It’s such a pleasure having this kind of stuff to read every day!

Tags: age, book, experience, history, lesson, medium, mimeograph, mimeography, rendering, stencil