White Christmas In Antarctica

The idea of a white Christmas may seem magical for many of us, but Science Daily asks you to "spare a thought for a team of scientists forgoing the festive season to take part in a novel campaign being carried out in one of the most inhospitable regions on Earth to support ESA's CryoSat mission." Plenty of people cooped up in the upside-down parts seem to find good ways to amuse themselves; I am especially fond of this introduction to Condition One weather, and Cops McMurdo. If anyone is reading this down there, I hope you're having a nice holiday.

Allahu ackbar!

[Anonymous Coward]

*pushes detonator*

captcha: childish

Leave it to /.

[Anonymous Coward]

To have posts like this. Probably one of those caring liberals.

Re:Leave it to /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Leave it to a right winger to be offended by everything.

Re:Where is everybody?

[Samy Merchi]

I guess everybody is having Christmases. It's damn near dead all over the Internet.

Re:But.. It's summertime in antarctica.

[Anonymous Coward]

At least all the winter over troopers didn't eat all the crab legs this year... like last year. bastards.

They got it all wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Santa lives on the other side of the planet!

Re:Don't Worry

[The Wooden Badger]

That's a lot of latex for 125 people in one year. What kind of research are they conducting there?

Re:Been there, ME TOO

[evil_arrival_of_good]

My answer only goes for 95-96. I'm not sure of the ratio, but maybe females made up 30%. I supply that figure as a wild azz guess, someone out there may be able to data mine NSF reports for the true figure. What geeks want to know: it is very hard to avoid having sex while on the Ice. In explicit language geeks can understand: Sex is prevalent, and distributed almost evenly.

Unix admin in Antarctica

[evil_arrival_of_good]

This being Slashdot and we are talking about Antarctica I must tell this story. I was at McMurdo 1995-6. In the winter-over we are down to around 190 people, and one unix sys admin for the base. He had been there through the summer, so I had gotten to know him before the sun set and winter began. He seemed normal enough in a loner sort of way in the summer. I even got my first exposure to unix know-how from him. As the winter set in, this unix admin began a new behavior. He would bark. Yes, bark with a real barking sound. He would only bark when upset at someone or something. At the wine bar (yes, wine bar ) someone said something he disagreed with and he just....barked. One very articulate and semantically well-formed bark. A few weeks later I saw a sign behind the bartender that said "No Barking". I lurked in the Crary Lab Mac Lab during my free time, enjoying the early WWW before spam-crud polluted it. One time, as I surfed the net, the unix admin was doing his job on another terminal. I guess he was having trouble with a script or other command line incantation. I heard him snapping his teeth at the keyboard, just a like a dog. This promoted unix like no other marketing campaign, I have been using Linux or OS X Unix ever since.