3PM Worked at the lab all day, but heard an announcement about the
holiday fitness challenge celebration, so i skied back in a hurry -- I'm
glad someone made the announcement as I knew I was forgetting something
again. Cathy the organizer welcomed me to the little gathering in the
galley. She's a strong looking girl and initially somewhat intimidating,
but very nice. Curtis the runner was the winner, logging close to 1000
hours of exercise a week. Amnesty won among the women every week. At
this little party was a person I hadn't seen in the past few weeks, and
she told me she's been spending a lot of time on her own intentionally. I
was a little concerned, but she seemed quite fine, so hopefully everything
is ok.
4PM In the galley, the spelling bee was starting. I hadn't signed up
to participate, but i overheard the prizes (including gift certificate for
massage therapy and other good stuff), so decided to participate for fun
as there was nothing to lose except respect for my spelling ability, which
I don't need. It was the 1st spelling bee ever for me. There were 12
contestants and we started from the 1st grade. During the 2nd grade, Dave
(accidentally of course) misspelled "orang" and was made fun of about the
last "e" for the remainder of the game. At 3rd or 4th grade, my word was
"congratulate" -- I spoke cautiously at the beginning of the word, but it
was easy so just coasted the end and somehow managed to slip my tongue to
spell "congratu-r-ate"! I felt really stupid for making such a typical
Japanese mistake, but I don't think many people realized that it was
because of the mixture of R and L in Japanese, because people seemed
confused that I misspoke it. Oh well, I'm glad(?) there's still this much
Japanese in me. [Jon, no need to make fun of me about this ;]. After
that I spelled more cautiously and survived after a few people dropped
out. After graduating from high school, the category was "commonly
misspelled words". I got a word that I now don't even remember, and used
my "ask the audience" card -- one of the contestants Cathy recommended
asking Ethan, which was a good choice. After that, pretty much everyone
used their "ask the audience" card on Ethan. I didn't know most of the
word the judges were giving us, and witing for my turn was more stressful
than I had anticipated :) My next word was "oleogenous", which dropped me
out of the game. Ok, I probably didn't need to describe a spelling bee in
this much detail, but it was a simple but fun experience. Please say hi
to me if you notice spelling mistakes here!
The bee lasted much longer than I expected, Ryan (also a contestant)
and I missed ultimate frisbee :( -- turns out there was not enough people
for it to happen today :(
The teacher Elke is leaving tomorrow, and she wanted to record an
interview with me that students can listen to. My recorded voice always
sounds horrible, but I agreed. She told me she'll ask questions like what
advice would you give to students interested in career in science, and
gave me couple minutes to think while she went to grab her voice
recorder. I told her i was having difficulty coming up with a good advice
in couple minutes, then she said others that she has interviewed said
things like "take lots of math and science classes" -- ok, i thought i
could give a more useful advice than that :) She had ~7 questions
(what's cosmology? how i got into it? especially into this project at the
South Pole? my favorite subjects in school? least favorite? advice?) and
we decided we'll do one at a time, but kept going and ended up recording
the entire interview without any pause. Hope it turns out to be something
useful...
8PM There was an informative presentation on the history of the 3
generations of the South Pole Station and the design & construction of the
newest one. I noticed that many of the criteria are probably similar to
constructing something on the Moon.
[1/14(Mo) bidaily duty]
A fellow graduate student Martin was leaving to return to Berkeley.
He wanted to take a nap, so I offered to call him when his plane was
arriving. I had to fill liquid helium, so could not go see him off at the
deck. I think he is really a hard worker.
While recycling the telescope refrigerator, I always go to the roof to
check if there's any snow on the telescope. Here I'm brushing off snow
from the ground screen, and off the slippery aluminum flooring. Not sure
why, but it's satisfying to brush/shovel snow.
I've been spending a lot of time trying to make sense of the
calibration data we took in November. There are discrepancies on the
order of 0.1°, which is too much for my goal. Kiwon has been very
helpful in trying to solve this mystery with me.
[1/15(Tu) emergency alarm in the middle of the night]
4AM An emergency alarm woke me up, needing attention on the other end of the building. It was not the (usually
false) fire alarm, so i thought it was real and ran out quickly with just sandals to save time. I was half asleep
and my brain wasn't working at its best. When I reached the other end of the building, I discovered that the scene
was way outside, almost by the skiway... I wished the announcement specified that it was outside, because I felt
useless with sandals and indoor clothing. I went back to put my gear on and headed to the scene. Apparently there
was some kind of snow mobile accident, and 1 patient was being packaged for transportation to the medical office.
They seemed to have all the medical cache except maybe some blankets to keep the patient warm, so I ran back to the
station to look for blankets. There was none in the closet that's supposed to have emergency cache, a few
minutes later Kathryn came with a roll of blanket. It would've been quickest for me to take it to the scene
since I was already dressed, but it didn't seem so urgent so I let her take it out. I checked to make sure
they don't need anything else and stood by outside at the bottom of the stiars in case help is needed to carry
the patient up the stairs. By the time the patient arrived on the sled, there were many people wanting to be
part of the help to carry him up, so I just stayed aside and made sure they don't drop him. I was still
tired, but had difficulty falling back asleep. I felt tired the rest of the day. One little accident can
wake up everybody on the station and mess up people's welfare and productivity. Especially in this kind of
environment with limited resources, it's important to be cautious even if you may be the only one who could
get hurt.
5AM As I was trying to fall back asleep, Denis called me -- he's back
from Russia! It was nice to get a call from him. He said I can call back
later when I'm awake, so I called back on the Iridium phone in the
afternoon to catch him up about the telescope -- the connection through my
calling card and the Iridium was not great, so we didn't catch up on
things outside of work.
This afternoon, with help of Kiwon, I put together a calibration
assembly for determining precisely the orientations of our detectors. I
often feel hesistant to make something new when I don't have a clear idea
of how to go about it, but often it turns easier than i initially imagine.
I cut out a circular hole in an absorber, and we were joking that it's not
"Cynthia quality", because she makes almost everything very pretty.
11PM Today is my sister Seika's birthday, so i called her as soon as
the satellites became available, which would be early evening before her
husband returns home. She said she's working on pottery pieces for team
and individual competitions.
[1/16(We) Joaquin's last night]
7AM The satellite was again not available, so we had to call in to the
teleconference through the Iridium phone, but it went better than before.
6PM I barely made it back to Michele's yoga class; today I probably
stayed up in a head stand for my record time :)
Tonight is Joaquin's last night before leaving tomorrow, so I decided
to finally join him and others to play foosball at the Summer Camp Lounge
(outside of the main station), even though I had been dismissing foosball
as not a real sport. I invited Evan to join us and was happy he actually
came along. We first played BICEP (Evan + me) vs SPT
(Brad,Joaquin,Tom,Keith) and we won every game, except when I tried
playing defense. It was actually very fun and I approved it as a
semi-sport. When Evan left, I started loosing, so I guess the BICEP power
was all in Evan, who said he played a lot when he was in a fraternity.
Keith is the 2nd winterover for the 10-meter telescope, and Tom is a
fellow graduate student from Berkeley who just arrived this week. Carla
and Michele joined us. We then went over to the Smokers Lounge, I think
the first time for me. It really was smokey and I really didn't like it,
especially having breathed the cleanest air on Earth for the past 2
months. I suggested going back to the other lounge. The one good thing
was how refreshing it was to get out of there to inhale the crisp clean
outside air again. After a while, everyone decided to go back to the
Smokers Lounge to leave 2 people slow dancing, so I went back to the
station to sleep.
[1/17(Th) Joaquin leaves :( Bill and Erik arrives!]
11AM Today, Joaquin is leaving, and my adviser Bill (right) and fellow
graduate student Erik (left) is arriving, so I skied back from the lab in
a hurry to see them. Erik and Bill have been working like crazy the past
couple months; I was slightly worried about their morale, but Bill looked
happy and so did Erik, this being his first time to the Pole and actually
see the telescope he's been making detectors for. Too bad funny Joaquin
is leaving already, but he was glad to be done. Site Manager Katie was
also leaving to relax in McMurdo for a week before her winter over here.
12:00 I joined the SPT ("the 10-meter" South Pole Telescope) crew for
lunch -- with their jargons particular to their detector system, I could
not understand much of what they were discussing, even though I'm in the
same field of research. I'd better understand better, especially in light
of the PhD qualifying exam I'd better take soon, ideally this spring...
This afternoon was busy, I even had to postpone a tour of our BICEP
telescope for Erik.
We stopped the regular observations to test the mirror setup for
spectroscopy measurements. I also brushed off snow from the telescope
again.
| 
Kiwon and I redesigned the device for measuring the telescope's detector
orientations to within 0.1° or so. It was much more tricky that it
seemed, and my brain felt lazy about thinking, but discussing with Kiwon
helped to come up with good ideas together. I was finally able to do some
work without the use of a computer, so Kiwon took this oppportunity to
shoot some photos of me. Here, I'm designing a metal piece I'm planning
to machine. |
6PM I hadn't machined anything to fine tolerance in a while, and I
could've easily asked the machinist to make the designed piece for me, but
I really wanted more experience so decided to try myself. I went to the
machine shop next door and started cutting metal. I didn't know where
anything was in this shop, so I spent most of the time looking for things.
I missed dinner and ended up finishing after 9pm. Anyways, it was very
fun and satisfying.
Back at the station, I was starving and heated up a bunch of
leftovers. I got full very quickly... When you're starving because of a
delayed meal, you feel like eating a bigger portion, but in reality your
stomach can hold the same amount of food, or probably even less because
the stomach has shrunk.
[1/18(Fr) a busy & productive birthday :]
January 18 was my birthday, but I didn't tell anyone (just a few days
ago people happened to ask me when my birthday was - i managed to joke it
off) because I'm more than happy even without people singing the happy
birthday song :)
I reassembled the calibration device with the aluminum piece I made last
night.
| 
Kiwon and I tested it -- it seems to work well! :)
| 
Our postdoctoral fellow Kiwon is busy assembling flexabicep designed by
Cynthia.
|
7PM Evan seemed a little stressed out and irritable about the prospect
of his spectroscopy measurement, so I decided to help him out despite
missing volleyball. It was worth it, since we got a thermometer to work
to monitor the temperature inside his device, and he was appreciative.
Today, a bunch of birthday emails started rolling in, roughly circling
the Earth from Asia/Oceania to Europe to America. Especially with
Facebook, everybody seems to notice your birthday...
I was supposed to write something about $#!+ some time this week, but
can't remember what it was about... It must've been a decent story since
I had made a note of it... Oh well.
[1/19(Sa) Cynthia arrives! & a busy freezing day]
| 
There were already ~150 people in front of the Dome, posing for a final picture. I
wanted to climb up the bank of snow, but there was no more room, so I
settled for a midway up. It was windy and cold, so I tried to get toward
the front of the flag passing line, to get it over with.
We stopped at the Ceremonial Pole to also relocate it and the 12 flags of
the original Antarctic Treaty. A few days earlier, Katie had asked me if
I would move the Japanese flag. So I had the honor of pulling out and
carrying the Japanese flag, between Michele who had the French flag (since
she has a French family name and has lived there) and Elke who had the
Belgium flag (she's from Germany, a neighbor). We then replanted the
flags at a new location.
2:30PM Everyone gathered in the gym and heard 3 speakers, including the
director of National Science Foundation. There was a lot of tribute to
Edmund Hillary, the first person to scale Mt. Everst in 1953, who just
passed away yesterday at age 88. I was kind of expecting more
heroic distinguished visitors, but too bad people like Buzz Aldrin never
made it here this year...
Then everyone went outside to raise the American flag on the new station,
along with a flag of the U.S. Antarctic Program. The halo around the Sun
was very pretty, so I had Kevin take a photo of it around me.
Kiwon and I went out to the top deck and took some photos. The USAP flag
was being lowered to half height, which I later found out was in tribute
to Edund Hillary's death. I also heard that all the flags in New Zealand
were lowered half way now for this reason, and that the American flag
cannot be erected at half height without the president's permission...
Loretta had asked me if I had any 'cool' picture of me in Antarctica or
with my telescope, and I couldn't find any, so i asked Kiwon if he could
take one for me. Thanks Kiwon! =>
