This has been amusing us here for a little while, maybe it will amuse you too.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5439022/site/newsweek/
Executive summary: John Ashcroft over there at the Justice Dept released a report that claimed the Patriot Act saved lives here last year, by allowing swift apprehension of our cute little Romanian hackers. The Justice Dept described the hackers as having control over our life & safety systems (ie power, which equals heat, water, etc). Unfortunately.... in the real world, as opposed to Ashcroft-land, all they had was a part-time toehold on one of our two sendmail servers, and an in with an astronomical data box. Whoopee. Also the FBI was already after the two dudes on another case.
Any time you see an article describing us as "50 scientists" or "50 researchers" (or this year, 75) you know it was written by a reporter who doesn't know anything about Antarctica, or field support in general. Handy tip. I am a scientist/PC tech; my friend Keros is a scientist/dishwasher; Jim is a scientist/carpenter; etc.
In other news there's not much other news. We had a good few days below -100F (ambient, not counting wind chill) and everybody who wanted to join the 300 Club got to. That involves sitting in a sauna at +200F for as long as you can stand it, and then walking or jogging out of the Dome, up the hill, and around the Pole wearing minimal clothing. Really minimal is just sneakers; I went a little bit better dressed but I was plenty cold by the time I got back into the sauna. Later the same week we got within 0.7 millibars of setting a low pressure record. This put our "physiological altitude" over 12,000 feet and almost everybody was having trouble sleeping. Back to "normal" low-11,000's now.
I had a burst of civic activity and wrote the Washington State election officials, asking them to be on the ball with absentee ballots this year. I was mighty annoyed when I received my ballot 2 days too late to vote in the last presidential election. Well what do you know, they'll fax it to me this year! We'll have planes by then so getting it sent outbound is no problem. I'm pretty happy about that. I also found out that there's a downloadable write-in ballot for the Federal offices, handy for folks who will be travelling or otherwise out of reach of a voting place/paper ballot in November. More info at www.murkworks.net/~sarah/vote.html.
We've got a month yet until we start seeing sunlight on the horizon, and another month after that until we get the sun itself. Overall we're pretty cheerful but we're almost all forgetting words and getting kinda stupid. It's mostly good for entertainment value. I spent two minutes in an HTML class the other day trying to remember the phrase "quotation marks." This morning I fell off a chair and provided entertainment for 3 people. Being easily amused is a very good characteristic here.
FEMC (Facilities, Engineering, Maintenance, and Construction - biggest dept here by far this year) is having a "No Cussing" day today with a party at the end of the day, beer to be bought with the penalty money. Being nice folks they invited us to participate: my cohort Henry and I went upstairs at morning break, cussed a bunch, and tossed some money in the penalty box. I checked the scoreboard at lunch - think there will be plenty of beer.
That's all for us! Hope you're all doing well out there and enjoying your summer.
Best,
-Sarah
ps - Apologies to the furriners on the list for being US-centric this time. I'll try to be more general-interest next month.