Scienceguru / Texts
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"Icicle up the butt". The sparkling dialog around here never stops ....
Sorry, but there is nothing cool or rad about some idiot doing dopey dances or posting pointless photos while ensconced in a military installation at public expense to perform a scientific vanity project.
Helping to destroy the only continent humanity hasn't yet shattered. Biome. Yeah right.
Clueless and ... nauseating.
Mr Hugo,
I don't know the guy. I can only judge from what I see posted. I was interested in what SPO coupled with a barber pole meant - so I clicked a few times and ended up here.
I know a bit about science. That doesn't mean similar material doesn't exist on lots of other blogs written by various grad students and post-docs all over the web, but on a site like SF0, it's unsettling.
The climate change work is at McMurdo Station. Mcmurdo is also an ecological disaster, but has a few redeeming characteristics: one being that supplies can travel by ship in summertime and another that some climate change and biological research is going on there that may have some meaningful implications. Perhaps.
The South Pole station, by contrast, is supplied only by plane, resulting in 260 smoke belching flights every five months and the importation of 500,000 gallons of fuel every year at a cost of $13US/lb. Soon they'll finish the Trans-Antarctica Highway (it's being built) - which will allow platoons of tractors to travel 1600 kilometers overland and free up the air force planes to pollute the other areas on the continent.
Research is not climate change-related at the pole: the large projects there are Ice Cube and the South Pole Telescope (your Loki is probably with one of those). Both are cosmic background radiation projects: one by drilling into the ice - the other looking up at the sky.
Sustaining life in an environment that is hostile to life is pyrrhic at best. And not very sustainable. It requires a massive outlay of reserves (200+ billion just to build the building and that's the third one they've built), huge annual payments to private military contractors (Raytheon Polar Services - a different division than Raytheon Iraq War Inc.) and transporting everything and everybody in and out on military flights.
Sure it's a triumph of manifest destiny, but aren't we supposed to be over defeating empty spaces to prove we can? What's the Biome trajectory of desire? Welcome to the 18th century?
He's doing a jig as the military-industrial complex is sustaining his existence somewhere he couldn't survive without them.
If they settle the Big Bang was 1.5 billion years ago or 1.7 or 1.8, does this change anything? Except for glacier-dancing guy, who gets a prestigious professor seat at a desirable university and doesn't have to slave away in Des Moines for a decade?
Sorry - not so cool.
Still pretty ambivalent about all this and pages like this aren't helping....
Well, whatever.
Just seems pretty bizarre to catalog all this cheery scientific plundering for career advancement as an act of environmental cacophany. I mean, what the hey?
This website is a bit confusing, if you ask me.
Well, no. I'm not going to fault someone for acting like their twelve years of age when they actually are twelve years of age. That would be silly.
But I didn't think that pranksterism came down to "looking like an idiot because it is funny" but if that's the goal than that's the goal. You said it. Who am I to judge? But whatever happened to poking at the soul-grinding system? Isn't that the point of cacophany? Or is this such watered-down cacophany that it's been reduced to entertaining your friends by acting like an idiot?
I read the thread and I understand that it is an imitation of another dopey video. That one was pretty lame, too. But at least it didn't have the utterly obnoxious element of claiming to be some task of environmental pranksterism and biomic cacophany. And it was a tourist, not a scientist who is part of the defacing of the last non-contaminated place left on the planet.
Antarctica isn't a game. It's a continent. Raytheon isn't a game. It's a military contractor getting millions and millions of dollars from the government, money that could be used to feed, to educate, to vaccinate, to protect. The United States could send that money to the developing world for AIDS care, food, micro-loans that could help thousands and thousands of people.
Instead we're trying to answer questions that don't need to be answered. And the people in the crux of this dilemma don't confront it, don't deal with it, instead they booze it up at the end of the world, get their degrees and dance on the glacier. It's a glacier of death. Not rad.
That makes me the idealist, not the nihilist. Too much of an idealist for this game, methinks.
As they say, you can try to do something or you can distract yourself because you're not doing anything at all. Thanks for elucidating the difference, Herbie.
Hey Susy,
I'm not going to forget Antarctica. Antarctica is the reason I made the original post. Because its a stupid, oppressive waste of resources and seeing it celebrated on a so-called cacophany website was upsetting (especially with that Biome reference). It's still looking pretty weird.
Yeah, yeah I quit my lab job years and years ago. Because it pissed me off then and it pisses me off now. I've been working in global health for years. And you really, really don't want to know how many anti-malarial mosquito nets I could have bought for the price of the flight that carried your friend into and out of Amundsen so he could fiddle with equipment and send you dopey Youtube videos. Multiplied by thousands and thousands over the years.
As for context: well it is true that you have a large site here, so perhaps there is some other place where you prefer comments, but here it was, it said: submit comments, I had a comment. It seemed logical enough at the time. Things posted on the web aren't private, remember?
I did follow the link you provided and I don't see your point. Actually it kinda defeated your point. Now I know that in addition to Antarctic research, the guy roams around San Francisco all night taking pictures of himself and writing long blogs. As he points out at the end, it's offensive to people who are actually without homes. I'll give him credit for at least noticing that. It's something. Not much, but something.
"Forgive me while I plug my ears and skip away".
That figgers .....
Sigh.
Between being challenged to a duel and various people be-foeing me, that eighteenth century vibe is getting kinda intense.
I'm not sure you can demand that someone contribute to your community before they've even become a part of your community - lurking, being annoyed and mentioning it do not not exactly comprise a joining thing. It's more like an observing thing. And I will repeat the obvious comment that things posted on the web are sometimes ... observed.
I assume "praxis" is your term for the bloggy things with the long descriptions and pictures of your self-assigned tasks. I'm glad they give you a sense of meaning, but dialog isn't such a terrible thing. Some of that is required in life. Just voting on each other's blogs has an element of mutually-assured complimenting that is a little pat. I know it's an old joke, but you've heard that one about the parents so determined to boost junior's self-esteem that they throw a literal party every time he/she toilets or ties a shoelace. Junior ends up a little bitter later on. All this awesome and supertastical and applause and rad and amazing over .... not much. It's a little hard to fathom.
One of the private messages conveniently referred me to Greenpeace. Well yeah. The actions they do to confront illegal whaling ships in ta-dum ... Antarctica are pretty damned rad. Really. Inspirational. And brave. Biomic. Deserves some votes. And some bucks. There's your challenge duel. Equal the funds spent on maintaining this thing on a donation to Greenpeace for their Antarctic campaign. Think your friend would get behind that while jigging?
I'll spot you five bucks ...
I suppose you'll re-link me forever and I didn't have the time to watch all of your door videos, but as best as I can figure out, you painted a bunch of doors, dragged them to a park, and braced them up. Then you all got drunk. Then some time later, Parks and Rec took them all down. Okay. Seems slightly less obnoxious than a long blog about staying out all night without a twenty in your pocket. I guess I'm glad you had a playhouse for a few weeks. But it doesn't seem to have had much impact on anybody else besides yourselves. Next time, build an actual house that will protect someone from the elements who is sleeping outside. I know it has that Habitat for Humanity earnestness to it and you seem to hate that: but it says a little bit more about private vs. public than having drunken parties in a secret art exhibit. Seems to, anyhow.
This is talking, not trolling BTW. I don't really care one way or the other, but I'm not one to fail to reply if someone talks to me. (Although I lost interest in one private message that got excessively semantical. Sorry, but not wasting time on that).
So for what it's worth, since some of you seem to enjoy battling and foeing and dueling, why don't you rise to a challenge and do something with this site and your community that rights a wrong, tilts at the powers-that-be, jams them up and makes something real change in a more positive direction. Or keep playing Myspace. Your call.
Nobody at all. Just what I said. I like art and revolution. Thought that's what this was about. I checked it out. Was intrigued by that SPO logo, figured it had to be the South Pole, so looked at it. Said yuck and here we are. That's all.
In the meantime, some of you kept posting links and writing to me, so I read them.
No one's complaining here. This is talking. I realize it's more fun to talk and not get talked back too, but no such luck. Talking often results in being talked back to.
I appreciate your enthusiasm for mild comments on the troublesome aspects of Antarctic research, but you have to realize that the motivation for bothering to make a comment at all was ... irritation. One doesn't journey through the web idly providing information for no discernible reason. There must be a motivating trigger. Motivating trigger: irkdom. It sometimes happens that way. Not the end of the world: it happens. Decided to say "well, that's kinda irksome". Turns out you can't say anything unless you register. Decided it was worth the five minutes to make the comment.
Which interestingly enough set off much thin-skinned reaction (personal messages as well as public) with a sea of links to attempt to uphold the general amazingness of the glacier-dancer - stay out all night guy and the doorbuilders and the rest of all this. Which is fine - obviously you all wouldn't be creating this sea of blogs if you didn't think there was something worthwhile about it, but it's a little vacant to the casual observer and I'm not sure that you change their minds with all these protestations to the contrary.
It isn't worth the price tag, environmentally or economically. Obviously. It's a little weird to have to contest that on a so-called alternative site. If I wanted NASA-cheerleading there's always disney .com to get romantic about rocket ships or www.usaf.com to get all gee-whizzy about military planes conquering the polar zone. Not much sense to doing that in anarcho-land. If I wanted conquistadors, this is a weird place to visit.
The point of my myopic viewpoint is that you don't separate your energy and creativity from the things you care about. Bring the fucking art TO the homeless shelter. Don't sleep off your tasking at an anti-war protest. Sleep in your bed and bring that energy and creativity TO the anti-war protest - that needs it.
You think you can do both, but resources: energy, creativity, money - it's entirely a zero-sum game. You spend it on pointless shit - not enough left. Whatever it costs to run this server (somebody made a reference to that in a private message) - it's money that ain't being donated somewhere else - somewhere it's sorely needed.
You get your heart and your mind and your life working together.
I don't want to play your game. Because it's just that: a game. Look at your last few praxis-thingies: (at the time I wrote this) - cheating on a toll bridge, throwing darts at a list of your own wants, and leaving a paper heart in a voting booth. Maybe that's average, maybe it's not - I dunno. Intensity? I mean, its fine, who cares, except maybe for the toll booth cheating, but so what? What merits all this picture-taking and explication? If it's just the astronauts playing golf, then why on earth do all this work to document your spare time escapism? And if it's supposed to mean something, than what?
It doesn't make much sense. If it's a pointless game, than it's just a complicated version of myspace/facebook and a waste of time, energy and resources. If it's some profound challenge to the soul-killing machine, then ummm.... challenge it.
Fuck with the environmental despoilers, those who allow people to live on the street with no homes for real, the computer titans stealing your privacy, or whatever else your group descriptions express anguish about.
That might be intense.
Now enough of this. I don't have anything else to say. Nice visiting with you.
"Must we feel guilty every time we see a film, read a novel, make love, enjoy a meal with friends, or tell a joke that doesn't attempt to transform our world for the better?"
Of course not. But why must you spend hours posting a blog and assembling photos and videos of your admittedly pointless leisure time? Thus multiplying by at least 10 the amount of energy and time spent on your useless things? Do you really need 25 compliments and votes from each other every time you do the equivalent of "see a film, read a novel, make love, enjoy a dinner with friends or tell a joke"?
And if you do - and who am I to assess a person's self-esteem - why wouldn't you do it privately like the rest of the world does? Why make a public spectacle of it and attach all this hyperbolic, exaggerated language?
It's called trying to have it both ways. It's important. Wait no, it isn't. It's just stupid fun. Wait no, it's an experiment in democratizing humanity and re-defining leisure time. Wait no, it's harmless. Well, what is it?
Yep, the noobs are going to Blockbuster and it's the death of community. And these noobs are filming themselves doing a hula on a glacier. Such a more interesting, creative death of community. Thats the point? That you're wasting more time, more energy, and more creativity on your down time than the other lemmings?
Isn't it vaguely disturbing that, glacier guy, you're saying yourself that what your fellows presented as one of the MOST inspirational things on this site and proof of what an amazing person you are is, in your opinion, "genuinely ugly" and "really harmful"?
If nothing else comes out of this, maybe you can all have some kind of talk about why you're inspired and made happy by such "ugliness".
Since you seem a little confused.
Well, it's been eye-opening ....
Rad? Are you all twelve years old? I thought this was a site for shit-disturbers and people with alternative values. Instead it's looking worse than Myspace. This is a BIOME task, you say - are you out of your minds? The South Pole is the least sustainable place on earth. It is maintained at massive expense and environmental degradation by the transfer of hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Raytheon - a military contractor and a rotten corporation to the core. The science being done at the pole is cosmic background radiation. It's only purpose is to fuel a few hundred more arcane arguments on how many kazillion years ago the Big Bang actually was - and feed a cottage industry of PHD students who write their theses and lock down $100,000 a year professorships for the rest of their lives. On your dime because you're paying for the whole thing - or at least the kids in the projects are. It's a good scam - a collaboration with the military-industrial complex all the way. SP0?. You guys are embarrassing.