August 2004 Archives
The NYPD is out of control
After the Critical Mass ride, I suspected it. The following day, I thought it might just be a bike thing. But events today have made it clear: everything we thought we knew about the NYPD's ability to manage protest is wrong. Today, another 550 arrests, bringing the total well over the 1,000 level. Here's the New York Times, which has not been noticeably protestor-friendly:
The turning point appeared to come as several hundred protesters with the War Resisters League tried to begin a march up Fulton Street that organizers had negotiated with police, although they did not have a permit. Ed Hedemann, one of the organizers, said their understanding was that if they stayed on the sidewalk and did not block foot traffic or vehicles, they could proceed toward Madison Square Garden. But within minutes, the protesters were confronted by a line of police officers who told demonstrators they were blocking the sidewalk and would be arrested, although they did not appear to be blocking pedestrian traffic at that point. A commanding officer, telling the crowd of about 200 "you're all under arrest," ordered other officers to bring the "prison van" and the "orange netting" with which to enmesh the protesters.
"We don't know why we are being arrested, we were just crossing the street," said Lambert Rochfort, who was among the protesters. "We were told if we don't do anything illegal we would be allowed to march on the sidewalk and we did just that. Then they arrested us for no apparent reason."
These are tactics we're beginning to get used to. The orange netting – that came out first on Friday; the police would use it to stretch across two ends of a block, and arrest everybody in the middle. The mass arrests; the needless antagonism; the way in which the NYPD seems determined to make sure every protestor in the city considers them the enemy. It's all utterly stupid, and I can't for the life of me work out why they're behaving this way.
Ironically enough, the "New York City Welcomes Peaceful Political Activists" webpage is still up, although its rhetoric is increasingly hollow. "New York City – a melting pot, home of the Statue of Liberty and first capital of this nation that was founded on the basis of freedom of expression – welcomes all peaceful visitors," it says. "There is no better place than New York to speak one’s mind and have one’s message heard."
There's been precious little regard for freedom of expression this week: I think the arrest of Josh Kinberg is probably the clearest single indication of that. At this point, you don't even need to be marking the sidewalks with chalk or riding bikes more than two abreast to get arrested; merely marching on a route which has been negotiated with the police is enough, if you don't happen to have a permit. And the stories from the diesel-sludge-filled holding cell show that the NYPD is intent on making life as miserable as possible for those they hold.
One commenter on this blog said that after similar arrests at a Critical Mass event in Los Angeles in 2000, eventually the LAPD had to pay out a lot of money in class action claims. They NYPD, with its indiscriminate behaviour, has to be risking a rash of similar lawsuits, and I can't see what the upside is.
The downside isn't purely financial, either: it seems pretty clear that the one standout incident of real violence was prompted by police aggression. Of course, anybody who beats a police officer unconcious deserves to go to jail for an extremely long time: there's absolutely no excuse for such behaviour. On the other hand, any police force in the world should be able to tell you that if you get aggressive with a penned-in and angry crowd, violence is likely to result. In this case, the police officer who was hurt was one of a phalanx of plain-clothes police who rode their scooters straight into the crowd. I saw the same thing happen on Friday: it's scary, I can tell you.
Walking down the street today, alone, nowhere near any demonstrations, I passed a police van. The occupants were just sitting around: one was eating a banana. But I got some nasty-looking stares, all the same, and felt a hell of a lot more threatened than protected by their presence. And I was looking perfectly presentable, without a single item of protest-style clothing on.
Over the past few days, the NYPD has created a climate of fear and resentment in New York. Of the thousand people arrested, I'd wager that fewer than 10 were being at all violent, and that most are the kind of New Yorkers who have been slowly coming to trust and respect their police since the low point of the Amadou Diallo shooting. Now, all those people, and their friends, will be mistrustful and fearful of the police all over again. And no longer will I be able to look smugly at Seattle or Genoa and say that New York's police are much better than that, a cut above, well trained and highly disicplined.
The weird thing is that New York really has been very good at dealing with protests in the past. The anti-war marches last year, the demonstrations at the World Economic Forum in 2002 and the UN Millennium Assembly in 2000 – all went off very smoothly. Someone high up in the NYPD – I have no idea who, and I certainly have no idea why – has clearly made a decision that there will be lots of arrests at the RNC this year. There will surely be debates about whether the arrests will make the Republicans look better on national TV; all I know for sure is that they will severely damage New Yorkers' faith in their own police force.
Posted by Felix at 23:20 EST | Comments (15)
Blowy Snowy Day
I really can't believe it's September tomorrow. But I have no frame of reference either. I guess at home you'll be watching the leaves become less green or recently-born animals becoming be less cute. You can feel it in the air, the crisper breeze, the extra layer you need to wear outside. In Australia and NZ the changes are different but it's change towards an equinox season nonetheless. I guess that's the only similarity I share – the change towards equinox, the hours of light and dark becoming more equal. That is something we're experiencing everywhere around the globe.
Today is a snowy, blowy day. I looked at the weather chart this morning and saw it was blowing 37 knots with an ambient temperature around -17C. Thirty-seven knots... hmm, I tried to remember: was the threshold for visiting the lab 30 or 40 knots? Minus seventeen?! That can't be right, it's toasty outside! What a change from the minus forties and clear skies we had last week.
Still, at least you could work outside in that weather. The first time I experienced weather like this it was exhilarating, it was phenomenal, it was an Incredible Storm. We found excuses to go outside just to know what it felt like, to say we'd been here and battled it. In contrast, no-one seemed very fussed at all this morning. Breakfast, cup of tea, melt-tank was a bit of a slog I imagine and off to work. The CASLab is out of bounds but we expected that yesterday and Steph set it up to run without us today so I'm not concerned. I went to the Simpson platform to work on some emails and make some chemical solutions. Digging snow for the Simpson melt-tank was a bit cold on the face but not as bad as I had expected it to be.
It's not like we aren't fussed or touched by this weather – I wore goggles today, pulled my bearpaws well over my sleeves and made sure to put my windy top hood up before going outside. Ness and I unwound and connected the line between the Laws platform and the other hand-lines so we can feel our way home from anywhere even if the visibility craps out completely. I mean, it was blowing 40 knots outside! When I got inside finally I was covered in snow and exhausted. Battling against that wind is a struggle but going home is bliss!
It's now reached 45 knots and -13C. The temperature is a bit deceptive though since at wind speeds like that you don't feel much warmth. The subjective temperature is -37.8C, much closer to what we're used to! Still, I didn't bother with my dead rabbit hat today: already had enough clobber on my head without the hassle of that! The building is shaking and wind howling, you can hear it everywhere. I can't weigh anything accurately in the wet chem lab cos the platform is shaking so much. The rocking chairs in the living room rock on their own and pictures start tilting. I have to head back to the Laws now and know it will take a good ten minutes to get properly togged up and I'll be fairly tired when I get there.
I don't really know why I'm writing this blog – I have nothing new and exciting to report. Just thought I'd say hello and talk about the weather. Some things are the same all the world over I guess.
Posted by Rhian at 21:45 EST | Comments (3)
Scenes from the protests
A nice balmy summer's night – perfect for a group bike ride around New York City, no? I thought so, anyway, so I joined about five thousand other like-minded bicyclists at Union Square this evening for the monthly Critical Mass event.
It's a Take Back The Streets thing – get enough cyclists together in one place, and they can actually control the roads rather than being sidelined (literally) by cars. There's something really rather exhilarating about pedalling down the middle of Sixth Avenue in such numbers that the cars have to yield to you, rather than the other way around. The most popular chant is simple: "Whose streets? Our streets!"
Normally, the police are well disposed towards Critical Mass events. They help the cyclists stay together, even if it means allowing them to run through red lights. Ultimately, so long as the bikes keep moving, the disruption to traffic is minimised. This time, however, was different: the AP reports that the police made nearly 250 arrests.
I feel a need, here, to explain what these people were arrested for – and to complain about the rather incoherent attitude of the NYPD tonight. According to news reports, the police were handing out flyers at the start point in Union Square – although I saw many police officers there, and none handing out flyers. Organisers were apparently told in advance that the police would be strict about enforcing traffic laws – even saying that we weren't allowed to ride more than two abreast.
But when the ride started, everything seemed copacetic between the police and protestors. A clearly senior police officer in suit and tie, rather than any uniform, let the riders out of Union Square and down Broadway in batches, allowing traffic to flow sporadically along 14th Street. We had no problems riding down Broadway and then making a right onto Houston Street; we then turned onto Sixth Avenue to make our way up to Midtown.
The general M.O. in such events is that if you're in the part of the pack which happens to hit an intersection as the light turns red, you stop your bike in front of the traffic so that it can't move until the pack has passed the intersection. This ensures the safety of the riders: no one wants to be sideswiped by a car, so it's best to make sure they don't even think about driving into the peloton.
I found myself on such traffic-calming duty a couple of times, and it's a nice feeling, necessarily a little bit reminiscent of that famous photo of the lone protestor holding up a long line of tanks outside Tiananmen Square. Mostly, the occupants of the cars were supportive: New Yorkers are generally well disposed towards these kind of actions, I think.
At one intersection in the 20s, however, things got ugly: a middle-aged white guy in a shirt and tie stormed out of the taxi he was in the back of, and tried to physically shove me out of the way. Naturally, dozens of cyclists immediately surrounded him, and he backed off, but he tried the same stunt a minute later with another guy.
I was a bit shaky after that, but relaxed when we hit 30th Street, where the ride moved east over to Madison Avenue. Suddenly, the police seemed to be in control again: rather than leaving the traffic control to the standard Critical Mass DIY method which had caused the confrontation on Sixth Avenue, the NYPD was making sure that tempers didn't fray too much on either side. We crossed Fifth Avenue without incident, biked up Madison to 55th, and then went over to 7th Avenue with police seeming very much accommodating of the bike ride the whole way.
The highlight of the evening was Times Square, for sure. Hundreds of cyclists filling up the Crossroads of the World, slowly – the police were manning 42nd Street, so we backed up into Times Square proper, and at one point somehow all managed to raise our bikes in the air at the same time, above our heads. I hope someone posts a picture online!
After Times Square, as the New York Times puts it, police patience appeared to grow thin. I suppose I must have been near the back of the pack at this point, since I was up by 36th Street, while netting was dragged across 14th Street, backing up riders. I did, however, see a major police operation, with riot police and motorcycle cops rushing down 34th Street in formation, creating a cordon around a group of riders, and, I assume, pretty much arresting them all. What you have to understand is this: every single one of the 5,000 riders was technically breaking the law, since we were not confining ourselves to bike lanes, we were riding more than two abreast, and we had to run through red lights just to stay with the pack.
The crowd was hyped up, and enthusiastic, but by no means were we a bunch of anarchists intent on violence. I'm sure that the arrests were entirely random: the police, at whatever point they decided to move in, simply rounded up whomever they first laid hands on, either on 34th Street or a bit further down the ride, at 10th Street in the East Village. I have absolutely no idea what they intended to achieve by this: it certainly didn't stop the main peloton from continuing the ride up First Avenue and on to 23rd Street, and everybody who witnessed it, I'm sure, was rather taken aback by the NYPD's sudden heavy-handedness.
The thing is, this was very much the kind of peaceful protest which Mayor Bloomberg has repeatedly said that he welcomes. Yes, we disrupted traffic, but that has always been the whole point of the Critical Mass ride, and traffic disruption is not violence. New Yorkers on the sidewalks, whether it was uptown or downtown, East Side or West – even the tourists in Times Square – were all hugely supportive of us, cheering us on all the way and flashing peace signs. They understood what we were about.
And the NYPD has a history of being very good at dealing with protests – when the World Economic Forum was in New York in 2002, say, or during the UN Millennium Assembly. Very few arrests, professional crowd control – I've always thought that New York managed to show its mettle in hosting such events, in contrast to, say, Seattle or Genoa.
The RNC, however, is a whole different kettle of fish. When protestors abseiled down the Plaza Hotel with an anti-Bush banner (great stunt), a policeman on the roof fell through a skylight, which allowed the protestors to be charged with assault: they now face possible long jail terms. And the hundreds of arrests today have already easily broken the total for the entire duration of the DNC in Boston – and the RNC hasn't even officially started yet.
Up until this evening, I was confident that the protests, though large, would not be marred with too much antagonism between the protestors and the police. Now, however, I'm not so sure: the NYPD seems keen to prove a point, even if the point it's trying to prove is hard to fathom. Earlier this evening, I inwardly scoffed at the grungy downtown types handing out emergency phone numbers for people who got arrested. Now, I'm going to make sure that I take that phone number with me to the big demonstration on Sunday. I have no idea what might happen.
Posted by Felix at 0:33 EST | Comments (8)
Zen Ice
I'm not sure if Emperor Penguins are right at the top, or the very bottom, of the karmic evolutionary scale. "Who would be an emperor penguin?" has not been uttered infrequently around here lately. Abandoned to the loneliest, coldest and most desolate ice sheet on Earth, destined to sit on an egg for four months during the coldest part of the year, starving, only to be relieved, you hope, by a fattened mate who brings up the chick whereupon you have to trek for days, weeks maybe, to find open water and seek food, which you then bring back to your mate – and reinitiate thecycle. By any beasts' standards it has been cold around here lately and it boggles the mind to think that any penguins survive at all, let alone chicks. It's a hard life.
To me, however, they are the epitome of Zen (about which I know very little). Patient, curious, animated, interested but apparently never hassled, never in a rush, strong, calm, self-aware while also totally dependant on the community for survival. I like them. They don't, it must be said, strike me as being particularly intelligent – but that really doesn't matter, they don't seem unhappy, either. The Adelies last summer were forever squawking and chirruping, placing themselves right at the foot of the lab steps and then getting in a fluster if you came anywhere near them. The Emperors seem more aloof. Upon seeing a gaggle of humans dangling down the ice cliff, a greeting party wanders towards us, curious about visitors. Walking in single file, looking in front and behind as though to check that they haven't been mislead and are suddenly on their own, they will walk right up to you. Once their curiosity is satiated, or you start walking towards the colony, they turn around and wander back.
There is a lot of anthropomorphising going on here I know, but it's difficult not to. They walk on two feet, look you straight in the eye if you kneel (when they are about chest or chin height), they chat and coo, a cross between a rattle and an eerie echo – and their cry is returned by companions. These curious ones seem to be a year or two old: fully grown but still too young to breed, adolescents to us. They walk around in groups, fight with each other and then snuggle up for warmth, show their chests off and rattle their heads and then, for no apparent reason, wander off somewhere else. They show no fear and as a spectator I did not feel that I was interfering with nature. I am undoubtedly wrong. I had no desire to get overly close or touch them, if for no other reason than that I was wearing such huge mitts that there would be no point and there was no way I was going to reveal bare skin to the elements even for the touch of penguin feathers, but also, because if you wait a short while, they come up to you. As curious as us. They, too, are living on a fairly monotonous ice shelf and are happy to see something new for a change. These are our closest neighbours.
Now the huddle, that's something else entirely. As you probably know, Emperors huddle to stay warm in winter. I had imagined a huge circular group with some kind of re-shuffle order so the ones in the middle eventually move to the edges and no-one gets too cold for too long on the outside. I don't know why, but I had imagined order. By now, I should know that nature exhibits order using chaos. Through a chaotic system, the most perfect solution to any problem will emerge. The penguin huddle was entropy embodied. No circle, no order, a number of large clumps. The ones in the middle roasty toasty, the ones on the outside burying their heads deep into the penguins in front, using that beautiful rounded back as a shield against the wind. Layer upon layer of buried-headed penguins like the centre of a sunflower.
At some point, the penguins on the outside get cold, or bored, or, I don't know, it doesn't matter, the point is, they decide to leave. So they wander off. And, I guess, that means the next layer gets cold. Heads pop up, necks stretch, lots of hustling and bustling, the odd peck, and before you know it the one-time calm huddle of heat generation has become a squawking, shrieking flurry of bristling heads shaking and pushing, confusion, ripples of movement in every which direction. I tried to watch for long enough to see what happened next but it wasn't entirely obvious. I thought the ones on the outside would start forming their own huddle with them at the core but more often than not they just walked off, single file, to apparently nowhere. A clown-like walk too since most were shuffling on their heels with their toes in the air, making sure the egg on their feet didn't touch the ice. Sometimes one would bend down and rotate the egg. A couple of them could be seen regurgitating food and stretching to their toes whereupon a tiny chick would appear from under the belly flap and stick it's head in the parent's mouth. Chirrup chirrup chirrup, you could hear them cheeping. It was beautiful. Thousands of them probably, clustered in groups of a few hundred, steam coming off the middle, heads buried on the outside. All calling, all doing their thing.
I've had an incredible week. Incredibly full, by my winter hibernation standards. I had forgotten what it was to be truly busy, at different times rushed, excited, stressed, exhausted, responsible, cold, high, low, confused and rejuvenated. I had forgotten what it was to multi-task. I am not looking forward to returning to 'normal life', whatever that is, I'm not looking forward to the summer season even. I'm not excited by the prospect of mental stimulation and the buzz of activity that I thrived on previously. It will come though, as I acclimatise to progressively more sun and more activity, when I drink my last bottle of wine, eat my last good quality chocolate bar, realise the prospect of fresh fruit is only a few weeks, rather than months away. Remind myself that with the first plane comes first post. With all of these things will my enthusiasm return. And probably my energy as well. I think this week was just a shock to the system.
It is well documented that August is often the hardest month here and I, who thought I was breezing through this whole Antarctic wintering thing, am starting to understand why. We are running out of things, I ate the last real apple on my birthday a month ago. Tinned potatoes, carrots and beans are, to my palate, fresh veg. All my clothes are tattered and holey, my hair has been dyed and re-dyed and now looks like it has a washed out blue rinse – it looks a bit how I feel. For some people, August is hard because the excitement of mid-winter is over but it is still months before the first new people arrive. For me, August has been hard because I'm sad to see the darkness go. I'm already forgetting what it looked like. It was never this dark in the middle of the day was it?, I found myself asking Frank yesterday. Even for me, it's difficult to conceive how little we could see. And I miss those beautiful, beautiful red stripes on the horizon at 2pm. Now at two the sun is well above the horizon, the world is light and white, I can see all the way to the lab and far beyond. On a good day. On a bad day I can't see beyond my feet but it's still white-mauve-cotton-wool-not-seeing as opposed to pitch dark not seeing. I couldn't see a thing today, I don't know why, but I was glad to still be falling over my feet and into unexpected valleys in the sastrugi. At night time Orion appears only to the night watchman but Scorpio still twirls his pincers around my head. The occasional aurora mists the sky with green. I love my darkness.
Anyway, I think the light has been a shock to the system. It's colder than we have ever yet experienced (approaching -50C at times) but the light misleads you into spending much more time outside, doing all those long-awaited jobs, taking your [outer] mitts off to take a photo for longer than you ever would have in June. Without question work outside is a lot easier if you can see what you're doing, even if it's cold – so we've been doing these things, and probably over-doing these things, not realising that we've just been jolted out of hibernation. In addition, where we used, during autumn, to stop activity after dark, we now see this as no hindrance, we know where the torches are kept and which clothes to wear in a gale. Everyone perhaps has been doing just that little bit more.
For me, the return of the sun means the start of spring-time chemistry. This is when it all kicks off. This is, if I'm brutally honest, the reason why I am, or my job is, here. The loss of a few weeks' data in mid-winter wouldn't be heart-breaking. A similar loss during spring-time would be quite upsetting for many. When the sun rises, all those chemicals that have been pooling in the snow and at the surface are activated, photolysed, react with photolysis products, come out of the snow, go into the snow, blow in from the coast, fly in from the plateau... different molecules in different air masses that all react and interact differently once they are zapped by the sun. This is what has not been studied before and why we are here.
When ozone drops and air comes in from the coast, we fly a blimp, we take height profiles, we align the telescope and try to measure halogens in the air. On calm days, we dig a pit and take samples of snow from different depths. On days when the air comes in from the east, we ensure the inlets are clear and compare chemistry in the snow with that in the air. My tank of helium ran low a few days ago and I haven't been able to change it since the temperature in the gas store has been below safety limits. Today the temperature warmed up but I found I wasn't strong enough to do this job on my own and will have to take a companion with me to help tomorrow. All this time, I feel the loss of data keenly.
On Tuesday morning at 3am I was woken by Steph, who was on night-shift, because the chemical and meteorological conditions we had been looking for were ideal for a blimp flight. It was 3am and our probe wasn't yet tested to perfection so we decided to wait until the morning. Still, I got up for a few hours to make some preparations in case we decided to fly. At 9am conditions were still looking good. At 10am I was told that a penguin trip, which I was meant to be on, was going ahead. We've been waiting for these for weeks but until now been prohibited by either temperatures that are too low for driving the vehicles or winds too high to abseil down the ice cliffs. What a conundrum!
I went on the trip, I had an amazing time. The minute we crossed the perimeter drum line I felt the burden of base life dissolve, evaporate, off my shoulders. It was so good to get out! Only then did I realise how captive we have been here, kept within a circular perimeter defined by empty oil drums and flags, 5km round and 2km wide. We were off to the coast! It felt great. An hour later we were there. On the cliffs! A different view, the ice, a sea-lead in the distance, sun, clouds, beautiful beautiful coast. This was enough for me, I didn't even need to see the penguins! But there they were, a seemingly small huddle on the ice below. Jingly janglies, harnesses, crampons, ice axes, hats, balaclavas, cameras, hot ribena, backpacks and sausages later and I'm abseiling down the cliff. I love abseiling, I love dangling off ropes! Look at me, this is great!!!
Once everyone was down, we spent a couple of hours on the ice, hanging out with the penguins, getting cold but never bored, taking photos, just sitting with them, walking around, flapping our arms as they flap their wings, calling back at them. When the time came to leave, people harnessed and clipped again, climbed up the ice wall, chose to either pull themselves up a rope mechanically or use a ladder for the last bit. I was going for the ladder. At the last minute, I ended up on the alternative route. I don't know why but I suspect my pride and big gob had something to do with it. It was a stupid decision. Everyone else had gone, it was -37C, I was cold and clueless. I had two crampons on my feet, two ice axes in my hands, two jumars on the rope (for pulling myself up), hard helmet, various caribeners and jangly things on my belt and a great big backpack pulling me backwards. I have never, except in practices, had to use jumars, ice axes or crampons. (You will recall that for my pre-winter field training trip I spent 9 days in a tent due to bad weather.) I knew, and the people with me knew I knew, how all these thing worked. But my brain failed me, my fingers cried with pain of cold, my pride held back tears and my legs started to feel a little less comfortable hanging off a rope, dangling in mid-air.
In retrospect it was a good experience, it is always important to know your limits and appreciate the skill levels of people around you. At the time, I felt like I was being pushed to a limit I hadn't ever yet experienced, meeting a part of myself that was so true, so deep, so cutting to my soul, I met a person who was at one moment angry and proud and arrogant and livid while a second later she was swinging upside down, laughing with the sun and penguins, giggling at her fate and her situation, being hauled over the overhang by her ever-reliant buddies upstairs.
And then the angry one kicked in again: "STOP IT, STOP IT, STO-----P, YOU BASTARDS!!! I can do it on my own damn you!" I was screaming but they couldn't hear me and they were getting cold too. It was like being utterly alive and learning who you are at the core. I know I could have got out on my own but it might have taken a while. I had figured the system out just before they haulked me over the edge. But I also know that they made the right call because they didn't know my situation and they themselves were getting cold. And that had been the deal from the start: "Don't worry, Rhian, give it a go, and if you can't do it, we'll Z-pulley you out." There was never any danger I wouldn't make it: had that been the case, I would have gone the ladder route. I am determined to return, and next time, I'll get out on my own.
Trundle, trundle. The cosy journey home. Tired and happy people. All these new experiences. See what the sunshine brings us?! When we get home, it all floods back. The chemistry, the met, the blimp – o god, conditions were ideal... o no, I shouldn't have gone... no, I went, enjoy it, remember it. But conditions were still holding and there was no reason we couldn't do a flight that night.
That night I realised for the first time how truly committed people here are. We worked from 6:30 pm to 2:30 am inflating the blimp, working on the probes, winching it up, winching it down, downloading data. It was seriously, dangerously, cold and everyone was already tired when we began. Plus, the nature of the task meant that the helpers were outside in the cold for many more hours than I was. Some people helped out to help their friends, others were interested in the blimp in and of itself, but many I discovered later were doing this for the science. This is why we're here, I was told, and if you tell us this is cutting edge stuff and important science, then we'll pull out all the stops to help you do it. It was incredibly humbling. I often feel like our work here is an excuse to have an Antarctic presence, but this week I have realised that science is still a purpose for those of us living here. It is a great honour to have this opportunity and we should make the absolute most of it. All aspects of being here.
Life is very simple here, it is remarkably free of conflict. It is rare that I have to make a decision of the type you make hundreds of during a normal day at home. Sometimes conflicts of interest arise: penguins or molecules, melt-tank or machines, scrub-out or pit-digging, dinner or the lab – but the right choice usually becomes clear pretty quickly. We are all here to do our jobs but it is also in our jobs' best interest for us to remain sane and happy. Plus, ultimately, we are all on call 24-7. Try as we might to differentiate between communal duties, work and recreation, they are all just different sides of the same round fruit. Last week the plumber had a virtually sleepless week because the sewage pipes kept bursting in the cold. And since he couldn't fix the problem alone, most of the technical staff dropped everything to help him as well. Friday night I stayed in the caboose with Frank. Saturday night I was woken by the night watchman because a science alarm was going off – that was rare, usually it's the plumber, electrician, Piggott engineer or generator mechanic who gets woken. Ultimately everything we do here is one and the same thing, there is no differentiation. It is all part of wintering at Halley.
Posted by Rhian at 21:59 EST | Comments (2)
Blodget on Google
I was never a big fan of the Google IPO. I didn't understand it when it was announced, and it looks even more stupid now that the prime reason for doing it – allowing big VC investors to monetize some of their stake – hasn't happened. As GOOG starts trading on Nasdaq today, however, Slate has stepped in with a guide to stock-market valuations. A good idea, right? Not really: the author is disgraced stock analyst Henry Blodget.
Blodget's thesis is that "most valuation conclusions are extraordinarily subjective," and that there are much better ways of working out whether or not to buy a stock. This is very dangerous stuff, and anyone who cares about their money should do their best to ignore everything he's saying. We're finally entering a world now where people are starting to pay attention to things like valuation again; this is unambiguously a Good Thing.
Floyd Norris, in the New York Times today, makes an intertesting aside:
The offering's lowered price represented something of a victory for institutional investors who had taken the extraordinary step of going public with analyses suggesting a fair price was in the $80's or $90's, or even lower.
In other words, old Wall Street ways die hard, and people who aren't directly involved in an IPO are still very wary about saying anything about the stock before it starts trading. That's silly, of course: especially with a well-known and well-liked company such as Google, there is likely to be a large number of individual investors who want to buy the stock but don't know whether or not it's overpriced. (This is true regardless of the technique used to price the IPO.) It shouldn't be "extraordinary" for sophisticated participants in the financial markets to share their own analyses of what a fair price is: the underwriters shouldn't have a monopoly on telling people what the company is worth.
To read Blodget, however, the value of the company is more or less irrelevant:
Even if we could establish for certain what a stock was worth, this would be no guarantee—or even indication—that the stock would trade there in any reasonable timeframe (or ever). [empahsis added]
Blodget, of course, was paid millions of dollars a year to tell investors precisely this – that buying a company for god knows how many times its actual value could be a really smart thing to do. But that doesn't make it right. Buying a stock without knowing what it's worth is a fool's game, and Blodget really over-eggs the pudding in trying to persuade us that valuations don't matter. Let me quote at length:
Let's assume, for example, that we know that a company will earn $1 per share per year forever (an other-worldly assumption, but go with it). In this case, all we need to determine the "present value of future cash flows" is a discount rate. Because, in our example, the cash flows are known and guaranteed, we can use the so-called "risk-free" rate, the prevailing rate of interest that an investor can earn without risking a loss of capital. One proxy for the risk-free rate is the yield on short-term Treasury bills, which, as of this writing, is about 1.4 percent. Discount 150 years of earnings of $1 a year (the financial equivalent of "forever") at this rate and—voila!—the value of our hypothetical stock is about $63. If the stock is trading at $50, we have apparently found ourselves a "bargain."
But what if we assume that the "risk-free" rate changes, as it always does? What if, for example, we assume that the return on 3-month T-bills will regress to its long-term mean of about 5 percent, a scenario that, given enough time, is probable? Well, then our $63 stock will only be worth $20. Or what if the T-bill yield jumps to 10 percent, as in the inflation crisis of the early 1980s? Then the stock will be worth $10. In other words, even if we know for a fact that a company will earn $1 per share per year forever—something that, in practice, we will never come close to knowing—we might conclude that the stock's "fair value" is anywhere from $10 to $80 (the T-bill yield could always drop, too), with a central value around $20 (the value generated using the T-bill's long-term mean). Fifty dollars might not be such a "bargain," after all.
Talk about making a simple concept ridiculously complicated! Blodget's hypothetical is, to all intents and purposes, something called a perpetual bond. These things have a simple, unambiguous value in the markets – and that's exactly what Blodget's stock would be worth. No one would ever conclude that the stock's "fair value" was $10, based on the off chance that interest rates are going to rise enormously in the future; similarly, no one would conclude that the fair value was $80, based on the possibility that they might fall. There's something called a yield curve, Blodget – maybe you should bone up on it one of these days.
Blodget really hates the idea that a stock is worth the net present value of future cashflows, though, and he'll use any old argument to discredit it. Here he is right at the beginning:
Given the confidence with which some commentators cite the theory, a casual observer might assume that the "present value of future cash flows" is an indisputable number, akin to a price tag on a can of soup. In reality, however, it is not a number but an argument. [Blodget's emphasis]
Again, he's wrong. The present value is not an argument, and it is a number. There can be an argument over what the number is – it's something mathematicians like to call an "unknown". But numbers can be useful even if you don't know what they are. For instance, when Blodget put his famous $400 price target on Amazon, a lot of people made the very coherent argument that there was simply no way, no matter what assumptions you made about discount rates, future growth, and whatnot, that the present value of Amazon's future earnings per share could ever be $400. That was a good argument, and those people were right, and Blodget, if he disagreed with them, was wrong. He still is.
Today, Blodget is still looking on the sunny side of things:
If one assumes that Microsoft and Yahoo! will develop superior search services, that Google will collapse under its own arrogance, and that interest rates will rise (all reasonable possibilities), one might conclude that Google's "fair value" is in the teens.
No, if Google collapses under its own arrogance and stops making a profit, then the present value of its future earnings is zero. Fair value isn't in the teens, it's nothing. Google has very little in the way of assets, certainly not the $4 billion that a $15 share price, say, would value the company at. If it has few assets and no profits, why should it be worth even that much? Some of the Kool-Aid is still, it would seem, circulating in Blodget's system.
Blodget was completely wrong when he covered the Martha Stewart trial for Slate, and he made the same mistakes there that he makes here: he thought he was still living in the world in which he originally made his name. He isn't: the bubble has popped, and it's not returning. Slate has a very good economics columnist, in Steven Landsburg, who can explain concepts like net present value a lot more clearly than Blodget can. They should use him more, and arrogant former Wall Street BSDs a hell of a lot less.
Posted by Felix at 12:58 EST | Comments (0)
Daylight
had brunch with my friend Geoff today, and he turned to me and asked: "does Rhian ever have a day where she just goes to work, rather than being blown away by the fabulousness of where she is?", Felix told me a few days ago, and I've been pondering it ever since. I do and I don't. I do, and then I find myself doing so and immediately make an effort to remind myself of where I am. It's a beauty of being here, I guess – even in the hardest of moments or when I'm at an all-time low, I think, this is a part of it. I came here for this too.It's a commitment that's more than woweee.
Anyway, I'm feeling a bit blah right now so, in Geoff's honour, I figured I should write a blog to show that I'm not on cloud cuckoo the whole time. Thing is, the reading might as a result be that much more bland but at least you won't be expecting me to be as exciting as my stories are once I return.
Believe you me, there's nothing I want more sometimes than to just walk down the streets of London (it has to be both big and familiar to fulfil my needs), totally anonymous, shooting the shit with my mate Steve as we amble from pub to pub – in the rain. I'd do anything for that right now. The rainier and greyer the better. Totally unfabulous (the weather that is, not the company!). See, if Toni was there, we'd be dancing in the rain and if Anna was there she'd be visiting from Australia so it wouldn't be just another day. It's never 'just another day' though is it, wherever you are? Shit. And then I realise I sound like some fluffy-bunny-spewing evangelist drunk on the beauty of the world when all I really truly want is another blah day with nothing spectacular happening at all. Just once in a while – enough to get my breath back and discover my thirst for adventure again.
So what gets me down? Not the weather. It's glorious when it's windy, sunny, dark, still, you name it. This is Antarctica, and Antarctica here is described by weather since there are no other physical features to speak of around here. The sastrugi's getting awful big these days, mind you (oh yeah, and it's nice to not have to add a glossary to the end of everything I write or say!).
The work? Yeah, the work gets me down. But when it does I try to find something interesting to do to wake me up. There's so many opportunities – so many other jobs to share a part of. In the last couple of weeks, for instance, I have helped with the gash run, when we bury our waste food; helped jack the buildings at -50 subjective (and got white fingertips as thanks); helped the gennie mech with flubbering, when the big bag of fuel under the base gets refilled with Avtur (the help involves switching a switch on, and then, an hour later, off); and helped the comms manager to loosen the stays on the masts that our aerials hang off. It's by no means one way – I'd say I receive a lot more support from fellow base members than I provide. People help raise to the handline to the lab, jack our building, attend to electrical, heat and vent problems – and, most importantly, I'm always asking for help with digging holes for samples and snow for the melt-tank!
Anyway, that's what I do when I get bored of my job – I look to do something else for a while. On the whole though, my job keeps me fairly busy at a cruise speed, nothing overkill and crazy like last summer but I'm certainly not twiddling my thumbs either. So work, does work get me down? No, not really – if I fix something I come home feeling dead chuffed and if something remains broken I have learnt, or am learning, to not lose sleep over it. We'll get there in the end.
I guess the thing that can really sway my day is other people. I used to think I was fairly stable, fairly reasonable (don't we all?), sensible, even. But you've got to remember that BAS sets out to employ reasonable, stable, independent people. And mainly blokes. So here, I am none of my previous selves. PMT hits me like a blast from the east, a word from a colleague can send me above the clouds or into dephs of navel gazing, innocent banter at dinner can fuel my energy or force me to leave the room protesting. This being a British base, there is a lot of banter, a lot of piss-taking, a fair amount of sarcasm and the inevitavble gossip. I thought I could give as good as I got but I'm learning to coat my shoulders with teflon – something I've never been a master of. Still, although I am improved from earlier in the year, one emailed sentence from a fellow inmate down here had me instantly in tears today. Tears of anger or despair, I'm not sure which, but whichever it is, it's not right. And while my friends here say "don't let it get to you", and I know it wouldn't get to them, it still finds its tender spot. I don't want sympathy, I'm not unhappy, PLEASE don't now elevate me further into 'I couldn't do it' levels – I just am answering a question since I realise that in this mood, and this isn't the first, I rarely write blogs.
The sun rose yesterday but we still haven't seen it – it's been hidden behind clouds. Maybe tomorrow. I had intended to write a blog tonight about the joys of daylight, the colours on the horizon, the effect it's had on raising the spirits of all on base, the increased energy around the place and all the outside jobs we can now do. Of how bizarre it is to see the landscape we have been creating in the dark – some things now buried, many things needing attention. The wonder of clouds and stars at dusk. How much closer everything seems. Everyone is rushing around happy that they can work without the aid of a torch. Skidoos are running and trips off-base being organised. Light first appearred around 10am, beautiful pink and orange sky, and dissappeared after dinner, around 7pm probably. Amazing. Last week we had a storm so the change from dark to light is spectacular and sudden. I had forgotten how normal daylight is. I don't particularly like the normalness of it, but it is very convenient.
Love, me.
UPDATE: Geoff, I'm not sure we have met, but to answer your question, no, I don't think there is ever a day here where I 'just go to work'. It's now 3:40am on the same night as the earlier entry I sent to Felix. I went to sleep for a few hours but was having bad dreams, tossing and turning, feeling too warm. The clock said 2:30. I went back to sleep and had an intense and weird dream. When I hauled myself out of it, groggy and shaking myself, the clock still said 2:30. I sleep in a sensory deprivation chamber, without my clock I have no reference of time.
Maybe my clock was wrong. I'm on gash today – surely someone would have woken me if I hadn't got up for cleaning? Or if it was 2:30pm (my clock is analogue)?! I got up, I don't know why, it's rare for me to get up in the night. I was still discombobulated from the evening's earlier interaction and I think that was why I didn't sleep well. As I pottered down the corridor in my dressing gown, very sleepy eyed, I met the friend who had earlier upset me. He apologised, I apologised, we made up and chatted for a while. It was really important to me to do this. Some people here have the ability to allow things like this to slippery slide off their shoulders but I don't. I take personal actions directed at me very seriously. You might say I over-react. I'm learning a lot from these blokes here, the ground rules of live and let live, and learning that I have a lot to learn.
My friend told me there was a beautiful aurora happening outside. Could I be bothered to get dressed for it? Twenty minutes later the night-shift person confirmed it was a good 'un, though not necessarily good enough to wake people for. I never regret going outside, never. So after goodnights I returned to my room for clothes and a 'doo suit. Ten minutes later I was walking like the Michelin man down the steps of the platform outsiude, crunch rustle rustle. The 'doo suits (glossary: doo =skidoo) are warm but cumbersome!
There was an aurora. Gentle green swirls in the sky, clear starry night. The swirls of aurora, the low-level mist, the milky way, all washed foggy stripes around the place, merged together, glazed the sky. Scorpio laughing from the north now, Orion not yet risen. I really do miss him. But to the South was another constellation I have been chatting with for a while but have not yet found a name for. Simon was outside with me, he's on night-shift but also conveniently has a PhD in astronomy. I've been meaning to show him this constellation for weeks.
As we're looking around the sky he points out that Scorpio's tail is in the Milky Way. It's good to know for when we get home. Oh – so when I see the Milky Way, I should look for Scorpio's tail and know the rest is out there somewhere?, I ask. Scorpio is huge in the sky and apparrantly also visits the north sometimes, like Orion visits us down here. I could believe that sometimes you can only see his tail. No, Simon says, it's so that when you see his tail, you know that's where the Milky Way is. I can't imagine the stars without the Milky Way. It's sad to think the only reason we don't see it is due to our own light pollution. While we're staring to the north watching the crustacean's pincers, a bright orb appears in the sky, falls, keeps falling, falls further and eventually fades. It is the brightest shooting star either of us have ever seen. Not so much shooting as dropping. There must be a meteor out there now, about to be buried in snow. It's funny to think that we're closer to that then any other people.
When we came in we looked the constellation up: Canis Major, Orion's hunting
dog. So, Orion might be around less these days but at least he's left his puppy!
Posted by Rhian at 12:10 EST | Comments (2)
WHOOOSH
I left the lab late today, around 9:30 pm, but it had been a productive afternoon so I bore no grudges. A nice little blast of work to clear my conscience for the weekend. Truth be told I haven't done much up there this week as it's been stormy for the past few days and there's no fun in going to the CASLab in winds above 30 knots, vis less than 10m, unless you really have to. Anyway, I left the lab in the dark. Two steps down and there was a breeze down my ankle – I hadn't pulled my overalls fully over my boots. Back indoors to re-attire. And check the mitts are snug as well.
I reached the bottom of the steps and was nearly knocked over by a gust of wind. It's blowing 25 knots and though that's low compared to the last few days, I was reminded that it still gives the air a significant force. But nothing unmanageable and the wind was behind me and slightly to my side, in my favour at any rate.
I thought, I love this, this is great. I wanted to remember what it was like so I stopped and looked around. Behind me was my beloved lab, shining white by the floodlights, still looking as though it belongs on the moon. Inside it is hot or cold, loud, buzzing, clicking and full of problems. From the outside, it still makes me gasp with pride. I work there. That's my lab. I even saw it being built!
In front of me, well the direction I was headed, were three dim lights. Hazes of light denoting the Piggott, Laws and Simpson platforms. Are they clear enough to follow home or should I stick to the handline? I love following the lights, there is so much space around me then. In every other direction I could see nothing. I couldn't see the surface my feet were walking on, I couldn't see my black mitts against the black sky. It does get really dark here still, thank God. I felt elated. This is what I love. A strong wild wind, space in every direction and a strong, deep, sense of security. Someone recently told me I was brave; I couldn't relate to that at all. Here I feel absolutely safe, at one, at home. It's wild but it's wonderful.
Dark. The surface, I was thinking about the surface and how my feet feel the way forward. Crunch crunch they squeak on the hard snow. Then suddenly a soft patch, like icing sugar, it's divine. Then back to the polystyrene chunks. Snap: so easy to break. The worst thing that can happen between here and the Laws, I feel, is that I fall over!
And as sure as mud is mud, you will fall over. I fall over the whole time. I love falling over, we always laugh. It doesn't hurt, there is nothing to be scared of. Why does it hurt at home? Maybe the scrapes and bruises – but here I am padded everywhere. A twinge in my lower back when my foot lands on air and I fall deep into a sastrugi hole perhaps, but that's the worst of it. It makes me laugh always. I love tripping people up too. You're never safe here if someone is walking behind you! Come to Antarctica and learn to rugby tackle (I was rubbish when I first got here – I'll be responsible for all sorts of bloody noses and lost friendships when I get home, no doubt, forgetting that concrete hurts!).
So I'm thinking about the surface beneath my feet that I love walking on so much. I could ski, not in this, but sometimes – but I prefer walking. I like to feel the sastrugi under my feet, the snow, the ice, feel the ice, a hundred metres of it maybe below me, and then below that is water. Salty, cold and dense ocean. It's great. Nothing like snow on concrete, snow on earth, this is snow on snow on snow. All water molecules.
So I'm watching the world around me, so dark, so blowy, so exciting. Remarking on how little there is to focus on, unlike at home. At home there would be buildings everywhere, or at least trees. Here I just have three blurry lights in front (I'm heading for the middle one) and one behind me. Black everywhere else. O my – there's a dot of light in front of me and up a bit. Bend, bend, bend your back upwards, Rhian. My hood and dead rabbit hat and goggles are obscuring anything above me, keep bending. O MY – LOOOK!! STARS!! Soo many stars you have no idea, I am clapping with joy. There's big smiley Scorpio and the bright lights of the Southern Cross. The Milky Way streaking like a great smoky line across the sky, even the magellanic clouds are clear tonight. This storm, this 25 knots of blowing snow around my head – it's just here, just at ground level. Not even on the platform of the lab was it this blowy. It's amazing. I knew I wasn't alone! Now I really am laughing, I can't contain myself. Who could ask for more?! Stars and storm?!! Woweee! I keep looking up but then I can't go forwards and I fall over. In the end I lie on my back, in the 25 knot blow, snow flying past my ears, and stare at the sky. HALLO SKY I shout!! I'm Rhian!!! I know, you fool, say the stars, we're billions of years old. Now get up before you never get up. And they accompany me all the way home.
Just before I reach the platform I am called in from my silence, my chest bleats "Rhian, Rhian- Laws" and after some fumbling inside two jackets I manage to extract my radio to inform them I'm ok, nearly there, nearly home. "Would you like a drink waiting for you?" Oh yes, a gin and tonic please, this is a night to celebrate.
Posted by Rhian at 11:19 EST | Comments (10)
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