Powerful Video

Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have been born in what happens to be the richest country on the planet at this time in history. I gripe about my "problems": Maybe I had a hard time getting a data analysis computer code to work, or maybe I get annoyed that a product I purchased doesn't work the way it is supposed to. But it usually does not take long for me to notice something that reminds me: I really have no right whatsoever to complain. One of those reminders of how undeservingly lucky I am showed up on a web page I was looking at this morning.

I was browsing fark.com, and found a YouTube video that held my attention. This is a CBS News report from 1975. It shows the last rescue flight leaving from Da Nang airport at the end of the Vietnam War. Apparently, the president of World Airways had been flying humanitarian missions, using his airliner planes to help evacuate south vietnamese to Saigon as the North Vietnamese troops marched into city after city. In the case detailed in this news report, a plane intended to evacuate women and children refugees was rushed on the Da Nang runway by mostly enlisted south vietnamese male soldiers, desperate to escape with their lives. They climbed aboard the plane, pushing each other out of the way in their panic. After the plane took off, they found that only 5 out of the 200-some people were women. Another world airways airline flying alongside informed the pilots that the bottom cargo doors were open during the flight (which was restricted to 10,000 ft altitude because they were unable to properly close the stairway door, which was damaged by the mob) and that those open cargo bays were filled with people.



I do not have problems. I am no more deserving of happiness than the refugees shown in this video, and yet, by pure chance, it is unlikely I'll ever have to endure one tenth of the fear and suffering that many of these people had been through in the ordeal that led them to be so desperate to escape.

Flickr has added video!

Many of my friends (especially the bridge kids who check our group MySpace page) know that I am ga-ga over Flickr. It's a hand-dandy photosharing site that brings me endless enjoyment as well as the ability to quickly and easily upload and share photos with friends and family. For a long time, however, I was frustrated that Flickr did not allow you to also upload those little videos you can take with your point and shoot camera. Sure, you can throw them up onto YouTube easily enough. . . but wouldn't it be nice just to have photos and videos of the same subject matter side-by-side, organized in a way similar to iPhoto on the mac?

Yes. .. yes it would be nice. So Flickr did it! Just today they added the ability to upload video. You can tag, geotag, and comment on the vids just like the pics, and all the world is in harmony now.

check out my videos on flickr!

Back from Baja

BajaMarch2008 - 35, originally uploaded by davidagalvan.

Reg and I went to Bahia de Los Angeles last week with our friends Tim and Julie. Tim knows the area really well, and led us to various islands for kayaking, fishing, and snorkeling. It was lots of fun! Check out some photos at my flickr site! For now, it's back to work!

Antarctica

I arrived in Antarctica on Friday, January 4th. My advisor, Mark Moldwin, and I have come here to repair and re-deploy a magnetometer that is based at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAISD). We successfully fixed the electronics box, and have been ready to go to WAISD to redeploy it since last Friday, Jan 11. Since then the weather at WAISD has been bad enough that every flight since then has been cancelled. Mark has commitments he must return to back in the U.S., and we are running out of time to get out to WAISD and get back to McMurdo, before then flying up to Christchurch, New Zealand, and on to Los Angeles.

At this point, we are just hoping to get a day or two worth of time at WAISD to re-connect the electronics box to the power, GPS, Iridium and sensor cables. If we don’t have time to raise all the elements of the magnetometer site, another trip down in a year may be required. We’re hoping it won’t come to that, not because I wouldn’t love to come down here again, but because of the extra cost of an additional trip just to dig out and raise the magnetometer site.

Here at McMurdo, the largest research station on the continent, life is similar to living at a typical university. There is a population of around 1000 people during these summer months, which drops down to about 200 during the southern winter. The sun, of course, never sets here. It just goes round and round in the sky, ranging from ~30 degrees above the horizon and due north at local noon, to about 10 degrees above the horizon and due south at midnight. I had my “Snowcraft Training” course, which involved learning to make a Kinsey (snow-cave), snow-block walls, setting up Scott Tents, using a high frequency (HF) radio to communicate with receivers up to 1000 miles away (we actually got to talk to people at the South Pole, just from our camp site!), and of course spending a night out on the ice shelf.

Mark and I have done several short hikes around “town”. It really is beautiful terrain when the weather is good. There isn’t all that much wildlife right around the station; I haven’t seen any penguins yet. Though an adelie penguin delayed our landing by being out on the ice runway when were supposed to be landing. We had to circle a couple of times while the airfield staff chased it away. I have seen probably 100 weddell seals from a distance, lying out on the ice shelf near melt pool and cracks in the ice. And there is the occasional skua scavenger bird (resembles a brown seagull) hoping to steal food from the people here in town.

It’s the height of summer down here, so the temperature hovers around 30 F, though it’s in the teens or single digits when you factor in windchill. The wind really does make all the difference here. The extreme cold weather gear (ECW) given us by the U.S. Antarctic Program is great though!

HDTV from the Moon!

The Japanese spacecraft KAGUYA ("SELENE", in English) has taken the first high definition video from lunar orbit! Now it's even easier to imagine what it would be like to be in orbit around the moon!

Check it out the awesome video here:
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2007/11/20071107_kaguya_movie_e.html

And there's more information about the spacecraft here:

http://www.selene.jaxa.jp/en/index.htm