21–29 of 29 posts
"six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour" WTF? I figured the only way you'd get someone to go up there (who's not a researcher) would be to pay well. Crazy...
If you've never seen it I highly recommend "A Place Further than the Universe". It's an anime, serious (not a wacky comedy) about 4 high school students who manage to take a trip to Antartica by joining an expedition. One of the best things I've seen in a while. Only 13 episodes so under 4hrs total. Super inspiring and I learned several interesting facts about not just Antartica but what it takes to get there as well…
I enjoyed Werner Herzog's "Encounters at the End of the World" at many levels, not the least of which was how different it was from "Aguirre, the Wrath of God".
I also recommend ie Dark Glow of the Mountains about Messner and Kammerlander doing properly hardcore expedition on Gasherbrums traverse in Pakistan that was never done before. He interviews them before they depart and after coming back, surviving by series of mere chances in extreme environment, pushed to absolute limits of human bodies and minds. Since I do a bit of mountaineering I can truly appreciate characters and the insights that no hollywood fantasies can ever come close to. True documentaries.
A bit controversial sidenote - these are the efforts that I have huge respect for, not doing it for the money, not chasing sponsors with every move. Seeing some world championships or olympics I can't have much respect for those very rich sportsmen who are focusing more on chasing new sponsors than actual spirit of the game.
"six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour" WTF? I figured the only way you'd get someone to go up there (who's not a researcher) would be to pay well. Crazy...
Article says room and board, plus cost of transportation, are covered. So that $13/hr goes quite a bit further than it would if a chunk of it was going towards paying for food and rent. (And if you were paying for the cost of the plane flight, then nobody would take the job). Can't calculate the equivalent compensation without knowing where the author lives normally, but it might (VERY rough guess) be the equivalent…
And Wikipedia says she earned a Ph.D. in 2004 and lives in NYC [1]
Probably safe to say she didn't go for the money.
>At roughly nine thousand three hundred feet above sea level (~2800M) I heard Antarctica on average very high above sea level. So I would think just the thinness of the air would make baking rather hard compared to sea level. Sadly I will not be able go there. 40 years ago, when I when was at around 6000 feet above sea level on a trip, I was getting dizzy when moving around :) Sea level is were I was born and were I…
>At roughly nine thousand three hundred feet above sea level (~2800M) I heard Antarctica on average very high above sea level. So I would think just the thinness of the air would make baking rather hard compared to sea level. Sadly I will not be able go there. 40 years ago, when I when was at around 6000 feet above sea level on a trip, I was getting dizzy when moving around :) Sea level is were I was born and were I…
Bodies acclimate. You'll go up in altitude one day and get quite sick, then the next day or another day you'll be fine. Spend a week there and you'll feel better. Drink water, stay hydrated, and it will go more smoothly. So unless somebody found something specifically atypical about your body, don't reject all mountains in the world because of one bad day 40 years ago.
Absolutely -- and at different rates.
I have had severe asthma since puberty. After a decade of suffering, good drugs arrived around the turn of the century, and I've been well controlled since and I've been pretty active.
But I am better at altitude. I have narrow obstructed tubes in my lungs. Thinner air flows through them more easily. The higher I am (on land, obviously) the more easily and efficiently I can breathe.
In the old days, asthma clinics were located up mountains for this reason.
I like spending time at altitude. Thinner air means more oxygen for me, which means I feel better and can be more active.
If I could live 3-4 km up all the time, without vast expense in somewhere tiny, I would.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they not do soaked beans? Leave them in water for 2 days and they shouldn't need a full boil I wouldn't think? Bonus: chickpea water as an egg substitute in recipes (powdered egg is nasty!). Re: coffee, mixing concentrated cold brew with hot water makes a pretty smooth cup
Even if soaked, beans still take hours to cook without a pressure cooker.
However, you still need more than a half of hour if you want the beans to be soft, e.g. 45 minutes (after having soaked the beans for a half of day).
I cook all my food in a microwave oven. Except for beans, I have never encountered any vegetable that would need more than 15 minutes. For lentils or chickpeas, around 12 minutes is normally sufficient.
"six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour" WTF? I figured the only way you'd get someone to go up there (who's not a researcher) would be to pay well. Crazy...
"six-day-week, eleven-hour-day, thirteen-dollars-an-hour" WTF? I figured the only way you'd get someone to go up there (who's not a researcher) would be to pay well. Crazy...
(Alas, I doubt my life will ever work out in such a way that I'll have that opportunity.)
The few times I've baked there, it's been a pretty good experience. There's a full height proving cabinet, yeast works really well at altitude, the ovens have steam injectors, there are good mixers, a commercial fryer. In many ways much easier than baking at home, but probably not a patch on a good bakery. We almost ran out of sugar in 2021 and Rothera sent us a bag of Tate and Lyle in break-glass-in-emerhency box on…
> It's also hard to brew coffee if you tend to use off-the-boil. The best you'll get is about 93 C. That sounds ideal for off-the-boil coffee brewing? At sea level I (and all the speciality coffee shops round here) aim for 91C, and I'll drop that to 88-89C for medium roast and lower if it looks on the dark side. Brew methods: Aeropress and cafetiere.
Thinking about it, we also had some "fancy" packet ramen from Momofuku. Good example there - those noodles take forever to cook compared to the deep fried ones. You'd have to soak, nuke in the microwave and still wait ages.
Most of the coffee we took down were light roast and how well the beans survived shipping/storage, how well they were roasted mattered much more.
There are a bunch of cafetieres as well, but I don't like the silt even with some of the techniques designed to minimize it.