A Hamster Travels to the South Pole

[David Farber <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>]

Posted-Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 14:36:29 -0400
Date:      Wed, 26 Oct 1994 13:22:54 edt
From: "josh quittner" <quit@newsday.com>
To: <farber@central.cis.upenn.edu>
HEADLINE              LIFE IN CYBERSPACE
                      COMPUTERS IN THE ^90S
                      A Hamster Travels to the South Pole
BYLINE                Joshua Quittner
LENGTH                89   Lines


  ALVAN WAS THE FIRST guinea pig in cyberspace.
     While this historic event happened a little over a month ago, only a
  handful of people know about it today.
     Let's change that right now.
     The story of Alvan, the guinea pig, begins in Antartica, at a rimy
  place called the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, where 27 people are
  living inside a modest-sized geodesic dome. These people are scientists
  and engineers, and most of them are affiliated with the Center for
  Astrophysical Research in Antarctica, which maintains a powerful
  telescope there. The South Pole, it turns out, is one of the best places
  on the planet to mount a telescope: Its air is drier than the desert.
  It's unpopulated. It's crazy-cold, which helps when you're trying to
  pick up sensitive infrared signals from the edges of distant galaxies.
  It was the only place on earth to see all the fragments of the Comet
  Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, in fact. (And you thought this column was
  never about science.)
     Anyway, the scientists live in isolation from February until
  November, iced in by temperatures that drift down to 160 degrees below
  zero (too cold for planes to land) and it gets pretty lonely. The
  highlight of the day is sending out a tractor for two hours to scoop up
  snow, which is brought inside, and melted down for showers and baths.
  Also, they play a game called volleybag, which is like volley ball
  except instead of a ball they use a cloth bag, stuffed with socks. The
  rules allow you to bounce the volleybag off lighting fixtures and walls
  and six overhead fire alarms.
     As I say, it gets pretty lonely.
     Bob Loewenstein had an idea that would change all that, and it
  involved  -  ta-da!  -  the Internet, the global network of networks
  that will doubtless go down in the history books as one of the truly
  major advances of science. Loewenstein, who's in charge of computer
  communications for the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin (which is
  conducting research at the Pole), decided to wire the Pole into the Net.
  This was achieved by using a satellite connection that would relay large
  bursts of data to the United States, and into the land-based cables and
  lines of the Mighty Internet itself. Loewenstein also left behind a
  video camera and a video card, which was plugged into a MacIntosh
  computer. The card was nothing special; it merely allowed the computer
  to receive and process video signals from the camera.
     Loewenstein also brought a floppy disk containing a copy of CU-SeeMe,
  a program available for free on the Internet and developed at Cornell
  University in New York, that allows people to send and receive video
  over the Net. This program has brought affordable teleconferencing to
  universities (and a few savvy businesses) around the world. It is
  spreading with predictable speed (and predictable applications: A recent
  flap involved someone sneaking an ad onto a CU-SeeME reflector site at
  the University of Pennsylvania, advertising a video "dating" service.
  Reflector sites are computers that people, equipped with CU-SeeMe, can
  log into and see other people. U-Penn officials told the advertiser to
  stop).
     On Sept. 13, Michael Hancock, an engineer wintering at the Pole,
  trundled across nearly a kilometer of ice. Snow was blowing so hard he
  got lost twice and had to stop to re-orient himself. It was so cold he
  could hear his breath, which sounded like a blow torch. Hancock finally
  made his destination, which was the CARA observatory, actually crossing
  from one side of the Pole to the other. He went inside, sat down at the
  Mac and made history, establishing the first, live, two-way-video link
  between the Pole and the rest of the world.
     Then, he pocketed the video card, grabbed the camera, and brought it
  back to the dome and his mates, including a scientist named John W.
  Briggs.
     Another video call was made to Yerkes, in Wisconsin, where Briggs^
  wife works, along with Loewenstein. The call was actually routed through
  a reflector site in New York, I'm proud to report, maintained by
  NYSERNET, in upstate Liverpool. The Internet doesn't care about
  geography and sometimes a link is easier to achieve on networks, where
  the fastest route between two points isn't necessarily a straight line.
     I got e-mail from Briggs the other day and he told me about that
  first call: "The video link was only B&W, but that was no matter when
  [Loewenstein] said to us. `Wanna see some TREES?^ And then he pointed
  his rig out the office window. We all particularly enjoyed that."
     Also, Liz Moy Briggs, his wife, ran to their nearby home and brought
  in the family hamster, named Alvan. John Briggs loves that guinea pig,
  maybe because the guinea pig is always the first animal to test science.
  In any event, Liz Moy Briggs had a great idea: She held Alvan up to the
  camera for her husband to see and a video camera, attached to the
  computer in Wisconsin, recorded his furred image and shot those digital
  bits down a cable and across the Internet, up to a satellite dish and
  down to the South Pole, a MacIntosh and a room full of people who were
  loving every bit of it.
      That's how Alvan became the first guinea pig in cyberspace.
     "It sort of sounds dumb to bring in a pet, especially a guinea pig,"
  Liz Moy Briggs told me recently. "But you have to understand that
  there's nothing alive, other than the people down there. There's a real
  craving for trees and animals and normal things."
     On the Internet we have gopher, and archie and veronica and even
  jughead   -  tools named after all sorts of funny things. I, for one,
  will be very disappointed if someone, somewhere, doesn't think of a tool
  and name it after Alvan, the guinea pig that brought life, over the
  Internet, to the South Pole.


  To contact Joshua Quittner via e-mail on the Internet: quit@newsday.com