The 7 am view up Forbes Ave, with Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning in the distance. Frank Lloyd Wright reportedly called it “The world’s largest keep-off-the-grass sign”.

A few quick updates this morning:

-Yesterday afternoon John reported that Jim, Cindy, Lauren, Emilie Nicole and Alex were on the plane flying south as of about 4 pm thursday, so barring unforeseen circumstances they made it to Antarctica late last night our time.  The first hours in Antarctica are way too busy to expect much blogging from them; the’ll be subjected to some formal indoctrination presentations, informal tours of McMurdo, demands from Brian and John (who have been waiting feverishly for their labor force) and of course the overall excitement of being in such an amazing place.

-I spent a couple of hours with Bill Cassidy yesterday afternoon (that was the prompt for John to call, so he could talk to Bill too).  Although the pace of his speech is deliberate and a few things that have fallen out of the old memory bin (he can’t recall Davis Ward, for example),  he’s still witty, charming and involved. He has a walker to help get around now, but it’s more a security aid than a requirement.  And he feels the cold,  which is a pretty common late-life condition for Antarctica vets.  There was a lot of exasperated head-nodding when he listened to John and I discuss all the trials and tribulations of the modern Antarctic expedition;  he made it clear that having to groom a runway for bigger plane to land on a snowfield was pretty wasteful in his opinion. Bev Cassidy runs a tidy, well-organized house,  clearly the hub for communications among their children and grandchildren.  She too had a few things to say about the modern Antarctica; the whole idea that we were sitting in their living room using my cell phone to talk to John in McMurdo wasn’t just amazing, it was also (maybe I read too much into this) eroding the rugged isolation that defines the Antarctic explorer, making things a bit too soft.    I made the case that changes always happen with time, they generally happen in the direction of increased safety, decreased risk, and higher rates of communication, for good and ill;  since management and double-checking go with all those things.  One thing we all agreed on?  Us old farts need to get out of the way sometimes and let the younger generation, who have the energy to deal with the increased adminstrative load, get on with the work.  As long as they don’t decide that crossing a crevasse in 4 short leaps with breaks in between is the equivalent of crossing with one long leap………

-As I write this I’m sitting in a hotel room near Pitt, waiting for my son Tucker to get up.  He’s visiting Pitt to explore getting an MS in biostatistics.  This is of course where I met my wife, who has a PhD in biostatistics from Pitt; and of course I got my PhD here too, working with Bill.  Bev Cassidy is a professional statistician who worked at Westinghouse for decades.  One of the amazing coincidences of life is that both Bill and I have statisticians as mates, and given one of Bill’s daughters also got a PhD in biostatistics,  it could be that legacy will go on as well.  At least we’re never far from someone who has a deep understanding of uncertainty,  always useful in the Antarctic exploration trade.

-Ralph,  from pre-dawn Pittsburgh