Doors of McMurdo

Yeah, the main advantage of pre-building is that land is cheap and nobody's using it, vs post-building where you know where the density is but you have to get the land.

In the cases I know of the density followed upon building the line, but that may not be universally true.

From my experience playing factorio, the best way to approach it is to plan out the areas you are building to allow future "backtracking" possible - increase space between buildings, ensure new "roads" are "reasonably" arranged to allow future expansion, etc. An example of this is ensuring that driveways/building distances are a certain minimum from the road, allowing you to expand a 2 lane road to 3, etc.

You build your infrastructure to, or just past the edges of what you know is being built, and make sure you reserve space past that to accompany further expansion.

The lets you expand the ~factory~ city while still allowing some sanity to the underlying infrastructure.

* This will likely apply to anything that needs both preplanning and unknown future expansion such as codebases

They aren't independent, the city will tend to build up along the transit lines due to the easy access to transit. E.g., the NYC outer boroughs and the DC metro area.

Maybe not so much the where, but the how (zoning regs) matter. In SLC, the roads are pleasantly wide for a city it's age. Turns out they had to be wide enough for a wagon to turn around.

Trying to avoid painting yourself into a corner without over thinking is the game.

> The city may not build up in the way the planners anticipated.

It might not, but planners have a lot of forcing functions.

For example, if they build a transformational backbone, and nobody uses some part of it, they can fix it, by say, moving major government offices to that area. Residents, other businesses, services will follow suit.

What doesn't work is half-assed planning, where you have a grand, but myopic vision, implement it, and never adjust after-the-fact.

So is IP - which version are we talking about?

The out-of-address-space v4 that wasn't future-proof enough to conceive of more than 4 billion computers?

Or the reinvented ipv6 that seems to have gone way too far in the other direction (and not just in terms of address size)?

It's certainly incorporating local knowledge though

I think but could be wrong that the article alludes to but does not explicitly state but that door is in fact a joke for instance it is a door that has a file cabinet on the other side and they didn't want people to go through it and they made a joke by labeling it thus and pretending the keys are lost. McMurdo feels like the type of place where someone could acquire a crowbar in under 10 seconds and that is the true key for that door if you ever in fact needed to use it.

A place I used to go to as a kid used to have a giant throw switch which said it would turn off the waterfall if thrown which was a joke they played on kids. It was in fact just the old Master throw switch for the house when they originally electric it up.

Zoning does that too. Usually MF is designed as a buffer between commercial and single family (as proxy for more/less affluence). Without zoning, it just happens more naturally because the commercial is going to usually want to be on a major road, then land next to busy commercial is not desirable for single family housing so a MF developer will build there.

The part I liked about it was the city was able to adapt to change. I saw the inner-loop part of Houston as a hellscape as a kid. Then ~2000s when inner-city gentrification began, it went quick. Neighborhoods tend to support more local business than the big box strip centers that proliferate in the master planned world. Also, master plans are just copy&pasted every couple of miles so it all just looks the same[0]. I liked having neighborhood restaurants and other quirky stuff inside an old house in the neighborhood, you actually knew the owner and it facilitated a sense of community. It's rarely ever actually in the neighborhood, just on a main thoroughfare that pretty much is high traffic regardless of the business use. I see living on a high traffic road not very different than living next to a busy shopping center.

The other thing I've noticed now that I live in Dallas (which is pretty similar to Houston except with zoning). I frequently see an undeveloped parcel of land and I think, "wow a X shop would do well in this location." I look up zoning and it's not allowed. What is allowed, IMO, wouldn't do well in that location. That's why it's still undeveloped land. Some map drawn 50+ years ago probably made some bad assumptions. Typically the neighbors will fight any zoning change because they actually like that nice undeveloped lot next door. Developers with bigger pockets pay the neighbors off so they don't fight the zoning change.

Hard to explain, but Dallas is known for 'lack of culture' and having lived in other Texas cities prior (Houston and Austin) I think it's largely due to with how it was designed. It's difficult to build anything unique or artistic here. Until it was banned a couple years ago, many of the city's in the metroplex building code would mandate exactly what brand and color of brick you could use. So we have entire small cities in the metroplex that are red brick (it was a trend in the 90s when that area was being swallowed by sprawl, and it's exactly what's off trend the last decade+) Actually, most cities still mandate it and if you're a developer you'd have to file a lawsuit to get your non-conforming design permitted (you'd win because State of Texas banned this a few years ago, but many municipalities have conveniently not updated their building codes).

Which segues to this;

> If you lack that financial security, you may be stuck next to all sorts of undesirable properties

But at least your in the mix of the city and somewhat able to interact and have social mobility, access to the core business districts and jobs that service the higher income citizens. In Dallas, the economic core/center of gravity is moving north towards Plano and those lacking financial security get pushed further and further south (usually). This essentially is a ghetto, food desert, high crime yet over policed, etc and provides little access to social mobility. It also reinforces a lot of the race issues that exist in our country. Dallas is very segregated compared to Houston.

[0] Most of Houston is very guilty of this, most of it also has defacto zoning by another name. I forget what it is, ordinances on noise and traffic impact or something. The inner loop area is pretty organic and sense it's well developed, you pretty much know who your neighbor is going to be. If you buy a house next to an undeveloped lot, you're rolling the dice, but there's likely not any lots big enough to build an oil refinery or a shopping mall or whatever. If you're in a residential area, it's likely a small lot and will eventually be built as residential.

It presumably had a good reason for being in each intermediate state before the one you became attached to, and people were presumably attached to those.

Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets.

Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.

Good question, honestly I'm not sure. I will try to remember to ask next time I fly up.

I can help! I went through it 7 times.

FSTP, prounounced "F-stop" like the camera setting, was the "field safety training program" and basically it refers to the group of mountaineers that the US Antarctic Program's contractor hires to live in Antarctica and help out with fieldwork. It also refers to the classes that they teach in McMurdo.

Basic FSTP "snow school" used to be required for everyone at McMurdo, and for many, it was the most fun thing you would get to do the whole season. You would learn to set up camp, cook, use radios, sleep out on the sea ice for one night (in a tent, igloo, snow trench, depending on the year and instructors).

I did a bunch of other FSTP-organized courses too, including how to travel on sea ice, and some mountaineering.

We had FSTP mountaineers with us up on Erebus and the joke was "the F stops here."

I think it got renamed to something else in 2017 or so... around when the BFC stopped referring to themselves as the building fulla chicks...

That site is getting confused by New Zealand's Antarctic Scott base.

NZ proper is about least 1,500 miles from Antarctica.

I think distcalculator is buggy:

"Distance between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA is 99 miles.

If average speed of your car will be standard for this route between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA and road conditions will be as usual, time that you will need to arrive to Los Angeles, CA will be 1 hour."

McMurdo is 2385 miles from Christchurch NZ, where support flights originate[0]. Flying from the south coast of NZ at Invercargill saves 208 miles[1]. It's 3222 miles to the South Pole[2].

[0] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZIR [1] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=NZNV-NZIR [2] http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=CHC-NZSP

That's what I meant - subconsciously you probably were thinking of the base that is the South Pole Station, since that's the one with more pictures of it and that's the location where you'd intuitively expect an antarctic base to be.

“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight.

Philip K Dick, Ubik

My wife points out that you can't hide it on top of the doorframe either, since the Yeti is taller than you...

I've been down with the USAP a couple times, most recently about a decade ago, and in that span the psych eval was required for winterover deployments but not summers. It was very questionable.

I like to think that a spoof "How to Pass the Psych Eval" video we made one winter might've somehow contributed to that particular system being torn down a few years later, though I don't have firsthand experience with the system that replaced it. My understanding is that the new one involves more "team building" type stuff before deployment, which sounds like a step in the right direction.

One issue is that by the time a person has gotten to that late stage in the hiring process, they are often deeply invested in deploying - having packed things in to storage, quit "real world" job, etc. and their nominal manager understands that. Another issue is that people behave differently in different environments, and Antarctica is quite unlike Denver.

correct, no psych evals for USAP participants.

My information is about 10 years old, so that makes sense. It also makes sense that such evals are of limited utility, as the people I know who worked down on the ice were ... difficult personalities to get along with.

Citation needed. My counter evidence is from 2022: https://drunkard.com/08-04- southpole/

mcm has two bars, they both absolutely serve liquor. source: me, a current bartender here in mcmurdo.