Word: domes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...some 130,000 years worth, which is what the scientists at NEEM eventually hope to drill through. The polar horizon stretches to all sides without landmarks, save for the black and red flags that mark the boundaries of the camp, the red sleeping tents and the heated main dome, a geodesic wooden structure that is the kitchen, conference center and overall heart of NEEM. The result is scary, when I ponder how tiny and isolated I am against this vast sheet of ice, a white void without plants, animals or even rocks. It's also really, really cool...
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, the Danish leader of the NEEM project, greets us on the ice with her team, and takes us back to main dome via NEEM taxis - sleds pulled by snowmobiles. The scientists and staff attached to NEEM are mostly Danish, with a sprinkling of other nationalities: a couple of Americans, Belgians, French and a South Korean. Lingua franca is English, with liberal amounts of Danish mixed in. When we arrive, we are given breakfast, and we soon learn that the preparation and consumption of food takes up a significant slice of time at NEEM. It might...
...meantime, there's dinner - massive steaks, potatoes and salad - and beer, which comes in 5 liter Heineken mini-kegs. Jimi Hendrix and Dr. Dre are playing on the stereo in the main dome. NEEM has no shortage of grad students like Trevor Popp, who describes himself as "34 going on 12," and they know how to have fun. Don't get me wrong. Ice-core science is all hard work - especially the painstaking analysis of the ice cores back in the lab - but only a certain kind of scientist chooses to spend weeks on an isolated...
...which is a period of panting indulgence doing whatever he pleases and to whomever. Dad Suddhodana, who would rather Siddhartha become an earthly king, manufactures this hedonism, hoping to shield his son from the world's anguish and thereby stanch any desire of Siddhartha to redeem it. A pleasure dome he decrees, turning the top floor of his palace into a lurid seraglio and confining Siddhartha there, "ensnared by women skilled in erotic arts/ who were tireless in providing sexual delights." The teenage St. Augustine would have been jealous...
...Shaffer died of cancer before publication, leaving Barrows, her niece, to see the book through to completion--a bittersweet ending in keeping with the dark shadows that gather in the corners of this otherwise lightsome book. It is, in the words of Lamb's friend Coleridge, a sunny pleasure dome, with caves...