Vivid Sydney

    Vivid Sydney is an annual event held at many places in the city of Sydney from May 22 to June 8. It features many light, music and ideas events.
    My family went to Sydney on Monday, May 25, and we did a short walk around The Rocks and Circular Quay. Most of the events start at exactly 6.00 pm.

    During Vivid Sydney, many artworks are displayed, lit up by neon lights, LEDs, and glowing fibres, accompanied by the amazing light shows projected onto the southern pylon of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Customs House, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Argyle Cut, and the sails of the Sydney Opera House.
    Me and my family walked from the Tree Of Light, which is a tree lit up by a huge number of LEDs, to Enchanted Sydney, a projection of images shown on the side of one of Sydney's buildings. Along with all of the artworks, LEDs light up buildings in the skyline, and ships in the harbour.

    One of the first artworks on the trail was Jigsaw. It looks like a group of flashing and fading jigsaw-shaped tiles...from a distance. When the viewer steps closer, he or she may see patterns and details that are not visible from farther away. Jigsaw was built at the quayside, close to the Harbour Bridge.
    During the walk around the artworks, I noticed that the events have changed since 2014. For example, 'A Light Year Ahead' was described as "a space odyssey" last year. Now it appears as a mix of bubbles and strange shapes. Nevertheless, it is a stunning artwork, a cube made of one open side, three screens, and a mirrored floor and ceiling, creating an amazing display.

    Argyle Cut is a huge sandstone tunnel in The Rocks, Sydney. It has a very wide ceiling and during May 22-June 8, 7.00PM-Midnight, The ceiling is used as a projection surface for videos filmed for BBC Earth's Life Story, a six-part series about nature narrated by David Attenborough.



    Two of my favourite Vivid Light events were Enchanted Sydney, projected on the Sydney Customs House, and Mechanised Colour Assemblage, projected on the MCA. They both feature a huge variety of colours, shapes and sounds that blend together to form captivating scenes. The images fit into the structure and architecture of the two buildings, making them look real and three-dimensional. If you want to see one of these light shows yourself, you could search 'Enchanted Sydney Vivid Sydney' or 'Mechanised Colour Assemblage Vivid Sydney' on YouTube, or if you live around, I suggest going to Vivid Sydney. It is really worth having to get through those crowds!

Everest, part II

This article is based on the article "Everest" which was written earlier this month.

From the first ascent of Everest, the numbers of people climbing the mountain quickly increased. Only a decade after the first ascent, an expedition was led up Everest via the incredibly dangerous west ridge route. When forty people made it to the top in one day, a controversy began. Soon enough, the Nepali government closed Everest to all but four expeditions, for only one year. During that year, all the climbers climbed up the north side of Everest, which was thought to be more dangerous. The Nepali government let more groups up Everest, and the next year on Everest was busier than ever.

Even with an increasing amount of people climbing Everest, there have been several controversies since. The root of the first and longest-running controversy was a storm in 1996. Sixteen expeditions were getting ready to climb Everest from the south side that year. Guided expeditions were competing with each other, trying to get the most clients possible to the top of the world.

Three expeditions were on high camp on the night of May 9. There was a noncommercial Taiwanese expedition, and two guided expeditions. The Sherpas were slow stringing fixed lines up the southeast ridge, and it took hours to fix lines to the top of the Hillary Step, a step of rock half an hour below the summit.
The earliest climbers reached the summit by 1:00, which would normally have been a safe turnaround time. The bulk of the climbers summited around 2:00, but people kept on arriving at the summit until 4:00.

Very few people were back in their tents at high camp by the time the storm struck. It came from the south, and was the remnants of a typhoon in the bay of Bengal. It came very quickly, and swept in from below.

A group of people arrived at the flats of the South Col, where the high camp was, but they could not see the tents and quickly got lost. Amazingly strong wind ripped across the South Col, countering the lost climbers, who had just found out where camp was, in the direction of the wind. Wind chill was minus 100 that night. Soon the group collapsed behind a boulder, unable to go further. Two people in the group succumbed to frostbite, one of which died, and one of which was left for dead.

Meanwhile, at the Hillary Step, three climbers were in a desperate struggle for their lives. The climbers included Rob Hall, the leader of a commercial expedition. Two other climbers died of unknown reasons. Rob Hall stayed alive, in the storm, for twenty-four hours before dying of frostbite. Below, at a place called the Balcony, the two other expedition leaders were dying of frostbite. The noncommercial expedition leader, Makalu Gau, was rescued later but lost all of his fingers and toes.

After the disaster, the press tried to blame people for the disaster. The press tried to blame Rob Hall, who had not reinforced the turnaround time at the day, Doug Hansen, a climber crazy with summit fever, who died with Hall, and Anatoli Boukreev, a Russian guide who climbed Everest without supplemental oxygen, and descended far ahead of his teammates. The press did not realize many important things, like how the lack of oxygen must have acted on people's minds that day. Boukreev also spearheaded a rescue attempt for the lost climbers on the South Col, which he could not have done without rest.

There have been several controversies since. The most famous of them circled around the death of David Sharp. Sharp climbed the mountain alone, without Sherpa support. What exactly happened was unknown, but some hours after Sharp began his push for the summit, a group of climbers walked by a climber that was dying of frostbite just below the summit. The group of climbers did not stop to rescue him, as they simply thought he was a member of a commercial expedition that had already made the fateful decision to abandon him.

After more than fifty climbers had passed the dying climber, very few people tried to help him, and many of these people were from noncommercial expeditions. Gradually, the climber's legs curled from frostbite, and he died. Only later did anyone find out he was climbing alone.

A little later in the season, at 26 May, Australian climber was found alive after being declared dead the day before. These people sacrificed their own summit attempt to rescue Hall, and he later made a full recovery. This shows that people attempting the summit should value other's lives over their summit.

Where are all these places?

This is a brief overview of the Southeast Ridge Route of Everest:

Base camp is at the head of a valley which reaches deep into the Everest massif. Climbers fly to the base of the valley and trek for ten days to the foot of Everest.

The first obstacle out of base camp is the Khumbu Icefall. This part of the glacier, sometimes named "suicide popcorn ball" because of the maze of shifting seracs, is the most deadly part of the mountain. Camp I is just above the Icefall.

Above the icefall is the Western Cwm, or valley, which is called the "valley of silence". Camp II, or advanced base camp, is a very safe, provisioned camp. Above the camp is the Lhotse Face, which is the subject of frequent avalanches. Halfway up the face is the steep, barren Camp III. At the top is the South Col, a rocky, windy area of flat ground. Climbers normally begin their summit push from here, but Edmund Hillary set up another camp, at the Balcony, which is three hours above the South Col.

Both camps are in the Death Zone, an area above 8,000 meters above sea level. The Death Zone is an area most people need bottled oxygen for. At 28,000 feet is a mound of snow called the South Summit. At 28,500 feet is the final challenge, a step of black rock known as the Hillary Step. From there, it is relatively easy walking to the summit. Most climbers are exhausted by the trip to the summit, and use every drop of energy on the way down.

A job to be done

Jobs are the force which drives the entire economy (Actually, it's more directly money, but jobs are more interesting and an article about money is likely to be one-sided). It is one of the most efficient ways of managing the system, for everybody gets to work on what they want and live where they want (to a point, of course!) and not everybody is working to make rich guys even richer than they already are.

Besides, if you work hard enough, you are likely to get your dream job. And just remember that, even in the capitalist system, money is not happiness. My father worked hard to get a job as a scientist, despite science not being an industry with a lot of money in it. He is now a physicist, and should be much less happy if he worked as, say, a doctor, despite the amount of work it took to be a physicist.

You know about the DiSC charts that are used to determine four types of people? The assessment was first used by psychologist W. M. Marston.  The borderlines: if the subject perceived oneself as more or less powerful than their environment, and if the subject perceived the environment as favorable or not. There are four possible combinations:

 

Dominance

Perceives oneself as more powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as unfavorable.

 

Submission

Perceives oneself as less powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as unfavorable.

 

Inducement

Perceives oneself as more powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as favorable.

 

Compliance

Perceives oneself as less powerful than the environment, and perceives the environment as favorable.

 

I think the DISC assessment, as well as helping people work together as it is commonly used for, could also be used for determining which kind of jobs people could be good at. "C" people, like my brother, see small details and that could be useful for a science job. "I" people are the most common type, and there are many different kinds of "I" people. A high amount of "S" people are working class and don't exactly have a dream job. I am a "D" person and I want to be a tour guide when I grow up. All of these personality types have their pros and cons, and everybody has a little of each personality.

Every person has a job unless they are young, old, or in big trouble. Since I will be doing a job for a long time, around forty years, I need to choose a job I like. And if I choose wisely, I won't even have to work very much; their job will be my happiness.

Diversity

Small-scale diversity

Since my former house was in the forest ("bush"), I loved to go walking around in the forest. The forest around my old house is a place of contrast, where the dry ridge-tops are bisected by lush gullies choked with tree ferns, where a forest of palm trees borders a rocky creek. The patch of forest was a limited size, for there were more houses on top of the ridge. The access road to these houses also had houses. To the south and west, however, there is a corridor of forest leading directly into the national park, and animals travel along this corridor; I have seen wallabies, lyrebirds, and even an echidna from the front deck of the house.

Australia has more diversification than many other places because of its harshness. The droughts and floods, and the hot summers, force plants to specialize. Some plants grow well in soils rich with nickel, and some go for the damp soils rich in iron. Once a plant evolved in one patch of forest, it would spread to places like the grove it first originated in. As a result, some plants, like the common bracken, would spread to many places because it first evolved in a more typical kind of soil. However, some plants like the Wollemi pine would stay in one place because the type of forest they grow in is very special and rare, like the pine itself.

In any case, I have recorded about twenty forest types around the house, all of which are very different.

Medium-scale diversity 

While I was still living in the Central Coast, I took a visit to Kuring-gai Chase National Park. It protected an area on the other side of the river from where I lived. I thought it would be much the same type of forest that was present on my side of the river; scrub-choked ridge-tops mixed with incredibly steep, forested slopes ending in small estuaries, the entire thing being rich in sandstone rock formations. However, it was entirely different; the ridges were very flat and open, with relatively few hills. There were soft, leaf-covered trails. The ridge-tops tapered off abruptly with steep hillsides clogged with vegetation.

This change might have had something to do with the type of rock on each side. It is all Hawkesbury sandstone, but the bedrock on the south side of the river might be lower down, deeper in the soil.

Large-scale diversity

Maps have been made of the world biodiversity. On the map I most recently looked at, India, Indonesia, and northern South America were all bright red. Diversity decreased to the north and south, with some exceptions, including eastern Australia, which was still yellow at 35 degrees south. Europe looked about as barren as the Canadian tundra, possibly because of all the development. The land around the mountains was surprisingly rich, whereas the mountains themselves were barren.

Everest

In India, 1847, the British were making a long survey of India. One of its objectives was to find the height of the highest mountain on Earth.

This mountain was then thought to be Kanchenjunga, a 28,169-foot peak in the forbidden kingdom of Nepal. The survey, however, included a peak behind it which was named "Peak B". Efforts were made to measure this distant peak, but were thwarted by clouds. In 1849, however, the British were back at the border of Nepal, measuring peak "B". Observations were made from five different locations, and the estimated height was 30,200 feet. This survey did not consider light refraction. However, the survey showed that the peak was higher than Kanchenjunga, a significant step forward. Then the surveyor contracted malaria.

The next surveyor who came to the area named the mountains after roman numerals, and renamed peak "B" and called it "Peak IV". From there, a Bengali surveyor found out that Peak IV was the highest in the world. Andrew Waugh, the surveyor general of India, took charge of measuring the peak himself. After checking and re-checking the results, Peak IV was found to be 29,000 feet high. To make sure the public would not think this was an estimate, the peak was publicly announced as 29,002 feet high, and Andrew Waugh was the first person to put "two feet" on top of the peak. Since the surveyor could not find a local name, he named it after the surveyor George Everest.


Since the peak was sandwiched between Nepal and Tibet, both countries closed to foreigners, nobody attempted to summit Everest for over half a century.

Early climbs

A 1921 climb led by the British climber George Mallory ascended to a flat plain called the North Col, at 7,005 meters. From there, Mallory saw a route to the top. But the party was exploratory only and they descended. The expedition was special because the climbers had found a route to the top, the North Col and northeast ridge route.

The British returned again next year. George Finch departed from high camp and climbed at an amazing rate and climbed with oxygen to the amazing altitude of 8,320 meters before turning back. It was the first time a human had climbed over the 8,000 meter line into the so-called "death zone", a place climbers thought nobody was able to get into. George Mallory climbed with Felix Norton to the North Col, but there was an avalanche on the journey back.

In 1924, an expedition led by Mallory was aborted by weather. Norton and Somervell climbed to 8,550 meters, but had to turn back because they were tired. The last effort of the year was Mallory and the young climber Andrew Irvine.

 The two departed from high camp at an unknown time, because nobody else was with them. Climbing partner Odell was at advanced base camp on the day of the expedition when he observed a blanket of mist lift and saw two black dots at the foot of what he thought was the Second Step, a 30 meter wall of rock on the summit ridge, at 12:30 PM. One of the black dots moved up the Second Step and got to the top in just five minutes, a pace not matched since. The clouds moved back and Odell's view was blocked.

Mallory never returned, and his body was found in 1999 below the First Step. Nobody knows, to this day, whether he made it to the summit or not. There are many things in Odell's sighting that are very strange, such as the fast ascent of the Second Step and the time, which meant the climbers were five hours late. There is increasing evidence that what Odell saw were just birds; this mistake has been repeated since.

After the disaster, the Dalai Lama closed Tibet to Everest climbers, so it was nine years until the next expedition, which was closed to bad weather. In 1933, a formation of airplanes flew over Everest in an attempt to deploy the British flag at the top. A 1936 expedition also failed. By this time, nobody thought anybody was ever going to try for the top again, that it was impossible for anyone to climb to the top of the world.

Very soon afterward, World War II began and the Brits were too busy fighting to climb Mount Everest. As expeditions rallied for the summit after the war, the Chinese made a sudden invasion of Tibet. In 1950, Tibet closed, but a year before that, Nepal had opened. So it came that in 1950 an exploratory expedition marched right up to what is now Everest base camp. In 1952, a Swiss expedition blazed a route from the base camp through the Khumbu Icefall, a maze of unstable seracs, and up the Lhotse Face to the South Col. Raymond Lambert and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay climbed to a height of 8,595 meters, setting a new climbing record.

In 1953, the ninth British expedition on the mountain made two attempts to climb Everest. The first climbing pair came within 100 meters (the height of the hill behind my house!) from reaching the summit before running into oxygen problems. The next, successful, attempt was made by (you guessed it!) Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay on the 29th of May 1953.

Since then, climbing on Mount Everest has become more popular. Below is what happened on the years following the ascent of Hillary:

1954: Nothing
1955: Nothing
1956: Two climbers summited
1957: Two climbers summited
1958: Nothing
1959: Nothing
1960: Nothing
1961: Nothing
1962: Nothing
1963: Four climbers summited
1964: Nothing
1965: Six climbers summited
1966: Nothing
1967: Nothing
1968: Nothing
1969: Nothing
1970: Two climbers summited
1971: Nothing
1972: Nothing
1973: Six climbers summited
1974: Nothing
1975: Twelve summited, includes first woman
1976: Two summit
1977: Nothing
1978: 20 summit, two without supplemental oxygen
1979: 14 summit
1980: 10 summit, 2 in winter, 1 solo
1981: 6 summit
1982: 14 summit
1983: 18 summit
1984: 12 summit
1985: 24 summit
1986: 2 summit
1987: 1 summits
1988: 35 summit, 1st woman without supplemental oxygen, 1st descent by paraglider
1989: 20 summit
1990: 75 summit
1991: 30 summit
1992: 85 summit
1993: 120 summit
1994: 40 summit
1995: 80 summit
1996: 90 summit, 8 of which die afterward in 1996 Everest storm
1997: 85 summit
1998: 115 summit
1999: 110 summit
2000: 130 summit
2001: 190 summit
2002: 170 summit
2003: 280 summit
2004: 325 summit
2005: 305 summit
2006: 500 summit
2007: 625 summit
2008: 420 summit
2009: 450 summit
2010: 520 summit