Kurt Vonnegut and Ice Nine

I was very sorry recently to hear about the passing of Kurt Vonnegut at the age of 84. Sometimes it seemed that he would live forever. I named this blog Ice Nine as it's my ninth deployment to Antarctica, and also because I read his book Cat's Cradle years ago, and the concept of Ice Nine was and is intriguing. Ice Nine is a form of water with a different structure than regular water. It is frozen solid at room temperature. Further, when it comes into contact with regular water, it causes the water to freeze into more Ice Nine. Given that 4/5ths of the earth's surface is covered by ocean, and that our bodies are mostly made of water, you can probably deduce that keeping the Ice Nine in a thermos where it can't come into contact with other water is an important plot element.