Experts' Expert: Which iPod should you take when you climb Mount Everest?

There's a question I bet doesn't keep you up nights, what?

The envelope, please: The iPod Shuffle.

How do I know this to be so?

Because it's buried deep within Noam Cohen's interesting June 18, 2007 New York Times article about what happens when state-of-the-art technology intersects with the world's highest peak.

The relevant paragraphs:

The main information-technology specialist on the team, Mark Kahrl, rattled off the technological challenges of managing a Web site from the Himalayas.

"Hardware doesn’t work well in this environment," Mr. Kahrl said from the base camp. Hard drives, for example, fail because of the thin air, although "we’ve only gone through three." Knowing this, the team brought extras, and made sure to take iPod Shuffles, which use a memory system that is not affected by the altitude, he said.

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I suspect the climbers chose the Shuffle over the similarly Flash-based Nano because there's less that can go wrong — i.e., no screen to crack or pop out.