Echoes of The Past - Netflix Series

Echoes of The Past | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Very engaging story about rich folks telling lies, hiding the truth about a fatal scuba diving accident. The patriarch convinces the dead girl's brother to plead guilty to manslaughter, telling him he'll only serve one year in prison. Something goes sideways, it's never explained why, and he is sent to prison for 15 years. Now he is out and he is looking for revenge, so we get to go digging through everyone's vague and distorted memories of what happened. Everyone is a suspect, but confusion is your only real clue.

Seems that the scuba diving accident should not have been fatal, the girl wasn't that deep, maybe 15 or 20 feet down, and her air hose sprung a leak. Seems like she should have been able to easily surface, but then who knows what actually happened. I mean, scuba diving is inherently risky, so maybe she got a mouthful of water and choked. Who knows? 

There are a number of fight scenes including a confusing one in a hotel hallway with the fire sprinklers going off and all the other guests trying to evacuate their rooms while our two guys try to take out the hired killer.

The finale is perfectly tragic - three of the principles, two of whom were suspect, but none of whom were guilty, all kill each other and the girl who caused all this trouble finally realizes what she has done.

Dept. Q - Netflix Series

Dept. Q | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix

Another squad of misfits set up to look into old cases, much like Graveyard, except this one is in set in Scotland, not Turkey. Funny how both groups get office space in a creepy old basement, full of old stuff that no one cares about.

The show gets off to a horrific start when our hero, Morck, and his partner visit a crime scene and are ambushed by a gunman, who kills the patrolman, and seriously wounds Morck and his partner before escaping. Morck hates everybody in the cop shop and everybody hates him, he's basically an asshole.

Meanwhile, in the courtroom, Moira, the prosecutor, is trying to convict Graham Finch of killing his wife by pushing her down the stairs. Except it wasn't meanwhile, it was four years ago. Moira disappeared shortly thereafter.

Merritt Lingard is the boss of the cop shop. I was confused at first because I thought Moira and Merritt were the same person. I thought they looked alike, my wife doesn't understand how I could not tell them apart.

Akram is the first person to join Morck's team. He is devout Muslim would used to do police work in Syria, whatever that means. Like all good immigrants he is willing to do all the scut work without complaining.

The missing Moira becomes the first cold case for our brand new Department Q to investigate.

The show has the usual Netflix complement of folks from the fringes: guy with mental problems, smart gal stifled in tedious administrative busy work, brown immigrant who works hard, a cripple, and I'm pretty sure there are several gays. None of that matters because the main story is intriguing. They keep giving the audience clues. How the devil is this group of misfit toys going to figure this out?

Edinburgh International Climbing Arena. Edinburgh, Scotland

There are a couple of unusual sets. One is large rock climbing gym. 

Hyperbaric Diving Chamber Interior

The other is a diving chamber like the ones used by deep sea divers working for extended periods deep underwater.

P. S. Nina Metz of the Chicago Tribune wrote a review of this same show and it showed up in Sunday's Oregonian.

School of Fish

Giant Schools of Fish
360 Nomads

I'm reading A Flash of Green by John D. McDonald. The story is set in small town on the coast of Florida. On page 121 I run into this passage. This book  was written in 1962 and we've got a couple of grown men talking, so this event probably happened in the 1930s.

"I must have been about eight years old. It was a Sunday in May. There was a school of mullet in there like nobody has ever seen since. I'd say they were schooled up six miles long, a mile wide and ten feet deep."

"Say, I remember that! God damn! We gigged all day long until our arms like to fell off."

"Everybody did. Half the town was out there."

"And the fish house price fell off to two cents, finally, and then they wouldn't buy at all because they had no room. I remember we run a truck down to Naples, but it was a hot day and we had no ice, and the man down there didn't like the look in their eye by then. So we dumped 'em damn near the center of town and took off fast."

"The whole town here stank for a week. That was the last big school, the last one on this coast, Elmo."

 

Torpedos

Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo

Defence Blog tells us that Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon's number one weapons supplier,

. . . was awarded $16,8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract in support of the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo efforts.

I like the "cost-plus-incentive-fee" bit. How fast can we pour money down the drain?

But it does get me thinking about torpedos. The Wikipedia article about the Mark 48 tells us:

The swashplate piston engine is fueled by Otto fuel II, a monopropellant which combusts to drive the engine.

Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.

Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.

Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]

Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.

Now I am reminded of the search for the missing flight 370 airliner in the Indian Ocean.

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.

There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.

Straits of Tiran

Ship passing through the Straits of Tiran - Amr Abdallah Dalsh/Al Reuters

Aljazeera tells us that the UN is withdrawing their peacekeeping force from the Straits of Tiran and installing cameras to keep an eye on things, so maybe things have calmed down here. But just where are the Straits of Tiran? So off to Google Maps we go.

Gulf of Aqaba

The Straits of Tiran are at the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba where it joins the Red Sea. It's not a vital shipping lane, unless you are Israel or Jordan who both have ports at the northern end of the Gulf. Jordan has a large oil terminal there, which might be where the ship in the first photo is coming from.

I was surprised by Jordan's presence there. I shouldn't have been, Jordan forms Israel's entire eastern border except the most northern portion, but you never hear anything about Jordan, it's like it doesn't exist.

Straits of Tiran, Tiran and Sanafir Islands

The Straits of Tiran are narrow, only about two miles wide and there are reefs in the middle. The islands look pretty desolate, but on the western (Egyptian) shore we have a bunch of resorts.

Party at Jackson Reef
Island in the background is the same one as in the first photo

I am looking at some street view images hoping to find a view of the pier that is in the first photo on this post, and this pops up. At first glance it looks like a typical drunken boat party, but if you take in the whole 360 degree view you see that the boats are almost entirely empty.

Divers at Jackson Reef

Turns out they are dive boats for tourists from the resorts and all the people are underwater. The sea life on the reefs is pretty spectacular.

Piers

I wasn't able to locate the pier on Google Maps until I realized that there were lines crossing a large green area adjacent to the shore and I realized that it was shallow water, not land, and those lines were light duty piers suitable for people to walk on, not for freight.

P.S. I thought I had looked at this part of the world once before but I couldn't remember why. Then I clicked on the place mark on the resort and all was revealed. The Super Tucanos stopped there on their round the world delivery flight.

San Juan de Pasajes

Bayou Renaissance Man has a good post up about 16th century Basque sailors. Seems their beverage of choice was hard apple cider. The advantage it had over rum, which is what the British used, was you didn't need to add Vitamin-C, apple cider already has Vitamin-C. The Brits, you will recall, used limes.

A diver inspects the San Juan wreck, connected to a hose supplying hot water to endure in the cold water of Red Bay.
I'd never heard of piping in hot water to keep a diver warm. Makes sense though.

Back in 1978, the wreck of the 16th century San Juan de Pasajes was found off the coast of Canada and they started an archaeological exploration of the site. The wreck was in such good shape it inspired some people in Pasaia, Spain to build a replica.

Laying out the template for an angle piece on a natural fork

Lower section of the hull

Pasaia and Irun, Spain

I'm looking at a map of this place, and I think 'wait a minute', we've been here before. Yes, with Captain Coignet and the Storks. Irun is Captain Coignet's town. Both Irun and Pasaia are on the north coast of Spain very near the border with France.

Disneyland for Divers

World’s deepest pool with a ‘sunken city’ opens in Dubai
South China Morning Post

Dubai is has got to be the strangest city in the world. Tiny, rich, popular with tourists in spite of being a freaking steam bath in the summertime. (Okay, it's probably very nice the rest of the year.) It's in the mideast but only gets a small fraction of their income from oil and gas. It's been run by the same family for pert near 200 years. 

Dubai has appeared here before. Also here. And don't forget about Abu Dhabi which is just down the road a bit.

Raise the Kursk

Raising the Kursk - SMIT Salvage
I am amazed. This video is a little longer than the ones I usually post, but it's Sunday, so I had the time to spend watching it. This size and complexity of this project is like something out of an epic science fiction thriller. It must have cost a pretty penny. I wouldn't be surprised if it cost $100 million (I wasn't far off. The salvage operation cost $65 million). I do remember hearing about the Kursk disaster, but I don't really remember hearing anything about raising it. I did a post that mentioned the disaster.

P.S. Using Blogger's search function for Kursk doesn't find the relevant post. Even with the post pulled up, the browser's search function (Ctrl-F) can't find it either because it's in an embedded spreadsheet. However, if you click on the spreadsheet, then the browser can find it. Not much help at this point, I just wanted to point out the limitations of these programs.

Underwater

Kathy & her underwater camera

Iaman reports: Kathy the scuba photographer cleans underwater camera equipment in kitchen. $ & heavy, it has unshown flotation modules.

Alacranes Reef

Alacranes Reef Trip - Robbie Gomez
Music - Tamacún by Rodrigo Y Gabriela
My friend Ned is down in Mexico, off the coast of Yucatan. They're running the Bolder Won out to Alacranes Reef for fly fishermen and scuba divers.

Alacranes Reef, also known as Scorpion Reef

The reef is a protected area, so designated in 1971 by a convention in Ramsar, Iran. (Iran? That hotbed of mad muslim bombers? Well, 1971 was before the revolution.)
    Up until now I thought the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico were synonymous. They aren't. The Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba separate the two. The Caribbean Sea is to the south and east and the Gulf of Mexico is to the north and west.
    There are several other places of interest that could be marked on this map, like the Dry Tortugas, which are about as far west of Key West as Alacranes Reef is north of the Mexican coast. Then there is Treasure Island, site of the pig farm (it's the pinky-nail sized island south by southwest of Havana with the city of Nueva Gerona).

Pic of the Day

Panama City, Florida, February 13, 2014. Students and instructors in the 40-foot-deep pool at Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center. Photo by Michael Scichilone.

The Ocean Corporation

Iowa Andy forwarded me an email from this outfit. Seems my nephew is contemplating becoming a commercial diver. The Ocean Corporation offers courses in diving and non-destructive testing. A few bits in that email stuck out:

Oil and Gas Pipelines in the Lower 48 States

Active Gulf of Mexico Offshore Oil & Gas Platforms

90% of commercial diving hours are billed in the Gulf of Mexico. In the United States alone, there are over

• 190,000 miles of pipelines
• 597,961 Bridges
• 149 Oil Refineries
• 104 Nuclear Power Plants
• 300,000 commercial and military aircraft.

January 2018 cleaned up some ugly html.

Russell Brand and the GQ awards: 'It's amazing how absurd it seems'

Comrade Misfit got me started wandering around and I ended up at The Guardian reading this pretty amazing piece by Russell Brand, who is some kind of comedian or something.

I have had the privilege of scuba diving. I did it once on holiday, and I'm aware that it's one of those subjects that people can get pretty boring and sincere about, and sincerity, for we British, is no state in which to dwell, so I'll be brief. The scuba dive itself was numenistic enough, a drenched heaven; coastal shelves and their staggering, sub-aquatic architecture, like spilt cathedrals, gormless, ghostly fish gliding by like Jackson Pollock's pets. Silent miracles. What got me, though, was when I came up for air, at the end. As my head came above water after even a paltry 15 minutes in Davy Jones's Locker, there was something absurd about the surface. How we, the creatures of the land, live our lives, obliviously trundling, flat feet slapping against the dust.

It must have been a while since I've attended a fancy, glitzy event, because as soon as I got to the GQ awards I felt like something was up. The usual visual grammar was in place – a carpet in the street, people in paddocks awaiting a brush with something glamorous, blokes with earpieces, birds in frocks of colliding colours that if sighted in nature would indicate the presence of poison. I'm not trying to pass myself off as some kind of Francis of Assisi, Yusuf Islam, man of the people, but I just wasn't feeling it. I ambled into the Opera House across yet more outdoor carpets, boards bearing branding, in this case Hugo Boss, past paparazzi, and began to queue up at the line of journalists and presenters, in a slightly nicer paddock who offer up mics and say stuff like:

"Who are you wearing?"

"I'm not wearing anyone. I went with clobber, I'm not Buffalo Bill."

Noel Gallagher was immediately ahead of me in the press line and he's actually a mate. I mean, I love him: sometimes I forget he wrote Supersonic and played to 400,000 people at Knebworth because he's such a laugh. He laid right into me, the usual gear: "What the fook you wearing? Does Rod Stewart know you're going through his jumble?" I try to remain composed and give as good as I get, even though the paddock-side banter is accompanied by looming foam-tipped eavesdroppers, hanging like insidious mistletoe.

In case you don't know, these parties aren't like real parties. It's fabricated fun, imposed from the outside. A vision of what squares imagine cool people might do set on a spaceship. Or in Moloko. As we come out of the lift there's a bloody great long corridor flanked by gorgeous birds in black dresses, paid to be there, motionless, left hand on hip, teeth tacked to lips with scarlet glue. The intention, I suppose, is to contrive some Ian Fleming super-uterus of well fit mannequins to midwife you into the shindig, but me and my mate Matt just felt self-conscious, jigging through Robert Palmer's oestrogen passage like aspirational Morris dancers. Matt stared at their necks and I made small talk as I hot stepped towards the pre-show drinks. Now, I'm not typically immune to the allure of objectified women, but I am presently beleaguered by a nerdish, whirling dervish, and am eschewing all others. Perhaps the clarity of this elation has awakened me. A friend of mine said: "Being in love is like discovering a concealed ballroom in a house you've long inhabited." I also don't drink, so these affairs where most people rinse away their Britishness and twitishness with booze are for me a face-first log flume of backslaps, chitchat, eyewash and gak.

After a load of photos and what-not, we descend the world's longest escalator, which are called that even as they de-escalate, and in we go to the main forum, a high ceilinged hall, full of circular cloth-draped, numbered tables, a stage at the front, the letters GQ, 12-foot high in neon at the back; this aside, though, neon forever the moniker of trash, this is a posh do, in an opera house full of folk in tuxes.

Everywhere you look there's someone off the telly; Stephen Fry, Pharrell, Sir Bobby Charlton, Samuel L Jackson, Rio Ferdinand, Justin Timberlake, foreign secretary William Hague and mayor of London Boris Johnson. My table is a sanctuary of sorts; Noel and his missus Sara, John Bishop and his wife Mel, my mates Matt Morgan, Mick and Gee. Noel and I are both there to get awards and decide to use our speeches to dig each other out. This makes me feel a little grounded in the unreal glare, normal.

Noel's award is for being an "icon" and mine for being an "oracle". My knowledge of the classics is limited, but includes awareness that an oracle is a spiritual medium through whom prophecies from the gods were sought in ancient Greece. Thankfully, I have a sense of humour that prevents me from taking accolades of that nature on face value, or I'd've been in the tricky position of receiving the GQ award for being "best portal to a mystical dimension", which is a lot of pressure. Me, Matt and Noel conclude it's probably best to treat the whole event as a bit of a laugh and, as if to confirm this as the correct attitude, Boris Johnson – a man perpetually in pajamas regardless of what he's wearing – bounds to the stage to accept the award for "best politician". Yes, we agree: this is definitely a joke.

Boris, it seems, is taking it in this spirit, joshing beneath his ever-redeeming barnet that Labour's opposition to military action in Syria is a fey stance that he, as GQ politician of the year, would never be guilty of.

Matt is momentarily focused. "He's making light of gassed Syrian children," he says. We watch, slightly aghast, then return to goading Noel.

Before long, John Bishop is on stage giving me a lovely introduction, so I get up as Noel hurls down a few gauntlets, daring me to "do my worst".

I thanked John, said the "oracle award" sounds like a made-up prize you'd give a fat kid on sports day – I should know, I used to get them – then that it's barmy that Hugo Boss can trade under the same name they flogged uniforms to the Nazis under and the ludicrous necessity for an event such as this one to banish such a lurid piece of information from our collective consciousness.

I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect, it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ, and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control, and won't tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool: comedy.

The jokes about Hugo Boss were not intended to herald a campaign to destroy them. They're not Monsanto or Halliburton, the contemporary corporate allies of modern-day fascism; they are, I thought, an irrelevant menswear supplier with a double-dodgy history. The evening, though, provided an interesting opportunity to see how power structures preserve their agenda, even in a chintzy microcosm.

Subsequent to my jokes, the evening took a peculiar turn. Like the illusion of sophistication had been inadvertently disrupted by the exposure. It had the vibe of a wedding dinner where the best man's speech had revealed the groom's infidelity. With Hitler.

Foreign secretary William Hague gave an award to former Telegraph editor Charles Moore, for writing a hagiography of Margaret Thatcher, who used his acceptance speech to build a precarious connection between my comments about the sponsors, my foolish answerphone scandal at the BBC and the Sachs family's flight, 70 years earlier, from Nazi-occupied Europe. It was a confusing tapestry that Moore spun but he seemed to be saying that a) the calls were as bad as the Holocaust and b) the Sachs family may not've sought refuge in Britain had they known what awaited them. Even for a man whose former job was editing the Telegraph this is an extraordinary way to manipulate information.

Noel, who is not one to sit quietly on his feelings, literally booed while Charles Moore was talking, and others joined in. Booing! When do you hear booing in this day and age other than pantomimes and parliament? Hague and Johnson are equally at home in either (Widow Twanky and Buttons, obviously) so were not unduly ruffled, but I thought it was nuts. The room by now had a distinct feel of "us and them" and if there is a line drawn in the sand I don't ever want to find myself on the same side as Hague and Johnson. Up went Noel to garner his gong and he did not disappoint: "Always nice to be invited to the Tory party conference," he began, "Good to see the foreign secretary present when there's shit kicking off in Syria."

Noel once expressed his disgust at seeing a politician at Glastonbury. "What are you doing here? This ain't for you," he'd said. He explained to me: "You used to know where you were with politicians in the 70s and 80s cos they all looked like nutters: Thatcher, Heseltine, Cyril Smith. Now they look normal, they're more dangerous." Then, with dreadful foreboding: "They move among us." I agree with Noel. What are politicians doing at Glastonbury and the GQ awards? I feel guilty going, and I'm a comedian. Why are public officials, paid by us, turning up at events for fashion magazines? Well, the reason I was there was because I have a tour on and I was advised it would be good publicity. What are the politicians selling? How are they managing our perception of them with their attendance of these sequin-encrusted corporate balls?

We witness that there is a relationship between government, media and industry that is evident even at this most spurious and superficial level. These three institutions support one another. We know that however cool a media outlet may purport to be, their primary loyalty is to their corporate backers. We know also that you cannot criticise the corporate backers openly without censorship and subsequent manipulation of this information.

Now I'm aware that this was really no big deal; I'm not saying I'm an estuary Che Guevara. It was a daft joke by a daft comic at a daft event. It makes me wonder, though, how the relationships and power dynamics I witnessed on this relatively inconsequential context are replicated on a more significant scale.

For example, if you can't criticise Hugo Boss at the GQ awards because they own the event, do you think it is significant that energy companies donate to the Tory party? Will that affect government policy? Will the relationships that "politician of the year" Boris Johnson has with City bankers – he took many more meetings with them than public servants in his first term as mayor – influence the way he runs our capital?

Is it any wonder that Amazon, Vodafone and Starbucks avoid paying tax when they enjoy such cosy relationships with members of our government?

Ought we be concerned that our rights to protest are being continually eroded under the guise of enhancing our safety? Is there a relationship between proposed fracking in the UK, new laws that prohibit protest and the relationships between energy companies and our government?

I don't know. I do have some good principles picked up that night that are generally applicable: the glamour and the glitz isn't real, the party isn't real, you have a much better time mucking around trying to make your mates laugh. I suppose that's obvious. We all know it, we already know all the important stuff, like: don't trust politicians, don't trust big business and don't trust the media. Trust your own heart and each another. When you take a breath and look away from the spectacle it's amazing how absurd it seems when you look back.

Heckler & Koch P11

Heckler & Koch P11 

What we have here is a gun for frogmen. It uses electrical ignition to fire the projectiles. My first thought was "what? Does it shoot rockets?", because model rockets use electrical ignition, and the answer is, yes it does. Bullets don't work very well underwater (Mythbusters episode #44). My next thought was "electric ignition in a device you use underwater", what are you crazy? I would think the good old fashioned mechanical firing mechanism like the ones used in conventional firearms would be more reliable. It would not be subject to failure because the electrics got wet and shorted out. Then I looked at it again. I was thinking it was a revolver, but now I see that it is injection molded plastic, there is no revolving going on here. Now I begin to understand. Making a gun with a mechanical firing mechanism means precise machining of small metal parts. With the advent of CNC (Computerized Numerical Control) machine tools, the price of machining has come down, but it is still more expensive than injection molding plastic. Plus metal parts corrode in sea water. Oh, you can mitigate corrosion with various coatings, but you are still going to need regular cleaning. A sealed plastic blob can survive for years underwater without any care.      The last bit that caught my attention was that you have to send the "cylinder" back to the factory for reloading. My immediate reaction was "unbelievable". Then I looked at the gun again, and thought about it for a bit, and realized that reloading was probably some kind of bullet point on a government requirements checklist. There's not going to be any reloading. This thing is disposable. Use it once and throw it away, or just drop it since you are underwater. It will never be seen again.
    I wonder how many frogman versus frogman fights there have been in real life. I know they are a staple of James Bond and diving movies, but has there ever been an instance of a real underwater fight? I mean diving underwater is kind of like going into outer space, you are taking your life in your hands just doing it.
   Here's another picture of the gun being used by my other virtual girlfriend / ninja assassin.

Lara (that's Lara, not Laura) Croft, Tomb Raider

I expect electronic firing mechanisms will start finding their way into conventional firearms in the near future, just because the tech guys can't leave well enough alone and the bean counters are always looking for ways to save a penny.. It's all part of a great worldwide conspiracy to destroy precision machining. Hold onto your steel guns. It won't be long (no more than a thousand years or so) before all new guns are made of plastic.

Thanks to Tam.

Bolder Won

Seems Bolder Won is back in operation down on Isla Mujeres in Mexico, just a stone's throw from Cancun. All you high rollers call now and book your Mexican scuba/cruise adventure. Previous posts about this boat here.

Sanctum

Sanctum seems to polarize viewers. I really liked it, even though everything the critics say is true. It's kind of like a stupid horror flick because you're always yelling "don't" at the screen! I can't stand horror movies. This is different than a horror movie because there is no malevolent brain directing the mayhem, it's just mother nature. It's more like one of those automobile accident movies they used to show in high school: here are all the horrible ways you can die in a cave full of water.

The prejudice against this film shows up in the pictures returned by Google. This was the best one I could find that showed something of the cave, and it's not very good. The vast majority of the pictures are of the actors in the movie. I mean, who cares? You can see a zillion people every day, but seeing the inside of an underwater cave, now that's something special, and all the promoters completely ignore it.

Maybe the majority of folks don't care, maybe that's why stupid social media like Facebook is so popular.

Update June 2016 replaced missing picture.

Deep Diving Submarines

Triton Submarine

While I was reading about submarines this week, I came across the Triton website. These guys are building little two or three man subs that can reach some amazing depths. They are not cruising submarines, they are exploring the depths, and what depths they can reach!  Their standard model can reach 1000 feet, their heavy duty model can reach 3000 feet, and they are talking about building one that can reach 20,000 feet! Compare that to depths of some other submarines (stolen from an earlier post. I gathered the data from Wikipedia.):

• 100 feet: Modern plastic tourist submarine.
• 300 feet: World War I submarines with carbon steel hulls.
• 600 feet: World War II submarines with alloy steel hulls.
• 1,000 feet: Modern military submarines with high-strength alloy steel hulls, Triton Standard Duty.
• 3,000: feet Triton Heavy Duty
• 4,000 feet: Rumor of crazy Russian military submarine with titanium hull.
• 5,000: feet (one mile): The BP oil leak in the Gulf of Mexcio last year.
• 15,000: feet: Alvin Research Submarine
• 20,000: feet Crazy new Triton Super Duty
• 35,000: feet: Deepest part of the ocean (Mariana Trench) reached in 1960 by the Trieste.

The pressure hull is an acrylic sphere. The walls of the heavy duty model are over six inches thick. Of course they are a bit pricey, about in the same stratosphere as a fancy new super-car. On the other hand, you don't have to be the leader of a modern industrial nation in order to get one built, you can just buy one. Pretty fricking amazing.

Update February 2017 replaced missing picture.

Marc & The Anchor

Sailboat at anchor

Marc & Glenn are talking about putting Maravida in the water again and sailing her someplace where she can either be sold, or put to use. So we are talking about this project at lunch the other day and the condition of the anchor, chain and windlass comes up. Do you really need a windlass (a winch for the anchor)? How much does the anchor and chain weigh, anyway? 3, 4, 500 pounds all told. Not something a single person is going to pull out of the water unassisted. And that's if the anchor is not caught on something. When you are pulling the anchor in you may be pulling the boat into the current or against the wind or both. Sometimes the anchor is so stuck that even the windlass won't pull it out. In that case, you fire up the engine and drive the boat over the anchor. Pulling on the anchor from the opposite direction will usually free it.

There was one time however that the anchor was well and truly stuck. They were in the harbor of a city. Even pulling from the opposite direction with the boat didn't help, so Marc puts on his scuba gear and goes down to take a look. The anchor was snagged on big old pipeline, maybe a foot in diameter. (What's in the pipe? What happens if it breaks? Let's not even think about that, it would be really ugly no matter what it was.) He wrestles the anchor out and over the pipe and then hauls himself up the anchor chain hand over hand, because now the anchor is free and dragging and boat is drifting. He had to get someone on the boat to help him aboard.

Update March 2016. Replaced missing picture.

Quick Boost To Orbit

Proton Flight Pattern

Click on the pic to see the full size version where you can actually read the letters and numbers.

REVISED. Stu made a comment, which prompted me to re-evaluate my reasoning. I don't think Stu's objection is correct. Perhaps this revision will clarify the situation. Or not.

When launching a satellite into orbit the quicker you can get there, the less fuel it takes. Yes, I know, higher acceleration requires burning more fuel faster. But if you are accelerating faster, you don't need to spend as much time accelerating, which means you spend less time burning fuel. So the total amount of fuel required will be similar.

However, even if you are not accelerating, you still need to expend enough fuel to support the rocket, i.e. one gravity of acceleration. So the force needed just to support your launch vehicle is being expended until you get to orbit. If you accelerate faster, your time to orbit is quicker, and therefor you should not need to expend quite as much fuel just for support. You will burn the same amount of fuel for acceleration, but you will indeed need to burn it much faster in order to realize any savings on the support end.

A higher acceleration rate puts a greater strain on the payload. If the payload is just a piece of equipment, it can be designed and constructed to handle this increased strain. If we are launching a spacecraft containing people, that is another matter. People don't react well to rocket launches. It puts a big strain on them. Boosting the acceleration to a higher level could easily prove fatal.

One way to overcome this would be to immerse the person in a tank of water and equip them with SCUBA gear. The elevated force of acceleration during a rocket launch would be converted to higher water pressure, which would be equivalent to diving deeper under water.

On the Earth's surface, under one gravity of acceleration, water pressure is proportional to depth. One atmosphere of pressure (15 PSI, what we get at sea level under a pile of air 100 miles high) is about the same as what you get under 30 feet (10 meters) of water. Of course 30 feet under the surface of the sea the absolute pressure is two atmospheres (30 PSI), 15 PSI from the pile of air, and 15 PSI from the 30 feet of water.

A 30 foot tall tank of water sitting on the surface of the Earth is going to have a pressure gradient from 15 PSI (air pressure) at the top to 30 PSI at the bottom. A taller tank will have higher pressure at the bottom, a shorter tank will have a lower pressure.

Under the acceleration of a rocket launch, the pressure at the top surface will remain the same (the amount of air in the sealed spaceship is not going to change), but the pressure at the bottom will increase in direct proportion to the acceleration. A ten foot tall tank would have a pressure of 5 PSI while sitting on the ground, while under an acceleration of 10 G's (Gravities, 32 feet per second per second), the pressure would increase to 50 PSI, similar to what you would experience at a depth of 100 feet underwater. The diameter of the tank would make no difference. Likewise a tank 3 feet tall would only have a pressure differential of 15 PSI from top to bottom under 10 G's of acceleration.

So the question becomes how much difference in pressure can a human being tolerate? A person standing in a small diameter tank would experience a difference in 50 PSI from toes to nose. That might be a bit much, it might squeeze the blood out of your legs and into your head. A person lying down would experience a difference of only about 5 PSI, which might be tolerable.

For a person being launched in such a manner, a relatively small diameter tube could contain them, perhaps as small as three feet in diameter. Of course a tube big enough for a human filled with water is going to weigh considerable more than a human alone, but I think we can probably find a use for the water once we are in orbit. We would need a second tank to drain the water into after we had reached orbit. We would not want our astronaut to be operating underwater while in space. That would be silly. (Or would it? More study needed.)

I read a science fiction story some time ago that used a similar mechanism to protect pilots from extremely high accelerations. In this case they were military pilots flying star fighters (a la "Star Wars") at extremely high velocities and distances. The pilots were housed inside a sphere filled with water somewhere in the interior of their ship. The main thrust of the story seemed to be the psychological stresses these pilots suffered due to the power at their control versus the protection their spherical cocoon provided.

Update October 2016. Mucked around until text stopped overlapping photos.

Update January 2017 replaced missing photos.

Balmorhea State Park, Texas

Scuba diving in West Texas? Amazing what you run across on the internet.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.