My nephew Nick came to lunch Tuesday. He's been up in Dutch Harbor for the last month on board the Fishing Vessel Nordic Fury. The Fury was operating as a tender, carrying fish from fishing vessels back to one of the three fish processing plants in Dutch Harbor. Something went wrong however, and there were three tenders and only one fishing boat, so Nordic wasn't seeing much action and eventually they sent the crew home.
The Nordic Fury is 127 feet long and has three holds / fish tanks that can each hold 70 tons of fish. They fill the tanks with sea water which is about 40 degrees Fahrenheit and then chill it down to around 32 degrees.
The fish are transferred from the fishing vessel to the tender using a vacuum system with a ten inch diameter pipe. When they get back to port, the fish are transferred from the tender to the processing plant using a similar system that uses a 14 inch diameter pipe. The system at the fish plant can empty a hold in 30 minutes. Here's some photos of a fish pump installed on a fishing boat:
Near as I can tell, fish pumps work by alternately apply vacuum and pressure. They apply vacuum and atmospheric pressure pushes the fish and the water up the hose, past the check valve and into the tank. When the tank is full, they close off the vacuum and apply some pressure and the fish and the water flows out through another check valve and the exit pipe.
Nick's crew were fishing for Pollock, most of which is turned into surimi, a seafood protean paste, and sent to Japan. Some of it is used to make artificial crab meat.
There are other boats up there that are crabbing (fishing for crab). A typical rig for a crabber will have a three inch diameter cable a couple of thousand feet long with a hundred crab pots attached to it. The pots are like seven feet in diameter and weigh a hundred pounds. They will lay the line along the top of an undersea ridge and the pots will lay on either side of the ridge. They were catching golden brown spider crabs, giant spindly things.
Dutch Harbor is full of bald eagles, seals and eels. There are literally hundreds of bald eagles in the area. Walking on shore, heading into a strong wind, head down, he looks up and sees a bald eagle heading right for him. The seals swim in packs around the harbor hunting small fish. The water in the harbor freeze over and the seals would poke air holes in the thin ice. Nick caught a 30 pound fish while they were at anchor in the harbor by simply dropping a baited hook on a line into the water. He lowered the hook a hundred feet of so into the water and hooked a fish.
Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery - Official Teaser Trailer (2022) Daniel Craig, Edward Norton
IGN
A real Agatha Christie / Clue style murder mystery. Daniel Craig reprises his role as Benoit Blanc the 'World's Greatest Detective' and brings his strange accent with him. I don't know what it's supposed to be, but it sounds weird and it doesn't sound anything like James Bond.
A billionaire has invited a group of 'friends' to his private island for their annual getaway. The invitation might have been the best part of the movie. It arrives inside a big puzzle box that no one can figure out how to open until they realize the outside of the box is printed with one of those Magic-Eye 3D patterns. Conjure the 3D image and it shows where the magic button is. Very cool.
All the friends are celebrities of a sort, but all of them are dependent on their ephemeral fame, and they depend on the billionaire to give them a boost when they need it, which he gladly does - in exchange for some small favors. But all of them are up against the wall, one way or another, so there is a lot of resentment brewing.
We get a glimpse their superficial lifestyle, full of buzzwords and the latest fashions. It's momentarily entertaining, but basically useless and stupid.
Gun
The macho man carries a gun around with him, but we never get a good view of it until is used by some unknown villain to shoot one of the contestants. At that point it flashes on the screen for just a second and we can see that it is a fancy, engraved automatic.
The climax is a disappointing, we want the bad guy executed for his crimes, or at least thrown in the clink, but all that might happen is that he will go down in history as a vile stinker.
The Iron Dog is an annual, 2,500 mile, snow machine race across Alaska. This year's race will he held in a couple of weeks. Another motor sport event I had never heard of before.
My nephew Nick came to lunch on Tuesday. He's been up in Dutch Harbor for the last month, but their fishing season got cut short. IAman wanted to hear a snow machine story so Nick obliged us with a tale from a year ago. There is a snow mobile race called the Iron Dog that covers like 800 miles of tundra. The ground is dead flat and the guys run their hopped up snow machines a hundred miles an hour over the frozen tundra. He was hanging out with some friends who had some of these hopped up snow machines (Ferrari's he calls them). They are out riding around and one of the machines develops a problem with the throttle. Intermittently the throttle would stick wide open. The driver got it under control and brought it back. The day goes on, some girls come over and they all start drinking and everyone forgets about the problem with the throttle. Well, nothing is more fun than hopping onto a hot rod snow mobile after you've had a couple of beers, and that's just what a couple of the girls did. Unfortunately, they got on the one with the throttle problem. The took off and Nick took off in hot pursuit because you never go out in the wilderness alone. You can go ten miles in a heartbeat and if something goes wrong you might never be found. Nick has the good sense to go after them and sees their lights head across a frozen lake. They're going lickety split and then the sound suddenly goes up, the snow machine rockets ahead and into the trees on the far side of the lake and then suddenly goes vertical. Nick follows up and when he gets there he finds the snow machine upside down, ten feet up in a tree, engine still running with the throttle wide open, screaming like a banshee. He shuts off the motor but when he does that, the lights go out. So now he's looking around in the dark for bits and pieces of the girls (arms? legs? heads?) but he's not finding anything. The girls show up laughing and giggling a couple of minutes later. They jumped off the machine when they realized the throttle was stuck while it was still out on the lake.
Here's a couple of videos that might give you some idea of what the Iron Dog race is like. This one is a little long and repetitive, but notice that the snow machines are keeping pace with an airplane.
The Silicon Greybeard has a post up about the SpaceX Starship. Nothing Earth shattering, I just like to keep tabs on Elon's pet project. They continue to march along, making incremental progress. The pace feels more like NASA in the 1960's when there was always a rocket launch / disaster in the news, not like the glacial pace that NASA has been taking since the end of Apollo.
The Snow Girl | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Set in Malaga, Spain. Stars Milena Smit as Miren Rojo, the intrepid girl reporter and José Coronado as Eduardo, her mentor. We've seen Jose in a couple of other shows, notably Wrong Side of the Tracks.
This show has a whole smorgasbord of crime. We've got rape, murder, kidnapping, child pornography and suicide. The cops are trying, but there are not a lot of clues. The best part of the show is the emotions people go through. Our girl, Miren, was raped a couple of years ago and suffers from flashbacks and panic attacks. The parents are distraught over losing their kid. Iris is devastated that she can't get pregnant.
Synopsis:
Iris desperately wants to become a mother. She has been visiting a fertility doctor in hope of getting pregnant, but none of the doctor's treatments work. That evening there is a big parade through the center of town. The doctor, her husband and her six year old daughter, Amaya, are in attendance. The father takes Amaya to get a treat and while he is dealing with the vendor, a gaudy bauble catches the Amaya's eye and she slips away into the crowd. Iris spies the girl all alone and in her desperate misery takes the girls hand and leads her away. Her husband, Santiago, has serious misgivings about this course of action, but Iris is determined and he gets drug along. They manage to get away and take the girl home where they raise her as their daughter. It takes a while, maybe a year, for her to adjust to her new life as Julia, but adjust she does.
Naturally there is a big hullabaloo, big police investigation, canvasing the town, but nothing turns up. The cops find the girl's uncle has some kind of prior run-in with the law, so they drag him in. Turns out his wife has an empty apartment and when the cops search it, they find the uncle and his son have been making child pornography. Our heroine, the intrepid girl reporter, is talking to the son when he gets a a two second phone call and bolts. Our girl tries to stop him, but he throws her to the floor, runs out the door onto the balcony, leaps over the railing and plummets four stories to his death. The uncle goes to prison.
Six years later, the Iris makes a video tape of the girl, now 12, and sends it to Miren. This gets the investigation going again, but once again, whatever clues there are, there are not enough to track down the kidnappers.
Somehow the cops get on the track of a reformed child molester living in a travel trailer. Miren visits him and pays him 6,000 Euro for a list of aliases of people who visited a child pornography website. Later, the uncle gets out of jail and when he visits the child molester, Miren photographs them together and publishes the photos on the web with the implication that one or both of them is a rat and is talking to the police. Predictably, they are executed and the trailer is burned.
Meanwhile, out at the remote farm where Iris, Santiago and Julia are hiding out, an agent from the bank pays them a visit to remind them that they have missed a mortgage payment. Iris, fearing she has been found out, shoots him with a shotgun and kills him. Later on, the cops come by looking for him. Santiago plays it cool, invites them in, yes he was here, then he left, no idea where he went. The younger cop notices height recording marks on the wall, but doesn't make anything of it. They aren't looking for a kidnapped child, they are looking for a missing adult.
Santiago has reached the breaking point. He drives into town and sits in his car trying to get up the gumption to turn himself in. He is so distraught that when he finally gets out of the car and crosses the street to go to the police station he steps in front of a speeding car that runs him down and kills him.
Iris makes another tape and sends it to Miren. Miren notices that this video is better quality than the last one. From the pattern of magnetic fields laid down on the tape, the resident wizard deduces that both tapes came from the same model of video recorder. Since the video on newer tape is better quality, we might surmise that the machine has been in for repair, and since VHS machines are few and far between these days, there's only one shop in town that would perform such a repair. Our girl visits the repair shop and finds the owner uncooperative, so when he is distracted with another customer she steals the ledger and runs off with it. From this she gets Iris's address and heads out there to pay her a visit. The visit goes off well enough, or as well as you could expect when visiting a rural recluse, but it's enough to panic Iris.
Miren leaves, but then hides in the weeds a short ways down the road and waits. Eventually Iris bolts with Julia, their luggage, and the shotgun. Our girl follows them with her lights off, but Iris makes her and stomps on the gas. So now we're speeding down the road in the driving rain and Iris is losing her mind. She unbuckles her seat belt and drives the van through the guard rail. She is tossed through the windshield, the van slides down the hill and rolls over. Iris is dead. Except for a few scratches, the girl is unharmed. When Miren confronts Julia, Julia pulls out the shotgun, and when our girl persists, Julia fires catching Miren in the shoulder.
Julia is reunited with her parents, but she's not having it. We expect she will readjust, but it might take awhile.
P.S. The title comes from the 'snow' that shows up on the video screen after the clips of the kidnapped girl have ended. The TV show is based on a novel. In the show, our girl, Miren, spends ten years looking for this girl and then writes a book about. The last scene of the show has her reading a passage from her book to a small crowd gathered at a bookstore, and in this passage she explains that she often felt like the kidnapped girl was lost in the electronic snow.
P 1. Intermittently I've been working on my English-words-to-numbers translation program for the last couple of weeks. It was working, but then I decided to embellish it by allowing larger numbers of hundreds. Normally a number like 1,234 is written out as one thousand two hundred thirty four, but it can also be written as twelve hundred thirty four. This shorthand is handy when you are writing out checks and you don't want to try and cram a zillion tiny letters into the allocated space. Well, that's great, but it makes the program a little more complicated. I thought about it for a bit and realized that a state machine would simplify the problem to a manageable level, so I set to work. I've drawn three rough sketches of my state machine, and I've written the code and it mostly works. There are still a couple of bugs. I am sure I can fix the problem if I just sit down and make one more drawing and then compare the states in the code to the states in the drawing. But it's been at least a week and I haven't touched it. Seems like there is always something else that needs doing and likewise it seems I can only get one thing done a day. I have been riding the exercise bike and I have been posting a bit, so I am not a total loss.
P 2. Whenever I am supposed to be somewhere at an appointed time, I wait until the very last minute to leave. I am often on time, but I am also sometimes late. I don't like being late. I would much prefer being early. If I remember to bring a book, I can read. Sometimes the places I go have a waiting room and magazines to peruse. Those can be entertaining. Some of them, like those you find in a hair salon, appear to come from another planet so hey, science fiction adventure right here in the real world. Even if there is nothing to read, and you are stuck with what's there, you can at least look around and notice your surroundings and the passersbys. I really should try to leave 15 minutes early.
I was talking to IAman about this yesterday and he told me about an ex-military guy he knew who would show up hours early. He might have a flight at 9PM and he would be at the airport at 4PM. My father-in-law was like that. I don't know whether he minded waiting or not, but he never showed any evidence of it. It is nice not to be stressed about being late. Sometimes I think we thrive on stress. Neither my wife nor I seem to be able to completely relax. There is always something that needs doing. After a long day of getting-things-done, when we are too tired to do anything else, maybe then we'll relax for a bit. However, if we don't have something to divert us we'll spend our downtime plotting tomorrow's attack on the world.
