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From gene Sun Jan 11 11:48:15 1998
Return-Path: <gene>
Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 11:48:07 -0800
From: gene m. stover <gene>
Subject: Cup O Stuff: A Titanic Repost
Cc: gene@gangrene.CyberTiggyr.com
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All,
At popular request (well, one request, which was made at my suggestion), I'm re-sending the article I wrote about the Titanic a couple of years ago. If memory serves, it was the first Cup O' Stuff article, even before I called them Cup O' Stuff. Seems appropriate, given the recent movie.
And remember: The movie is fiction.
I could have sworn I wrote two or three articles about the Titanic, but I could find only this one, & it tells everything I think I would have thought of telling, all told.
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Date: Tue, 28 Nov 95 23:29:42 PST
From: gene@CyberTiggyr.com
Subject: The Collosal Titanic
THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT THE TITANIC
ON
THE DISCOVERY CHANNEL
Forgive me if my typing is crappy; I just stepped on my glasses. That's the last time I interrupt dinner to answer the phone for a telemarketer. I think I'll pipe bomb the telemarketing sales office of the New York Times.
Most of these facts are from the special section about the Titanic disaster in a book I'm reading, ``The Ocean Almanac'' by Robert Hendrickson.
First, here's a directly quote from an article in the book. Note that the Titanic sank in the wee hours of the morning on Monday, 15 April 1912.
----------------
THE OTHER TITANIC
There is a remarkable precedent for the Titanic sinking-in fiction. Back in 1898 Morgan Robertson had written a popular novel entitled Futility, which told of a great ``unsinkable'' luxury liner named the Titan that sank on her maiden voyage after hitting an iceberg and lost almost all her passengers because there weren't enough lifeboats aboard. The amazing similarities between the Titan and Titanic disasters, called by some a near-perfect example of ``promnesia'' (``memory of the future'') on Robertson's part, are best shown in the chart below:
TITAN TITANIC Ship length 800 feet 882.5 feet Ship tonnage 75,000 66,000 Propellers 3 3 Speed at impact 25 knots 23 knots Number of passengers 3,000 2,207 (capacity of 3,000) Number of lifeboats 24 20 Month of sinking April April
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The rest of this message is an original work. (That is, it's a bunch of very unoriginal facts (as facts tend to be) in my own words.)
The Titanic cost $10 million to build. Her keel was laid in 1909 in Belfast, and she was completed in February 1912. She was 882.5 fee long and 92.5 feet abeam. (By comparison, a modern aircraft carrier is usually about 1,000 feet long, give or take a dozen feet.) She had a sister ship, the Olympic, which was ever so slightly smaller, but she was the much more luxurious of the two. (I'll betcha the difference in their sizes was due to a shorter flagpole and smaller breasts on the masthead of the Olympic.)
The Olympic was in service on that fateful day, and was not destroyed, (it was a long way off). From what I can gather, she went on to live the life of a happy ship and die of old age as good ships do.
The Titanic was conceived to be the queen of the ocean. She was...for 4.5 days. During those 4.5 days, many of the passengers spent much of their time talking about how great it was to travel on a completely safe, unsinkable ship.
We all know the big T had 16 seperate compartments that could be individually sealed for your protection in the event of a rupture. The compartments were front-to-back in single file down the center of the body of the boat. In other words, the boat was built on, around, and of 16 compartments that had been lined up. I'm going into this detail (unsuccesfully) to point out that each compartment was as wide as the boat. Scratching either side of the boat at a given distance from the bow flooded a given compartment. Remember that (if you understand what I'm trying to say, that is).
A compartment would seal when a heavy door on each end was automatically and more or less immediately lowered, with exactly the same functionality as those manually closed and locked doors you see on submarine movies and, presumably, with much the same look and feel of a hallway door on the Death Star. What was in those compartments besides air or sea water (take your pick)? The boilers, the engines. The crew. The third class passengers!
Those automatic doors on the compartments worked flawlessly, sealing some crewmen nicely for their trip 14,000 feet down.
Up to four compartments could completely flood and the ship still wouldn't sink. The iceberg took out six.
A direct collision with the iceberg was narrowly avoided and turned into a side-swipe in which the six compartments were ruptured. One must wonder if it would have been better in the long run to go ahead and hit the iceberg head-on, possibly taking out only the single compartment in the bow.
The Titanic carried 20 lifeboats which together had the capacity for 1,178 of its 2,207 passengers . She had space for 48 lifeboats, which would have been more than enough room to save all passengers and crew.
Most of the design for the Titanic was done by Thomas Andrews, one of the most respected men in the world in the shipbuilding industry. He also managed her construction and saw to it that no expense was spared: the best and latest riveting methods, the best steel, and the best materials and techniques for every other part of her construction. He was on the Titanic for her maiden voyage because he wanted to see, personally, any and every flaw in the boat so he could personally devise and oversee their fixes later. During the 4.5 day voyage, passengers and crewmen came to him with complaints, and he considered each and every one worthy of his attention. From what I've read in this and other books, I believe that Thomas Andrews truly wanted his ship to be the most luxurious and safest work of man of all time. He loved the boat and cared for the people who would have been her passengers. He believed he had created the unsinkable boat, and in this, he represented his society, which believed man would both master and improve nature, if it hadn't done so already.
Thomas Andrews went down with the ship without making any effort to save himself. In fact, he refused help. The look of dejection on his face must have been worth seeing (if you didn't have to go down with the ship to do so) because this man, like the age in which he lived, had never seen the world through the realistic eyes of cynicism.
Just the other day, Scott Horton declined my invitation to go ocean kayaking because, as he put it, sitting in a 7-foot-long boat directly on a body of water large enough to swallow the moon would drive home his significance in the universe all too well. Thomas Andrews, with passengers screaming and drowning in the night all around him, shook off the simpleton's optimism of his age and realized his true significance less than five minutes before he breathed the 31 degree water of the north Atlantic and road his masterpiece to the bottom, 14,000 feet down.
And lest I end this dubiously philosophical and definitely depressing message on a low note: The Titanic had a two-story post office. Five minutes after the collision with the iceberg, the workers on the lower level were up to their knees in salt water. The hauled the full bags of mail to the upper level for safe keeping. (Heh heh heh. I'm still chuckling about it, fully an hour after reading it.)
gene
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gene
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gene m. stover (gene@CyberTiggyr.com)
For any madness of their kings, it is the Greeks who take the
beating.
- Horace
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For ages & ages, I've used a strict if-success / else-failure style. Some people (none of them programmers whom I respect) have said it's lame. Some other programmers, all of them I respect, have said it's a good style though it's not for them. At last, I have vindication in print by an independent authority, someone who doesn't even know me, that it's good style. Ha!
Note this new feature of Excel 2007 according to the article: ``Office SharePoint Server Excel Services enable employees to view and edit that spreadsheet through a Web browser. All of a sudden, workers don't need to email spreadsheets around the office - they can all work on the same spreadsheet.''
Then notice a paragraph from one of my own horror stories: ``Let's say you are editing a monthly budget spreadsheet that is, for whatever reason, stored in a database instead of a file. At the same time, another user is editing that same spreadsheet. If you make a change to the spreadsheet that improves the monthly budget, the program displays that change on the other user's screen. If the other user makes a change that improves the budget, that part of your spreadsheet magically changes to reflect that change. When cells on your spreadsheet apparently change on their own & without warning, for how long will you remain sane?'' [386]
Be sure to look at Graph 2. It shows that our economy is doing exactly what Marx observed & predicted for capitalist economies. ([247], page 71, first full paragraph, which begins ``The radical or Maxist position...'')
I've discussed this with friends for ages. None of us care much for massively multiplayer games, but we mostly agree that a single-player game could download new content on a regular basis, like weekly or whenever you finish the current stage. That would allow you to have games with story (which massively multiplayer games don't do so well), but you could also have new content regularly (which massively multiplayer games do well).
Good news. At least five people in the US government are still sane.
Here's a paragraph from the news story:
This almost certainly means that the CIA's interrogation regime is unlawful, and indeed, that many techniques the administration has been using, such as water-boarding and hypothermia[and others]violate the War Crimes Act[because violations of Common Article 3 are deemed war crimes], wrote Mr Lederman.
If Lederman is correct, then the CIA, under orders from President George W. Bush, has committed war crimes.
Gene Michael Stover 2008-04-19