Posted on Facebook under “Heard it might be a Boeing 737 MAX on way back from Ireland so decided to take a ship for safety.”:
Could this be the world’s most lavish museum devoted to engineering failure? The science turned out not to be settled, unfortunately. Folks in Belfast do like to point out “She was alright when she left here.”
The museum does disclose how badly the first voyage turned out for most people on board:
This was despite substantial government regulation:
Also despite the latest in wireless communication technology:
Yet the skill of management, engineers, and workers is celebrated:
Is it a bad thing when a country goes from being a world industrial leader to irrelevant compared to South Korea, China, and Japan? Barack Obama says “No problemo:”
Passengers were arbitrarily divided into only two genders:
Not every movie about the Titanic is an unimaginative derivative:
Then, as now, the migration industry was highly profitable for some…
A reminder to be humble…
… considering that the best humans could do lasted less than two weeks against Nature. From notes typed up by a shipyard office worker:
The building is a beautiful work of engineering in itself and includes a gratuitous Disney-style ride:
More: Visit Titanic Belfast
More than half the kids died. Only about a quarter of the women. Wonder why.
Gender roles haven’t changed at all. All the single men are programming mobile apps in SOMA. The rest are in FIDI.
Is it a bad thing when a country goes from being a world industrial leader to irrelevant compared to South Korea, China, and Japan? Barack Obama says “No problemo:”
It depends on the country in question. Obama referred to “this island”, which is made up mostly of the republic of Ireland. The republic was never an important center of heavy manufacturing, though it does currently boast one of the highest standards of living in the world.
I think “this island” refers to “Queen’s Island,” the landfill on which the shipyard was built. See https://www.culturenorthernireland.org/features/heritage/shipbuilding-belfast
Certainly I hope that our most Presidential President ever did not imply that there was ever a time in which the larger island of Ireland was not chic.
So Obama made complimentary remarks about the museum and developments in the city since the Good Friday agreement and he somehow failed to mention the decline in British manufacturing. That’s not surprising.
Also, British industry must have been surpassed by America and Germany long before the rise of South Korea.
> engineering failure
The chief cause of the sinking was excessive speed in an area known to contain icebergs. After Captain Smith sideswiped a berg, holing five of the ship’s sixteen compartments, it still took over two hours for the ship to sink. It hardly seems fair to assign to engineering failure the disastrous misjudgment of the captain.
Wasn’t it an engineering failure to include an insufficient number of lifeboats?
I’d say it’s doubtful. The arrangements for lifeboats were presumably specified by the shipping line, not by the builders.
You could call it a management failure, but even that seems to me a little wise after the event. The ship would have been just fine if not for steaming at near full speed in iceberg-infested waters on a moonless night.
There’s an unusually thorough and extensively footnoted Wikipedia entry on the lifeboats. The section “Lack of lifeboats and training” is a must-read:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeboats_of_the_RMS_Titanic
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That looks like a very pollution-free skyline – no smokestacks, no haze. News reports from the past few years say the pollution is life threatening. For example:
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/dangerously-high-levels-of-air-pollution-found-in-northern-ireland-38060370.html
Of course, they’re in a war against the diesel engine.