Book tip: The Underworld (about full ocean depth submarines for recreation)

The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean (Susan Casey) is an interesting book about privatized and recreationalized (is that a word? ) deep submarine excursions. The book seems to have been written before the Titan imploded near the Titanic (June 2023) and then published shortly after the tragedy.

This is more about the personalities and feelings of deep-sea exploration, but there is enough engineering background and detail to make it interesting for the quantitative reader. It is good background for understanding the psychology of the people who built and dove on the Titan.

In 2007, [Patrick] Lahey had cofounded Triton Submarines [of Sebastian, Florida] to create a new generation of eye-catching, user-friendly subs, with acrylic spheres, decent headroom, and plush leather seats. Their maximum depths didn’t extend beyond the twilight zone, but that was deep enough for a taste of the sublime. The subs were a hit with yacht owners—and with filmmakers and scientists, who reveled in the immersive visual experience.

When the hedge fund magnate Ray Dalio loaned his Triton sub to a group of marine biologists in 2012, they captured the first footage of a giant squid hunting off Japan. Previous encounters with the animal had meant ogling a dull mauve corpse: before that dive, nobody had ever witnessed a giant squid in action. The scientists were stunned, because far from being blandly colored, the massive creature looked metallic, as though it had been dipped in silver and bronze. It moved with the fluidity of water itself, its long tentacles studded with suckers, its hubcap eye gazing directly at the camera.

How many more epiphanies were down there? A good rule of thumb is the deeper you go, the stranger things get—and now Lahey had mobilized his decades of experience to build a sub that could explore the deepest reaches of the underworld. As far back as 2011, Triton’s website had included a mockup of the 36000/3, a sub that would take three people to thirty-six thousand feet, or full ocean depth. But this dream machine existed only in pixels: no vehicle was headed to Hades unless someone with a burning desire to dive below twenty thousand feet stepped up to write a series of seven-figure checks. And extremely wealthy people who want to be sealed inside a metal ball and sent plummeting for miles into the ocean’s sepulchral blackness are not found on every street corner.

Once Triton existed anyone with a some cash to spare could launch the kinds of expeditions that previously only governments could undertake.

The saddest part of the history section:

Deep-sea submersibles are an inherently risky proposition, but the field has a sterling safety record. No one has died in a manned submersible since 1974, when an electrical fire inside a Japanese craft caused the two-man crew to be overcome by toxic fumes.

There is plenty of risk and failure is always an option:

Of the many ways a pilot can find himself in trouble beneath the ocean’s surface, the biggest risk is entanglement: getting snagged on fishing gear, cables, debris, or even ropes. There is no plan B when you’re stuck a mile down. Somehow the sub must be freed. “I’ve been hung up twice,” Kerby said, looking sober. The first time happened early in his career. “I was a green pilot, and I got caught in the lines from a shrimp trap. And I knew that if I couldn’t get out of it, I would die.” The second entanglement was more recent: Kerby ran into a pile of cable that had been dumped by a tugboat. “The worst thing you can do is thrash around,” he said. “You have to stop and take stock of your heading, and try to project yourself outside of the sub.” Both times, he added, it took hours of dressage-style maneuvering to escape. “Self-help is the only help, that’s our motto.”

The Pisces are equipped with five days of life support, so anyone marooned underwater would have plenty of time to consider their fragile mortality. This wasn’t a theoretical situation. In 1973, another Pisces submersible, the Pisces III, suffered a hatch failure that flooded its external machinery tank, overburdening the sub and causing it to plummet to the North Atlantic seafloor with its two pilots trapped inside the pressure hull.

Thankfully, the Pisces III crashed on soft bottom mud without catastrophic damage, at a depth of 1,575 feet—shallow enough to attempt a rescue. (It narrowly avoided falling over a shelf that would’ve carried it beyond reach.) That was the good news. The bad news was that submarine rescues are logistically complicated scrambles that often fail to beat the mercilessly ticking clock.

The Pisces V—at the time owned by a Canadian company and working in British Columbia—was airlifted to the scene, along with the Pisces II, which had been laying cable in the North Sea. While the stranded pilots, Roger Chapman and Roger Mallinson, endured this long wait, they watched the Pisces III’s oxygen supply dwindling like an hourglass. Hypothermia set in, then dehydration, then delirium from breathing too much carbon dioxide. Terrible weather and plain bad luck slowed the rescue, but finally the other subs were able to attach lines to the Pisces III. By the time Chapman and Mallinson were craned to the surface, they’d been in the sphere for eighty-four hours. Only twenty minutes of oxygen had remained in their tanks.

The book also contains a story of nonprofit org fraud and startup fraud:

Since the International Seabed Authority opened its doors in 1994, its 168 members (now numbering 168 delegates from 167 nations and the European Union) have met annually at its headquarters in Jamaica to prepare for the biggest resource haul the world has ever known—or as one marine scientist put it, “the greatest assault on deep-sea ecosystems ever inflicted by humans.”

To date, the ISA has granted thirty-one mining exploration contracts covering about six hundred thousand square miles, a seabed footprint the size of Alaska. Nineteen of those contracts are for nodule mining, but with an expansiveness that would have delighted Mero, the other twelve contracts would allow miners to investigate scalping the tops off seamounts and grinding up hydrothermal vents. Apparently it’s not hard to get an exploration contract, because so far the ISA has approved every application. Any member state that pays a $500,000 fee and follows procedure can soon have exclusive rights to its own patch of seabed. There’s no stinting on size: an average CCZ contract area spans about thirty thousand square miles. Some nations already hold multiple contracts (China has five) and there’s nothing to prevent any ISA member state from obtaining more, usually by sponsoring contracts on behalf of private-sector mining companies. (In that case, the mining company puts up the capital, runs the show, and would pocket most of the profits—theoretically, billions. The sponsoring nation receives a small royalty, and could be liable for damages if anything goes wrong.) Ultimately the ISA stands to benefit from every contract it grants, with royalties rolling in from each mining operation. Some of that cash will be distributed to developing nations, but a portion flows to the ISA itself—a jarring conflict of interest for a group that also serves as the industry’s regulator. Absurdly, there are even plans for the ISA to develop its own nodule mining concession called “the Enterprise.”

Then add some credulous environmentally conscious investors…

The story got bigger: DeepGreen’s pursuit of nodules was about nothing less than saving the world. And [Gerard] Barron was everywhere, telling it at length. It was a blur of land-based mining destroying rain forests Africa child labor toxic tailings fossil fuel human rights violations versus renewable energy closed-loop recycling no-waste sustainable abundant nodules that “literally lie on the ocean floor like golf balls on a driving range.” “I’m doing this for the planet and the planet’s children,” Barron said. Also, for an 8.1 percent stake in a company that would soon be listed on the NASDAQ. In 2021, DeepGreen went public in a SPAC merger, changing its name to the Metals Company (ticker symbol: TMC). It was valued at $2.9 billion, which was impressive given that it had no revenue, and its only assets were seabed rights that supposedly belong to the rest of us.

The TMC stock debuted at $11.05 a share, spiked to $15.39, and fell to $3.48 within a month. (It has since dropped below a dollar.) Accounting problems emerged; lawsuits followed. Shareholders joined a class-action suit, alleging the Metals Company had made “materially false and misleading statements”;

The Explorers Club in New York City is full of members not afraid to risk anything… except SARS-CoV-2 infection:

The Madagascar hissing cockroaches were roasted extra-crispy, glistening on wooden skewers. They were bigger and shinier than the Costa Rican cave cockroaches and the Argentinian wood cockroaches, with longer antennae and a formidable set of horns. If you were hoping for a black-tie occasion to sample a variety of roaches, this was the only game in town: the 118th Explorers Club Annual Dinner. Archaeologists, anthropologists, geologists, field biologists, polar explorers, marine scientists, endurance athletes, space travelers, wildlife photographers, ocean conservationists, extreme climbers, single-handed sailors, and assorted peers: this was their party, a global gathering of adventurers. For the last two years, the annual dinner had been canceled due to COVID, so the night was both a reunion and a celebration, the rooms overflowing with the club’s members and guests.

More: read The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean

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The nutlergic work to liberate Al-Quds

The robust young activists of New York City can be felled by a single peanut or almond and yet expect to significantly assist in liberating Al-Quds and destroying the Zionist entity.

In case the above is memory-holed:

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Maybe cars can teach themselves to drive in the more structured states (the MANIAC book)

I recently finished The MANIAC, a concise novelized biography of John Von Neumann bizarrely bolted onto a history of computer programs that dominate chess and go. Somehow the combination works! What I hadn’t realized was how quickly programs that play chess and go can evolve when entirely freed from human guidance. Apparently, in a matter of just a few hours, a program can go from knowing almost nothing about chess other than the basic rules to being able to beat a grandmaster.

This kind of success has famously eluded those who promised us self-driving cars. We’ve gone from failing via humans encoding rules to failing via AI-style training sets of good driving and bad driving (coded by people in India? if you’ve ever been to Delhi or Mumbai maybe that explains the failure). Benjamin Labatut (the MANIAC author) reminds us that when the situation is sufficiently structured computers can learn very fast indeed.

Returning from a helicopter trip from Los Angeles to Great Barrington, Maskachusetts, my copilot commented on the chaos of road markings as we entered Cambridge. “Are there three lanes here or two?” he asked. This is a question that wouldn’t be posed in most parts of Texas or Florida, I’m pretty sure, and certainly not on the main roads of the Netherlands or Germany. Instead of the computer promising to handle all situations, I wonder if “full self-driving” should be targeted to the states where roads are clearly structured and marked. Instead of the computer telling the human to be ready to take over at any time for any reason, the computer could promise to notify in advance (via reference to a database, updated via crowd sourcing from all of the smart cars) that the road wasn’t sufficiently structured/marked and tell the human “I won’t be able to help starting in 30 seconds because your route goes through an unstructured zone.” The idea that a human will be vigilant for a few months or even years waiting for a self-driving disconnect that occurs randomly seems impractical. The MANIAC suggests that if we shift gears (so to speak) to redefining the problem to self-driving within a highly structured environment a computer could become a better driver than a human in a matter of weeks (it takes longer to look at videos than to look at a chess or go board, so it would be weeks and not hours). We might not be able to predict when there will be enough structure and enough of a data set and enough computer power for this breakthrough to occur, but maybe we can predict that it will be sudden and the self-driving program will work far better than we had dreamed. The AI-trained chess and go systems didn’t spend years working their way into being better than the best humans, but got there from scratch in just a few hours by playing games against themselves.

Regardless of your best estimate as to when we’ll get useful assistance from our AI overlords, I recommend The MANIAC (note that the author gives Von Neumann a little too much credit for the stored program computers that make the debate regarding self-driving possible).

Separately, based on a visit to the Harvard Book Store here’s what’s on the minds of the world’s smartest people (according to Harvard University research)..

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Trans Day of Visibility in Florida

I recognize that Trans Day of Visibility was Easter Sunday, ending Bisexual Health Awareness Month, and that today is Lesbian Visibility Day (we’ve moved past International Asexuality Day, National Youth HIV/AIDS Awareness Day, Day of Silence, National Transgender HIV Testing Day, and Nonbinary Parents Day (calendar)).

Despite the intervening five 2SLGBTQQIA+ holidays, I thought readers would appreciate seeing how Trans Day of Visibility was celebrated in Florida. Manatees who identify as bunnies:

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The fraud in GDP growth statistics continues

New York Times, today:

The U.S. economy remained resilient early this year, with a strong job market fueling robust consumer spending. The trouble is that inflation was resilient, too.

Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down sharply from the 3.4 percent growth rate at the end of 2023 and fell well short of forecasters’ expectations.

The word “population” doesn’t occur in the article, though it is critically important. If the population is growing at a 1.7 percent annual rate, for example, Americans are currently on track to become poorer on a per capita basis.

How much did the population grow? It’s almost impossible to say because our population growth is driven by undocumented migration and the error bars on estimates are huge (see “Yale Study Finds Twice as Many Undocumented Immigrants as Previous Estimates”).

Separately, the GDP of Harvard Square is growing. An “essential” marijuana retailer seems to have opened up on Church Street. Photos from this evening:

It’s also a great time to be a tent retailer. The “Free Palestine” encampment in Harvard Yard, view from outside Harvard’s police-guarded border wall:

Here are the stickers that supporters of Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad have added to Harvard’s “the Yard is closed” signs:

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Coronapanic and landlords

An aviation connection owns 250 apartments in the middle of the country. I asked him whether he’d lost a lot of money during coronapanic when nobody had to pay rent and he was barred by order of the CDC from evicting anyone. “No,” he said. “Nearly all of my tenants kept paying and, in fact, many of them applied for and received government assistance to pay their rent. I already had 20 percent Section 8 vouchers and ended up with about half of my income coming from the government.”

He took the opportunity to refinance his properties at a 2 percent rate and also substantially raised the rents that he was charging (i.e., his costs fell and his revenue soared). He estimates that his property doubled in nominal value between 2019 and today. He raised rents by 50 percent.

Who else got rich? “The local car dealer [in his small town] bought a Phenom 300 and a Bell 407” (that’s $15 million worth of aircraft; the Phenom 300 is made by Embraer in Brazil)

What else has been working for him? Open borders. “I love having Latinos as tenants,” he said (sorry about the hateful failure to use proper English (“Latinx”), but it is a direct quote), “but sad to say that the English-speaking tenants get upset if there are too many Latinos in their complex. They complain about Mexican music being played and noise. I don’t want to be racist and exclude people on the basis of being Hispanic because it makes other tenants upset.” Has the rising cost of labor eroded his increased profit margin from the 50 percent rent boost? “No,” he replied. “White people have pretty much stopped working, but there are plenty of hard-working Latinos. I wish that I spoke Spanish because then I could do a better job explaining what I need.”

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Harvard’s border wall has been breached

An addendum to Harvard’s border wall to exclude the undocumented… Although the signs on the border wall explicitly say that no tents are allowed, it appears that a tented pro-Hamas demonstration is thriving nonetheless. View from outside the border wall:

Outside of the Yard, the exclusion of the undocumented is done on an building-by-building basis. Example:

The bakery selling $72 (updated via sticker) pies has a Black Lives Matter sign in the window:

The Harvard-owned theater up the street says that Black and BIPOC lives matter:

Folks in Cambridge apparently agree that a Black life on the sidewalk is not a matter of concern:

Maybe someone would care about the sidewalk dwellers if they flew Palestinian and/or rainbow flags?

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Harvard’s border wall to exclude the undocumented

Harvard’s best and brightest minds have proved Scientifically that border walls don’t work (see this 2019 Harvard Gazette story, for example, and “Laurence Tribe sues Trump over border wall” (MSNBC coverage of the Harvard Law School prof’s fight to keep the border open)).

This week, however, Harvard Yard is closed to the undocumented and the border fence is guarded by police. Photos from last night:

Harvard Square (the commercial area adjacent to Harvard Yard) is still open. Anyone wanting to protest against homelessness and/or assist homeless people was free to do so. However, we didn’t see any students or professional progressives stop to try to help the people sleeping on the sidewalk right in the heart of Harvard Square:

The local public high school does have an official government banner reminding people that one group of humans deserves special attention, but the group is not the noble Gazans:

Circling back to the border wall built by people who say that border walls are immoral and impractical… “Harvard Yard Closed Until Friday in Anticipation of Pro-Palestine Protests” (Crimson):

The University restricted access to Harvard Yard until Friday afternoon in apparent anticipation of student protests, amid a wave of high-profile pro-Palestine demonstrations at universities across the country including Columbia University and Yale University.

The closures are a sign that Harvard’s leadership is hoping to avoid its own version of the scene at Columbia, where more than 100 students were arrested Thursday by the New York City Police Department for their participation in an ongoing pro-Palestine encampment on the school’s main quad.

An announcement of the closure, posted to Yard entrance gates, warned of disciplinary measures against Harvard students and affiliates who bring in unauthorized structures such as tents or tables or block access to building entrances.

An email sent to students and staff who work in the Yard stated that the closures are being done “out of an abundance of caution and with the safety of our community as a priority.”

Note how “abundance of caution”, the leitmotif of the Covidcrats, was woven in! Also that “safety” is the most important goal for a human, not liberating Al-Quds, destroying the Zionist entity, or stopping a genocide and famine that is intensified by a population explosion (60,000 pregnant women, an unspecified number of pregnant people of other genders, and more than 183 births per day (source)).

The arrests at Columbia sparked a wave of solidarity protests at universities across the country, including at Harvard, where more than 200 Harvard affiliates rallied in Harvard Yard Friday demanding that the University “disclose and divest” from Israeli companies and investments in the West Bank.

The rally at Harvard was co-organized by a coalition of recognized and unrecognized pro-Palestine groups. Unrecognized activist organizations — including the African and African American Resistance Organization and Jews for Palestine, which staged an occupation of University Hall in November — have increasingly led pro-Palestine organizing on campus.

The University “shifted to HUID access only to stay ahead of potential issues with non-Harvard recognized groups,” College spokesperson Jonathan Palumbo wrote in a statement to The Crimson on Sunday.

Apologies if the photos are blurry. I’m here in Cambridge after five days in a Robinson R44 and my hands are still shaking a little. The trip was from Los Angeles to Great Barrington, Maskachusetts. Within 30 minutes after arriving in Massachusetts, I was offered free marijuana samples from one of the “essential” businesses that was allowed to stay open while schools were closed:

Every crosswalk in Great Barrington is painted in the sacred colors:

Not too many people were out and about in Great Barrington on a Tuesday afternoon in the off-season so, though I saw some folks wearing masks I wasn’t able to get a photo of an outdoor masker in a rainbow crosswalk.

Related…

Also, NYU decides that a border wall might work in some circumstances…

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Did the fate of Iran’s ballistic missile attack against the Zionist entity prove Ronald Reagan correct?

Iran launched 120 ballistic missiles at the Zionist entity earlier this month (Wikipedia) and most of them were shot down.

America’s expert class ridiculed Ronald Reagan for his credulous belief that ballistic missiles could be intercepted either in space or on their way down to earth. The Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) was Edward Teller‘s dumbest idea ever, certainly! New York Times, 1985:

A computer scientist has resigned from an advisory panel on antimissile defense, asserting that it will never be possible to program a vast complex of battle management computers reliably or to assume they will work when confronted with a salvo of nuclear missiles.

The scientist, David L. Parnas, a professor at the University of Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, who is a consultant to the Office of Naval Research in Washington, was one of nine scientists asked by the Stategic Defense Initiative Office to serve at $1,000 a day on the ”panel on computing in support of battle management.”

Professsor Parnas, an American citizen with secret military clearances, said in a letter of resignation June 28 and in 17 pages of accompanying memorandums that it would never be possible to test realistically the large array of computers that would link and control a system of sensors, antimissile weapons, guidance and aiming devices, and battle management stations.

Imagine a dusty academic quitting an easy job that paid $1000/day in pre-Biden money! At official government-certified CPI, that’s equivalent to nearly $3000/day right now.

The geniuses at the New York Times were so fond of feeling smarter than Reagan that they were still talking about this after Reagan had left office. From 1993, for example:

Star Wars can never work as a defensive system because there are too many targets in the U.S. and because the weapons arrayed against it are too diverse and powerful.

But do the recent interceptions of Iranian missiles prove that Ronald Reagan was actually smarter than the expert class?

Separately, the Iranian attack seriously injured a 7-year-old Muslim Israeli. Given that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Muslim, what is the plan among the Iranians, Houthis, Gazans, et al., who are going to destroy the Zionist entity? How will they protect fellow Muslims and, especially, Muslim children?

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Why are there foreign do-gooders working in Gaza?

We regularly read about foreigners doing heroic deeds on behalf of Palestinians seeking to liberate Al-Quds, destroy the Zionist entity, and establish a river-to-the-sea nation. Most dramatically, we have learned about the deaths of six foreigners working for World Central Kitchen (Wikipedia):

The IDF claimed that before the incident, the WCK cars had escorted an aid truck that had a gunman on its roof that fired a gun … A second gunman was spotted at the warehouse joining the first gunman, leading to the drone operators assuming that they were of Hamas, claimed the IDF. As a result, according to the IDF, the IDF drone operators believed that the WCK cars were being used by Hamas militants, and further suspected that they saw a person entering a WCK car with “a rifle but at the end of the day it was a bag”, in a “misclassification”. The IDF claimed that the drone operators believed that the WCK aid workers had remained at the warehouse with the aid truck, instead of leaving in the cars.

It doesn’t surprise me that people get killed by mistake in a war zone (especially if they share a warehouse with armed men who look just like one side’s fighters). If the risk weren’t there one couldn’t claim credit for heroism by volunteering to work in a war zone. What does surprise me is that WCK employs non-Palestinians to work in Gaza. Even before the October 7, 2023 resistance action, only a minority of adult Palestinians worked (one of the lowest rates of labor force participation of any society ever to exist, presumably at least partly due to the fact that EU and US taxpayers provide food, health care, education, etc. via UNRWA). If the majority of adult Palestinians don’t work, why can’t an aid organization do whatever it wants to do with an all-Palestinian workforce? Gaza has an enormous surplus of potential labor, in other words, so it shouldn’t make any sense to send workers rather than cash and material goods.

Here’s UNICEF, for example, sending a blond do-gooder to delivery food and water:

Instead of paying her salary, why not hire 10 locals with the same money?

There are plenty of Palestinians who can drive trucks, stock shelves with food and water, and cook. Why do UNICEF and WCK bring in foreigners to do these jobs?

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