15107 —
Submitted 7 days ago

Tom Heaverlo 4 days ago
It's a legit livery. Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6u_sXrTsYik

Jorge NoronhaPhoto Uploader about 13 hours ago
It's the livery made for the 2025 Tiger Meet in Portugal, this is a Portuguese F 16

Lockheed F-22 Raptor (02036)
Submitted 7 days ago

Raptor Demo Team
Captain Nick "Laz" Le Tourneau

And let's talk about wind turbines that they love. A slight problem, one of a few but this is the worst, yet one that the Democrats are too stupid and too arrogant to admit: The machines are lasting for one-third of their advertised life. It's an engineering issue that no one has solved and that I will explain presently. The issue has required bailouts of Siemens (#2 wind turbine producer, #1 market share in the U.S.) by the German gov't. Similar info for the others isn't publicly available but read on and you will see that ALL of them face it.

It's actually simple. Wind fields are mathematically chaotic. The flows are NOT uniform. Think of wind not as the unified force that we think we feel outside because we don't stop to analyze it, but as what it really is: an infinite number of constantly varying smaller forces. This means that the wind pressure that makes the blades turn varies GREATLY on the blades. Different not only the top vs. the bottom of the blades, but along their entire length, and constantly varying on each foot of each blade as the three of them turn.

As a result, the turbines wobble at the hub. The bearings and gearboxes are warranted for 20 years but are failing at 7 years. The issue has been known since the very beginning. Anyone here drive past wind turbines and notice how many of them aren't turning? That's why. Think it's one of those easy, boring things that the engineers in the basement can fix? Think again. They can't fix it, and as a result, today's wind turbines are tomorrow's white elephants. In utility lingo, "stranded costs." We will be paying those bills for decades.

Even when they are "working," wind and solar are the least reliable power sources. Democrats hate facts and ignore critical problems. Why not, when your solution is to just raise taxes? Mr. Teixeira, I love ya to death, but I'm afraid that, alas, your underlying thesis is tragically incorrect. The "progressives" who run the Democratic Party are every bit as hooked on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as they have ever been. They continue to lie their asses off at every turn, and to stick us with the bills for their crusade.

1. Countries are back-pedaling away from their climate commitments as fast as they can. Ten years after the Paris Agreement on reducing emissions—which as, David Wallace-Wells notes, had been treated by the U.N.’s Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, “as though its significance approached, if not exceeded, that of the U.N. charter itself”—leaders of major countries can’t even be bothered to show up at the U.N.’s annual climate change conferences. For the upcoming November conference in Brazil (COP30), the overwhelming majority of countries have not submitted formal decarbonization plans and, of those that have, most are not compatible with the ambitious goals laid out by the Paris Agreement.

2. The U.S. is not back-pedaling, but sprinting, away from its climate commitments. The Trump administration pulled out of the Paris Agreement and has eviscerated Biden-era climate policy, including the elimination of subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. There has been a thunderous lack of protest to these moves other than press releases from climate NGOs and garment-rending jeremiads from the usual suspects like Bill McKibben.

3. Despite decades of well-funded programs, mandates and targets, global progress on eliminating fossil fuels has been extremely slow. Today, 81 percent of world primary energy consumption still comes from fossil fuels and only 15 percent from renewables, less than half of which comes from wind and solar. The renewables share is higher for electricity generation, 32 percent, but electricity only accounts for 21 percent of global energy consumption. //

The euphoria of the 2015 Paris Agreement has run into the harsh realities of a global energy system based largely around fossil fuels that is very, very hard to change quickly. Nor should we wish to do so given the likely associated costs. As Vaclav Smil points out:

[W]e are a fossil-fueled civilization whose technical and scientific advances, quality of life and prosperity rest on the combustion of huge quantities of fossil carbon, and we cannot simply walk away from this critical determinant of our fortunes in a few decades, never mind years. Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat…

And as he tartly observes re the 2050 deadline:

People toss out these deadlines without any reflection on the scale and the complexity of the problem…What’s the point of setting goals which cannot be achieved? People call it aspirational. I call it delusional.

This reality has begun to sink in for political leaders around the world. Not only is net-zero by 2050 not going to happen but their constituents have a remarkable lack of interest in seeing this goal attained. In the United States, voters view climate change as a third tier issue, vastly prioritize the cost and reliability of energy over its effect on the climate and, if action on climate change it to be taken, are primarily concerned with the effect of such actions on consumer costs and economic growth. Making fast progress toward net-zero barely registers. //

Roger Pielke Jr.’s “iron law of climate policy”—that when policies focused on economic concerns confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic concerns that will win out every time—remains undefeated. //

You’ll need to go to the Windows 11 Start menu, type Registry Editor, and then step through the folder file tree much like you’d do in the Windows 10 Settings menu. Here’s the directory you’re looking for: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Once you’ve entered the “Advanced” folder, right-click to create a “New” DWORD (32-bit) Value.

Name it Start_ShowClassicMode. Then right-click that value, select Modify, and set the “Value Data” to 1. You’ll then need to restart your computer.

Workers with ropes could make the moai "walk" in zig-zag motion along roads tailor-made for the purpose. //

In 2012, Lipo and his colleague, Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona, showed that you could transport a 10-foot, 5-ton moai a few hundred yards with just 18 people and three strong ropes by employing a rocking motion. //

Lipo was not the first to test the walking hypothesis. Earlier work includes that of Czech experimental archaeologist Pavel Pavel, who conducted similar practical experiments on Easter Island in the 1980s after being inspired by Thor Heyerdahl's Kon Tiki. (Heyerdahl even participated in the experiments.) Pavel's team was able to demonstrate a kind of "shuffling" motion, and he concluded that just 16 men and one leader were sufficient to transport the statues. //

"Pavel deserves recognition for taking oral traditions seriously and challenging the dominant assumption of horizontal transport, a move that invited ridicule from established scholars," Lipo and Hunt wrote. "His experiments suggested that vertical transport was feasible and consistent with cultural memory. Our contribution builds on this by showing that ancestral engineers intentionally designed statues for walking. Those statues were later modified to stand erect on ceremonial platforms, a transformation that effectively erased the morphological features essential for movement."

A 36-year-old man showed up to the emergency department of the Massachusetts General Hospital, severely unwell from a puzzling set of conditions. He had abnormalities in his lungs, intestines, blood, liver, and lymphatic system—and, of course, no single clear explanation. His case was such a riddle that a master clinician with an expertise in clinical reasoning was called in to help unravel it.

Liberia’s aviation safety systems have come under critical review following an urgent inspection tour of the Roberts International Airport (RIA) and the Liberia Civil Aviation Authority (LCAA) by House Speaker Richard N. Koon.

The Speaker’s visit was prompted by reports of malfunctioning navigation and safety equipment that have left Liberia’s only international airport vulnerable and below international standards. The tour also followed revelations that the country “failed miserably” during a 2022 audit conducted by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). ///

The airport collects a lot of money for every passenger. Why doesn't that fund all this?

Yes it does.

Seems like a lot doesn't it?

But, we must consider scale.

A 747-400 carries around 63,500 gallons of fuel, which actually makes that gallon-per-second burn rate quite efficient when you think about it.

At cruising altitude (around 35,000 feet), a 747 burns approximately 5-5.5 gallons per mile.

Works out to about 0.2 miles per gallon, which sounds terrible until you consider that the plane is moving nearly 400 people and their luggage at about 550 miles per hour.

Break it down per passenger, and you're looking at roughly 85-100 passenger miles per gallon. //

Greyhound many years ago measured its bus transport efficiency in passenger-miles/gallon. Their goal was to …wait for it… get to and maintain that very 85–100 passenger-miles/gallon number range.

There's no consumer more averse to DRM-adjacent restrictions on computer technology than the data hoarders who buy NAS devices. Synology's thinking here was close to incomprehensible. When I read about it I assumed it had been sold off to private equity or hired an AI trained on a remote learning MBA syllabus as CEO.

"If you bring a charged particle like an electron near the surface, because the helium is dielectric, it'll create a small image charge underneath in the liquid," said Pollanen. "A little positive charge, much weaker than the electron charge, but there'll be a little positive image there. And then the electron will naturally be bound to its own image. It'll just see that positive charge and kind of want to move toward it, but it can't get to it, because the helium is completely chemically inert, there are no free spaces for electrons to go."

Obviously, to get the helium liquid in the first place requires extremely low temperatures. But it can actually remain liquid up to temperatures of 4 Kelvin, which doesn't require the extreme refrigeration technologies needed for things like transmons. Those temperatures also provide a natural vacuum, since pretty much anything else will also condense out onto the walls of the container. //

Erbium68 Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
8m
1,829
Subscriptor
The trap and what they have achieved so far is very interesting. I have to say the mere 40dB of the amplifier (assuming that is voltage gain not power gain) is remarkable for what is surely a very tiny signal (and that is microwatts out, not megawatts).
But, as a practical quantum computer?
It still has to run at below 4K and there still has to be a transition to electronics at close to STP. The refrigeration is going to be bulky and power consuming. Of course the answer to that is to run a lot of qubits in one envelope, but getting there is going to take a long time.

We seem to have had the easy technological hits. The steam engine, turbines, IC engines, dynamos and alternators all came with relatively simple fabrication techniques and run at room temperature except for the hot bits. Early electronics began with a technical barrier - vacuum enclosures - but never needed to scale these beyond single or dual devices, and by the time that became a barrier to progress, transistors were already happening and it was then a matter of scaling size down and gates up. The electronics revolution happened at room temperature, maybe with some air cooling or liquid cooling for high powers.

Now we have the issue that getting a few gates to work needs a vacuum chamber at below 4K. Scaling is going to be expensive. And progress in conventional semiconductors will continue.
This approach may be wildly successful like epitaxial silicon technology. But it may also flop like the Wankel engine - the existing technology advancing faster than the initially complex and new technology can. //

dmsilev Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
16y
6,561
Subscriptor

Erbium68 said:
The trap and what they have achieved so far is very interesting. I have to say the mere 40dB of the amplifier (assuming that is voltage gain not power gain) is remarkable for what is surely a very tiny signal (and that is microwatts out, not megawatts).
But, as a practical quantum computer?
It still has to run at below 4K and there still has to be a transition to electronics at close to STP. The refrigeration is going to be bulky and power consuming. Of course the answer to that is to run a lot of qubits in one envelope, but getting there is going to take a long time.

Compared to a datacenter computing system, it's actually not all that hugely power consuming. In rough numbers, 10-12 kW of electricity will get you a pulse tube cryocooler which can cool 50 or 100 kilograms of stuff down to about 4 K and keep it at that temperature with 1-2 W of heat load at the cold end. That's enough for a lot of 4 K qubits and first-stage electronics. Add in an extra kW for another pump and you can cool maybe 10 kg to ~1.5 K, with about 0.5 W of headroom. A couple more pumps at a kW or so each, some helium3 and a lot of expensive plumbing, and you have a dilution refrigerator, 20 mK with about 20-40 uW of headroom.

Compare that 10-15 kW with the draw from a single rack of AI inference engines.

A new listing of the 50 most concerning pieces of space debris in low-Earth orbit is dominated by relics more than a quarter-century old, primarily dead rockets left to hurtle through space at the end of their missions. //

Russia and the Soviet Union lead the pack with 34 objects listed in McKnight's Top 50, followed by China with 10, the United States with three, Europe with two, and Japan with one. Russia's SL-16 and SL-8 rockets are the worst offenders, combining to take 30 of the Top 50 slots. //

The list published Friday is an update to a paper authored by McKnight in 2020. This year's list goes a step further by analyzing the overall effect on debris risk if some or all of the worst offenders were removed. If someone sent missions to retrieve all 50 of the objects, the overall debris-generating potential in low-Earth orbit would be reduced by 50 percent, according to McKnight. If just the Top 10 were removed, the risk would be cut by 30 percent. //

China, on the other hand, frequently abandons upper stages in orbit. China launched 21 of the 26 hazardous new rocket bodies over the last 21 months, each averaging more than 4 metric tons (8,800 pounds). Two more came from US launchers, one from Russia, one from India, and one from Iran. //

Since 2000, China has accumulated more dead rocket mass in long-lived orbits than the rest of the world combined, according to McKnight. "But now we're at a point where it's actually kind of accelerating in the last two years as these constellations are getting deployed."

These vehicular attacks present a troubling new twist on ICE enforcement operations in Chicago. ICE agents have already faced doxing, threats, and physical assault this year, as well as several incidents of lethal ambushes. Those attacking federal officers while they carry out their duty to enforce federal law have no excuse for their lawless violence. Their actions only provide an excuse for federal authorities to respond with their own aggressive tactics. And, while it’s fair to question whether those federal actions are warranted, it’s clear to see the opposition that prompted them.

When aggression follows aggression, it only leads America down a path towards further violence, less freedom, and an erosion of the ordered liberty that has made America unique and successful. When administrations set concerning new precedents, they must answer the question, what is the justification, and what is the cost?

The two religious kibbutzim near Gaza are Sa'ad and Alumim. Sa'ad did not suffer a single death or kidnapping. Hamas terrorists did not enter Sa'ad even though it was less than a mile from Kfar Aza, where Hamas killed 54 civilians and kidnapped 20 others. Twenty-six IDF soldiers were killed trying to liberate Kfar Aza.

In Alumim, the town's armed security prevented Hamas from killing or kidnapping any Israelis. Hamas then targeted the Thai workers in the fields, killing 22 of them and kidnapping four. It is reasonable to assume that Sa'ad had armed security similar to Alumim, and thus, Hamas decided not to attack. //

In conclusion, gun laws that allow for personal gun ownership with fewer restrictions certainly help residents protect their families and homes from an attack. However, if the residents do not believe in purchasing firearms, then those laws are meaningless. Thus, even if Israel had allowed all of its civilians to purchase and carry guns without a permit, it is unlikely that it would have prevented the atrocities of October 7 due to the demographics that Hamas targeted that day. In short, many politically conservative Israelis hope their leftist counterparts wake up one day and understand the need to protect themselves without relying on the IDF or the police. Even after October 7, it remains to be seen whether that will be the case.

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
10y
4,490
Subscriptor
p-chapman said:
Ok, if Shackleton would have known about what seemed to work in the Antarctic ice, why did Shackleton cheap out for the Endurance?

Wikipedia suggests that the fully equipped, custom-built Discovery cost 51,000 pounds.
Ignoring British inflation adjustments over the next decade or so, Endurance was bought for 11,600 pounds. (And he also spent 3,200 pounds on the Aurora, the smaller 2nd ship for the expedition group at the other side of the Antarctic continent -- this was all about an Antarctic land crossing, after all.) However, the Discovery was slightly over twice the GRT (gross registered tonnage) of the Endurance. (GRT isn't always the best metric, as for example the bulbous Fram, shorter than the Endurance, still has a larger GRT.)

So let's say that a smaller custom-built ship the size of the Endurance would have been, say 2/3rds the cost (as cost won't scale linearly). Thus something like 34k custom build cost vs. 12k for the actual Endurance. Plus some additional customization costs for the Endurance that must have been added on afterwards.

In any case, well over twice the cost to buy a custom ship for likely the biggest expense of the expedition!
(I suppose the cost ratio would have been guessed by anyone buying a depreciated used car vs. a new one...)

What about the diagonally reinforced Deutschland ship, mentioned in this article?

Shackleton was well aware of it, as he had wanted to buy it for his earlier 1907 expedition. But as wikipedia notes:

Thus at one point even 11,000 pounds, less than Endurance's cost, was too much for his finances.

So I won't write Shackleton off as being a dumbass when it came to choosing a ship. But it still bears looking into, just what the Endurance's structure was, how it compares to the Fram and Discovery and Deutschland -- and whether any useful reinforcements could have added at moderate cost within a reasonable time.

Cost was certainly a factor. If you don't have £50,000 available, but can scrounge up £11,600, then your choices are to either go in the cheaper ship or don't go at all. Men like Shackleton don't wait for the money to turn up. They do what they can with what they can get now.

Also worth noting is that the design compromises required to make a ship really good at freezing into pack ice tend to make it relatively miserable to live with at other times. It'll have a hull shape that yields a less comfortable motion in ocean waves. It'll be heavier for its length and beam, thus slower and less able to get out of the way of bad weather. It'll be crisscrossed internally by beams and braces that make it awkward to live and work aboard. A higher percentage of its total displacement will be its own structure, leaving less for people and cargo; thus, it needs to be bigger for the same usable capacity. That, in turn, makes it more expensive to maintain and operate after you've paid off the higher initial cost.

Designing Endurance to handle bumping into ice floes, but not to freeze into pack ice, was a perfectly reasonable decision for the ship's original mission. Picking it for the expedition was a justified risk, against the backdrop of all the other insane risks being taken by the very nature of the expedition. Letting it freeze into the pack ice was not planned or wanted – it was simply the only possible option left to Shackleton after all other options had been closed off by conditions that, until they happened, could only be foreseen as a vague and imprecise probability or possibility. //

atomicpowerrobot Smack-Fu Master, in training
3y
66
ramases said:
It is called the Action Fallacy. It describes our tendency to elevate leaders who appear decisive in a crisis over leaders who manage to avoid the crisis in the first place.

Martin Gutmann talks about it specifically within the context of Ernest Shackleton:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg
Click to expand...

The Action Fallacy isn't really appropriate here b/c the bar isn't "not getting stuck in the Antarctic Ice" but rather "crossing the Antarctic continent by land first". First being a critical part of that bar. It was difficult enough to secure funding for these "Exploration Age" adventures but nobody was going to fund anyone to do it second.

By the definition of the Action Fallacy, you are a better leader than Shackleton b/c you did not get a bunch of men stuck in the ice in the Antarctic by choosing the wrong ship. But you also didn't attempt to be the first person to cross the Antarctic continent by land.

Shackleton had previously nearly made it to be the first person to reach the South Pole, having to turn around and very nearly starving on his return journey, after which he lost out on that particular honor to Roald Amundsen. His "settling" for the Endurance was likely a concession made in an attempt to win honors for himself, his (volunteer) crew, and his country.

Of course you evaluate the risks, but at a certain point, for the immortal honors of doing something first, you pays your moneys and you takes your chances.

His legendary advertisement for the expedition read:
"Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
Now that may have been real, or it may have been apocryphal, but it does accurately represent the situation that all of the men knowingly signed up for.

icosapode said:
I personally think it's important to have a clear eyed understanding of people who are often held up as heroes. A more nuanced picture that includes their faults as well as strengths doesn't diminish the things they did achieve after all.
That negates the point of having heroes though. We don't celebrate heroes for their faults. We all have faults - pointing out that they are no different is counterproductive. We celebrate them for the things they DID achieve beyond the standard works of men and women. Sniping at dead men who did great things b/c they weren't perfect is petty and driven by envy.

You don't have to idolize Shackleton's trip planning to recognize him as the type of man you want when the chips are down. As was said of him:
“For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.”

p-chapman Ars Centurion
7y
220
Continuing trying to be an amateur historian in the time span of only a few minutes -- There's a lot more back and forth one can get into, regarding Shackelton's knowledge of ice and choice of ships.

Shackleton certainly knew something about building for ice, so he wasn't entirely ignorant:

[Edit: That's sort of the TL;DR of this long winded post. Shackleton certainly had some experience with ships for ice. Getting a custom built ship probably was far too much for his finances. As arjalon wrote, it was likely Endurance or nothing.]

For a 1902 British government expedition, with Robert F. Scott in charge, and Shackleton as 3rd officer or something, the custom built ship RRS Discovery was described this way:
Having observed previous expedition boats, particularly Nansen’s Fram, he [Scott] knew how to maximize the Discovery’s chances of not becoming enmeshed in the ice. The ship had therefore been designed with a well-rounded, bulbous hull made from thick wooden beams which meant it could rise up without being crushed by the extreme pressure caused by million-ton ice floes on the move.
[in Ranulph Fiennes' book on Shackleton]

Well, a quick look at pics makes the Discovery look fairly conventional, with some slab sides up top at least, and wikipedia says this:

Early discussions on building a dedicated polar exploration ship considered replicating Fridtjof Nansen's ship Fram, but that vessel was designed specifically for working through the pack ice of the Arctic. The British ship would have to cross thousands of miles of open ocean before reaching the Antarctic, so a more conventional design was chosen.

Still, it goes on to describe all the various heavy wooden construction used in the ship, so it was heavily reinforced, in some manner. But I don't know about whether diagonal reinforcing, as opposed to heavier hull, ribs, and cross beams. (The Fram had some diagonals.)

Whatever the details of its construction, the Discovery was stuck in Antarctic ice for two years. And came out OK.

So it might not have been a Fram-like gold standard, but would have been well regarded as very suitable.

Ok, if Shackleton would have known about what seemed to work in the Antarctic ice, why did Shackleton cheap out for the Endurance?

Wikipedia suggests that the fully equipped, custom-built Discovery cost 51,000 pounds.
Ignoring British inflation adjustments over the next decade or so, Endurance was bought for 11,600 pounds. (And he also spent 3,200 pounds on the Aurora, the smaller 2nd ship for the expedition group at the other side of the Antarctic continent -- this was all about an Antarctic land crossing, after all.) However, the Discovery was slightly over twice the GRT (gross registered tonnage) of the Endurance. (GRT isn't always the best metric, as for example the bulbous Fram, shorter than the Endurance, still has a larger GRT.)

So let's say that a smaller custom-built ship the size of the Endurance would have been, say 2/3rds the cost (as cost won't scale linearly). Thus something like 34k custom build cost vs. 12k for the actual Endurance. Plus some additional customization costs for the Endurance that must have been added on afterwards.

In any case, well over twice the cost to buy a custom ship for likely the biggest expense of the expedition!
(I suppose the cost ratio would have been guessed by anyone buying a depreciated used car vs. a new one...)

What about the diagonally reinforced Deutschland ship, mentioned in this article?

Shackleton was well aware of it, as he had wanted to buy it for his earlier 1907 expedition. But as wikipedia notes:
Unfortunately, Christiansen's price – £11,000, or approximately £1,150,000 in 2018 terms[3] – was beyond Shackleton's means; he eventually acquired the much older, smaller Nimrod for around half of Bjørn's price
Thus at one point even 11,000 pounds, less than Endurance's cost, was too much for his finances.

So I won't write Shackleton off as being a dumbass when it came to choosing a ship. But it still bears looking into, just what the Endurance's structure was, how it compares to the Fram and Discovery and Deutschlan -- and whether any useful reinforcements could have added at moderate cost within a reasonable time.

Again, this is all a quick & dirty look at the subject and I'm sure one can find more and better evidence for all sorts of opinions & counter opinions.

Rirere Ars Centurion
12y
263
Subscriptor++
Wheels Of Confusion said:
Seems to me competence might include not making a voyage in a ship you're well-informed isn't up to the task. That's like having to make an important cross-continental road trip on a beater with bad spark plugs.

Now now, I didn't say that the competence was all Shackleton!

While I do think Shackleton demonstrated some admirable on-the-ice leadership (but also some questionable decisions, of which the most infamous is probably his treatment of the carpenter, McNish), the name I was actually thinking of was Frank Worsley, who navigated during the journey of the James Caird through 800 miles of the nastiest weather and waves imaginable using a sextant and brief moments of sun, hitting an island at that distance that was more or less the size of a speck compared to the open seas.

wow, that's a long sentence oops //

ramases Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
14y
8,332
Subscriptor++
Wheels Of Confusion said:
Seems to me competence might include not making a voyage in a ship you're well-informed isn't up to the task. That's like having to make an important cross-continental road trip on a beater with bad spark plugs.

It is called the Action Fallacy. It describes our tendency to elevate leaders who appear decisive in a crisis over leaders who manage to avoid the crisis in the first place.

Martin Gutmann talks about it specifically within the context of Ernest Shackleton:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Z9IpTVfUg //

Nooge Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
11y
188
Subscriptor
TheColinous said:
There is no accounting for the urge "If I don't get there first, the wrong 'un will get there before me" to explain why people take risks that in hindsight prove less than intelligent.

The thing is this was his already his third trip to Antartica, having failed twice (on the Discovery and Nimrod expeditions) to be first to the pole (Amundsen was first). He was already knighted. But he wanted to be first to cross the entire Antarctic from sea to sea. Despite his failure on Endurance he chose to return to the Antarctic a fourth time but died of a heart attack en route. The guy just couldn’t get enough.

There’s a podcast called Cautionary Tales that I highly recommend in general, but especially the mini series on the Antarctic expeditions of Scott and Amundsen, the two explorers whose race to the South Pole was intertwined. It explores the motivations of the men and how that affected their decisions and errors.

Here’s the first episode
View: https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/south-pole-race-david-and-goliath-on-ice //

c1josh Seniorius Lurkius
15y
5
When the 'Endurance' was launched (as 'Polaris') in Dec. 1912, as a ship designed for interaction with ice, it was not designed for extended polar exploration. It was built to bring wealthy tourists to the edges of the ice for hunting big game. 'Fram' a true polar exploration ship was launched 20 years earlier and successfully survived extended periods of time frozen into pack ice in the Arctic. She was designed by Colin Archer for the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
The key design feature was a hull that didn't include any vertical portions below the waterline. It was designed to be lifted by the ice as the pressure increased, not crushed. And it was build HEAVILY, at 5m shorter and 50 tons heavier than 'Endurance'. //

Oldmanalex Ars Legatus Legionis
13y
11,321
Subscriptor++
citizencoyote said:
It's not criticizing Shackleton, it's asking a very valid question: why did someone with so much experience, knowledge, and preparation make such an obvious mistake/gamble? Was it hubris? Lack of funding? A combination of both? Some other reason? We won't ever know because Shackleton never explained his reasoning.

In a nutshell: the article doesn't say, "Wow, what a bonehead Shackleton was," it asks, "Why would someone otherwise so experienced make this choice?"
Because it was that or nothing. And Shackleton, like the other great explorers of the age, was a risk-taker. Any person who would take a wooden boat deep into the Weddell (or the Beaufort) Sea is someone who has more than my tolerance for risk. And risk-taking involves an assumption that bad luck will not occur. Erebus and Terror sailed on an assumption that they would not enter the Arctic in the three coldest successive years of the 19th century, and when they did, they were buggered. Scott did not assume that the Antarctic winter would be so unusually cold that his sled runners would be unable to melt a lubricating water layer, and Shackleton did not assume that he would be caught in an unusually bad Antarctic ice season.

And look at the timing. In August 1914, there were other things on most peoples' minds. And Shackleton's misjudgments here cost several men great hardship, and one several appendages. At the same time, the world leaders made decisions that killed over 20 million.

And look at ourselves. We know the risks we are taking, and the consequences. But, we are drifting into both a loss of our (relative) freedom, and a possible human extinction, because we cannot tell a few hundred greedy psychopaths to change course on global destruction. I think Shackleton would have been embarrassed on our behalf. //

matt_w Ars Scholae Palatinae
17y
1,169
One of my favorite songs is a Chris Thile cover of a Josh Ritter song that romanticizes this story.

View: https://youtu.be/_n3wHljJQ4M?si=RyGPFIQVEsiwEww8

In 1915, intrepid British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew were stranded for months in the Antarctic after their ship, Endurance, was trapped by pack ice, eventually sinking into the freezing depths of the Weddell Sea. Miraculously, the entire crew survived. The prevailing popular narrative surrounding the famous voyage features two key assumptions: that Endurance was the strongest polar ship of its time, and that the ship ultimately sank after ice tore away the rudder.

However, a fresh analysis reveals that Endurance would have sunk even with an intact rudder; it was crushed by the cumulative compressive forces of the Antarctic ice with no single cause for the sinking. Furthermore, the ship wasn't designed to withstand those forces, and Shackleton was likely well aware of that fact, according to a new paper published in the journal Polar Record. Yet he chose to embark on the risky voyage anyway. //

The same shipyard that modified Deutschland had also just signed a contract to build Endurance (then called Polaris). So both Shackleton and the shipbuilders knew how destructive compressive ice could be and how to bolster a ship against it. Yet Endurance was not outfitted with diagonal beams to strengthen its hull. And knowing this, Shackleton bought Endurance anyway for his 1914–1915 voyage. In a 1914 letter to his wife, he even compared the strength of its construction unfavorably with that of the Nimrod, the ship he used for his 1907–1909 expedition. So Shackleton had to know he was taking a big risk.

If you wanted to build the quintessential fictional character that embodies the leftist trope of the “toxic male,” you would be hard-pressed to find a better avatar than James Bond. Find the male trait the activist set has railed against, and 007 has that tucked away inside his elitist tuxedo. //

Over the weekend, it was noticed that on Amazon Prime, they had a series of new series of promotional images for the collection of James Bond films on the platform. //

Also noticed: Every single gun originally portrayed was either airbrushed out or the image was cropped to remove the weapon from being visible

For years, I have used mainstream cloud storage services, including Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud. They are all convenient, but rely on centralized servers. This creates reliance on centralized infrastructure, and once I started thinking more about cost, control, and avoiding vendor lock-in, I knew I had to consider other options.

I recently replaced Google Drive with a self‑hosted NextCloud server, but there are several other options to explore. So, I tried Syncthing.

Using Syncthing has paid off in several ways, most notably through superior synchronization speed and efficiency for large files and folders, as well as true decentralization and local redundancy.