A San Francisco Based 40 foot custom boat “Mureadritta’s XL” that did
the Pacific Cup SF to Hawaii race was on its way home yesterday when they were hit by a whale 500nm north of Hawaii.
The crew was in contact with the owner via Sat phone. They tried stuffing the hole with sails and wrapping the outside of the boat with a jib to stem the flow but were not having any luck.
They eventually decided to abandon the boat on Tuesday morning. They were picked up last night around 8pm by a ship then transfered to a fishing trawler and are expected back at Honolulu on Friday.
All sailors are safe and un injured. They had all the proper safety gear EPIRB etc. Very lucky crew.
Lucky? I think proper planning was probably more relevant in this story since hitting a whale and sinking 500 miles from shore seems like bad luck to me.
Interesting that innovation has made sailboats lighter and stronger, and personal rescue equipment more reliable and comfortable, but there really is no open water hull-patch kit available yet. Stuffing the hole with sails sound like a scene from a sci-fi movie where people patch the hole in a space station with their pillows. Didn’t Heinlein write about that too? I wonder if there could be a better way, like pushing an umbrella-like device through the hole that could expand and then seal against the hull to stop the leak at least to the point where a sump could keep up with the flow. Probably too expensive to make it worthwhile to develop and test since the threat (being hit by a whale) is low and the asset value (of a sailboat) is only marginally high. I had my share of dangerous experiences sailing across the Pacific, but fortunately the only whales I saw kept their distance.
A snafu on the Google servers led to an exposure of another product about to be released to the public as a beta:
Writelys index page briefly showed an introduction to GDrive (as illustrated in the screenshot), then linked to pages available to Google employees only on the Google VPN.
Weak security, and scary foreshadowing of the safety of the product itself, or guerilla marketing?
Ooooh, I want one of these in my neighborhood. Check out the awesome stats on the engine:
Particulate Matter (PM) reduced by 90 percent over the cleanest diesel buses now in Metro’s fleet
Carbon Monoxide (CO) reduced by 90 percent over the cleanest diesel buses now in Metro’s fleet
Hydrocarbons (HC) reduced by 90 percent
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) reduced by 40-60 percent
Nitrogen Oxide (NOx) reduced by 50 percent
When Washington state mandates biodiesel (B5?), there is likely to be even more emission reductions. Ok, the next question for me is why the “big heavy box” design is still around. What if they took old airplane fueselages that are doing nothing but gathering dust and repurpose them for public transportation? They are light, strong and probably far more efficient. If they rode high-enough you wouldn’t even need bumpers on the fueselage, just the chassis. I’ll see if I can doodle something into an example.
I guess I do not find it surprising that they want controls, but it is a but curious how they are trying to get them put into place:
The Guardian has learned that police and security agencies have been lobbying ministers and senior officials, expressing fears about the potential for voice-over-internet-protocol technologies to hide a caller’s identity. Their aim? To get VoIP providers to monitor calls and find ways to identify who is calling whom – and even record them.
Though enforcement agencies say their main concern is VoIP’s inability to deliver a 999 service, sources counter that this is a smokescreen to cover police efforts to monitor calls and identify individuals – an agenda that becomes more credible in the light of submissions made by police to the communications regulator, Ofcom.
[…]
“At present, law enforcement agencies have great difficulty in tracing the origin of VoIP calls,” wrote [Detective Superintendent] Macleod. “This poses significant threats to our democratic society”
[…]
According to experts at BT’s Martlesham Heath research labs, the only real solution would be a complete overhaul of the routers that make up the internet backbone, an exercise they estimate will cost £1bn.
“The network was never designed with identity in mind. When it was set up it was for the free and easy exchange of data.”
The Guardian does a fine job explaining how portable devices and VoIP are becoming so common so fast that the government regulators are having a hard time keeping up. The quote by Macleod is very telling of the kind of one-sided position the police might attempt to force, unfortunately. In other words, are we meant to believe that surveillance does not also pose a threat to democratic society?
