Brooklyn Nine-Nine | 7.05
Anonymous asked:
tonight i went to the bathroom at 3 am and looked up and saw two bugs on my wall having sex and i thought of you
thank you for thinking of me. here’s a poetic adaptation of how that might‘ve gone down:
i look and see a shock above,
but really there’s,
no danger.
i pee and watch the bugs make love,
and think of him:
a stranger.
some twin peaks shit happening on my poem
I had an interesting night last night
I’m so glad I have tumblr gold so I can view this post
Tumblr gold users rise up
to you, it's a shitty sentence. to some random bitch 500 miles away, it's a fire line that'll haunt them for the next 17 years.
you don't know how impactful your writing is because it's been in your brain for far too long now. you've stared at it for hours and repeated "this sucks" over and over again to the point that you killed your capacity to feel anything about your work.
but trust me, once you get your shit out there, someone's gonna go over that paragraph you hate and go "jesus fucking christ" and put the book down to have an existential crisis.
In case you thought the OceanGate missing submersible news couldn't be worse- this has happened before. The submersibles don't even have a beacon. They rely on a gamepad controller and short texts to the mother ship for navigation.
The company knew full well the technology they're using is dogshit and not approved by anyone at all, and they were covering it up to sell more 100,000 dollar trips to rich tourists so they can see the Titanic.
The Titan Sub - An Engineer's Hot Takes : Hatches & Human-Factors
Ok so I have more to say after my first post. I'd reccomend reading that first for background on the sub's design flaws. Which, in my professional opinion, were batshit insane. And near-certainly criminally negligent.
Bit of context - I've worked in the robotics / startup space, on life-critical vehicle applications, and as a system safety engineer. And my dad used to be a submariner, so I know a frankly weird amount about submarine system design for someone who's terrified of the sea.
I found this video on OceanGate's site of a successful trip. And despite being a promotional video? It was concerning. Let me start with a quote:
"We're excited about doing it in a way that is safe, and enjoyable, and engage other people in that activity" - CEO Stockton Rush
Ouch. The dramatic irony of that being narrated over this footage of the sub being opened from the outside. The ONLY WAY it could be opened, since, to close it...
The sub was BOLTED SHUT FROM THE OUTSIDE. I thought that was a figure of speech when I first heard it. No, here they are literally bolting the only entry / egress point shut with a damn socket wrench and bolts. There's no quick egress from this. None at all without outside assistance. And it's an airtight vessel.
Just for contrast, above is a standard "door" (aka Hatch) on a submarine. It can be opened by hand, easily. (Above water at least)
I've opened and shut one of these, visiting a submarine at a museum when I was younger. The wheel can be turned to gradually retract the heavy latching mechanism, allowing even a pre-teen with the physique of wet spaghetti to turn the hatch from inside. And this was on a system designed to be operated by young, fit, able bodied men.
Because that's what good safety design is - you don't design for the best case, or the average case - you design for the worst case scenario. Especially when you're going to THE FUCKIN DEEP SEA???
The decision to bolt passengers inside? They were assuming the best case scenario - the sub could return to the ship, and the ship could recieve them and successfully unbolt the hatch. You should never do that.
So much could go wrong diving 8 times deeper than sunlight can penetrate, to near-freezing waters, in a system with negligently designed controls, and no apparent fail-safes, or redundanies in the design.
If instead of an implosion at depth, the crew had been able to surface the vessel? (There are rumors that, before the implosion, the crew and passengers knew something was wrong, and were trying to surface) And even then? It still could have been deadly. And that's a fucking horrifying thought - to come so close to surviving and still suffocate.
It infuriates me - there's a design out there already for a hatch even a scrawny kid can open. It's industry standard. And they brought out the EXTERIOR BOLTS? I can't imagine any justification for that, other than "It was the cheapest" - which seems to be a trend here.
Enough on hatches though - I'm getting claustrophobic just thinking about it. Let's talk human factors engineering.
Holy shit. They were letting passengers PILOT THE SUB IN THE DEEP SEA. Using the systems that I described... And heavily criticized... in part 1
That's, yet again, terrifying. Because when your system's lacking in safety engineering rigor, there is very little margin for error. It falls on the operator's shoulders to perform perfectly. And even with an extremely well trained operator, it's still a significant risk - people are only human, no matter how well they're trained.
It's a core tenent of safety engineering that counting on a person (or their PPE) for safety should be the last resort.
People are just never going to perform as well as a system built to meet the relevant engineering safety standards. And that's not a diss on people, us safety engineers are just anal enough to design things that are 99.999999% to 99.9999999% likely to work perfectly in any given hour.
OceanGate came so close to understanding this when they said "The vast majority of marine (and aviation) accidents are a result of operator error, not mechanical failure" which I'd agree with, since mechanical failure is statistically far less likely to occur, in systems designed with the appropriate engineering rigor. But then they used that stance to defend not pursuing classing - a process which enforces that very engineering rigor that makes mechanical failure unlikely??? (Why do I have a feeling that archived blog post might show up in court?)
Training is never going to replace safety engineering and good mechanical design - and that's why it's so terrifying OceanGate didn't comply with safety standards - but let's see how bad the training really was.
Fuck.
A presentation, the day-of?
If the tech and engineering community learns anything - I hope it's this:
We can't "innovate" our way around hundreds of years of engineering safety precident. For every innovative new technology - I don't care if it's autonomous vehicles or deep sea submarines, there are many years of engineering lessons-learned to fall back on.
It doesn't matter if a project is cutting-edge and one-of-a-kind, it's still built on some technical foundation. And those who don't learn history (or at the very least grab a copy of the standard that summarizes what everyone else in history already learned) are doomed to repeat it.
This wasn't a freak accident. This was the tragic and inevitable conclusion to a company who claimed "classing agencies only focus on validating the physical vessel. They do not ensure that operators adhere to proper operating procedures and decision-making processes – two areas that are much more important for mitigating risks at sea." - A stance that flies in the face of the core systems safety engineering, and human factors principles I cited above.
They saw their own on-the-spot skills as more important than proper validation. Then the unvalidated physical vessel imploded, and 5 people lost their lives.
I'll say it again - safety regulations are written in blood.
Other Posts:
- Part 1 - Systems-Engineering Negligence
- Part 2 - Human-Factors Negligence
- Part 3 - Corporate Negligence
- Part 4 - Detailed Timeline & Technical Breakdown of Disaster
- Ask: How a small submarine can be done right
legal disclaimer below the cut.
the thing that still bothers me about the whole oceangate fiasco is that no human being actually NEEDS to go down to personally see the titanic anymore. like CEO stockton rush’s thinly veiled “noble pursuit” of going to see titanic was to study how it continues to decay in the next decade. but in reality there are already remotely operated submersible cameras that have successfully gone down to see the ship and have been able to take pictures and recordings in places where people cant go. plus the cameras are small enough to go inside the ship and get better coverage of the interior than any bulky submersible or submarine with people inside of it. that’s how they were able to create the 3d image of the ship for research purposes without putting peoples lives at risk
it sounds like all oceangate was doing was looking at the outside of the ship for like twenty minutes before going right back up. sometimes they couldn’t even find the ship and just blindly groped around the seabed before ascending. so what exactly was the point? besides rich people being able to say they “saw the titanic” (or were in a hundred feet of it through a small porthole window)? at what point is it worth peoples lives?
All of my life, everyone has always told me, “You’re a shoe! You’re a shoe, you’re a shoe, you’re a shoe!” And then today I just stopped and I said, “What if I don’t wanna be a shoe? What if I wanna be a purse, y’know? Or a- or a hat!” No, I don’t want you to buy me a hat, I’m saying that I am a hat. It’s a metaphor, Daddy!
JENNIFER ANISTON as RACHEL GREEN Friends | Season 1 (1994-1995)
i cannot believe that since we started using the destiel meme as a breaking news alert there hasn’t been ONE destiel au fic where they’re co-anchors on the morning news.