Comment by samizdis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by samizdis | Hacker News Reader

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> Some people have suggested unloading the ship. I don't think you realize the infrastructure required to unload a ship.

It seems, though, that a partial unloading is being considered by a professional in the field according to quotes in an article in The Guardian [1]:

However, Peter Berdowski, CEO of Boskalis, a specialist dredging company that has sent a crew to the scene, said data so far suggested “it is not really possible to pull it loose” and that the ship may need to be unloaded. “We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Berdowski told Dutch television.

He said the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal. “It’s like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand.”

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/25/suez-canal-blo...

Perhaps the classic beached whale clearing technique [0] would work.

[0] https://youtu.be/V6CLumsir34

Amazing reporting, highly enjoyed the narrative.

Yes let's blow up a whale, beached as. What could possibly go wrong? Remains to be seen.

This pun deserves all the upvotes it can get.

Upvoted you, too — I would have skimmed right by the (great) pun had I not noticed your comment.

Just handed out the updoots left right and sideways myself, because my points on this video comment just hit the triple digits (!!!). What a time to be alive.

That's actually the same ballpark as mine; thanks again for sharing it, I'm sure it'll be one of my all time favourites as the years go by.

Please don't do this here.

That's a pretty cheeky comment: You've got one karma and just created the account; GP has been around for awhile.

Appeal to authority based on points.

And your appeal is to what, exactly? Answer: It's to the "authority" of an opinion offered by an unidentified newcomer, with no indication why the rest of us shouldn't dismiss the opinion as unhelpful noise.

In contrast, points and longevity serve as a rough, very-democratic measure of a poster's cumulative contributions to the community here, and thus (indirectly) of how well the poster has grokked the local cultural norms. That, in turn, gives readers useful information about the weight that they might wish to consider giving to the view(s) expressed by the poster.

(Apropos of which: I see that you still have a total of -1 points for the all of five days that your account has been active.)

Please don't do this here.

Wow, thanks; I was wondering if anyone would notice - there was one or two a while later, and I was happy someone got it.

Then came back just then after a few busy days and had to do a massive double take at the number of upvotes; I probably shouldn't discuss the actual number, but it's my most upvoted reply ever - there must be a lot more punsters here! :)

I used the reference to the NZ "Beached As" due to its brilliance, if you haven't seen it it's a silly treat especially if you love the accent.

And again I greatly enjoyed that sardonic tone of the original video, which I saved for future repeats.

I don't have to click that to know what it is.

If you haven't seen it, this is a remastered version and much better than the ones I remember watching ~20 years ago.

I got my Wikipedia chops by writing the article about that video. Got the Oddball Barnstar.

holy crap amazing. Why doesn't news editorialize like this anymore like this reporter did at the end? Simple, obvious, and stated fairly. You don't always need to talk to the guy who thought the whale hailstorm was still a good idea.

Old school journalism? That kind of reporting takes too long — two minutes until the event is shown — to lay out the facts in a responsible way... giving everyone a clear idea of the initial problem, the proposed solution, and what the proposed solution was supposed to accomplish.

Aside from taking too long, it fails to manipulate the audience by giving them a prepackaged take that aligns with the viewers' preconcieved bias, enrages the opposition, and generates audience affinity with the news outlet. Where's the profit in that?

I'm a little confused by this take: editorializing doesn't happen anymore, which is sad. It doesn't happen anymore because editorializing occurs, which is good, because editorializing is bad?

The goal of news media is not to provide a useful information stream, but to gather repeat views (follow the money).

The news barons of the past foolishly conflated the two, or at least assumed the first was optimal at producing the second.

Today, we’ve learned better — there are far more effective strategies available, largely by exploiting our natural search for drama.

That is, the reporting was good at its goal of good reporting; but this was not the correct goal to have.

Fits into a tik-tok limit of 3 minutes.

Journalism, a lost art.

Thank you. I haven’t laughed that hard since the start of the pandemic.

Thank you, it's also a time capsule preserving the "hw" pronunciation of whale. (Which seems to be slowly disappearing.)

Weirdly my elementary-school-age kids were taught in kindergarten that "wh" is a separate sound from "w", and that the received pronunciation is "hw".

That's in Seattle, where al of nobody does the "hw" thing.

So that was a surprise to find in their little takehome pages. I'm guessing those handouts were first xerox'd 40 years ago...

> No respectable seagull would attempt to taggle[?] [the particles of dead whale] anyway.

tackle?

I cried, fantastic.

Instead of listing possible technologies and solutions to the problem of re-floating the container ship, why not make an ordered list of worst possible outcomes and approach the problem from the least-worst?

I'll start:

1. pull the ship out of the sand by force with a fleet of tugs which tears a hole in the ship causing an angle of loll and to subsequently keel over.

Ok, I know it sounds crazy. But what if they put a correctly sized explosive(s) deep enough below and along the spine to blow and then fill the area with water, reducing the rheological load? We're talking about 100 feet underneath the canal bed, and do it with a shaped charge that'll be more optimal for the task. Just thinking about fast <1 week methods.

I was wondering if it is sand, can it be liquefied using vibration around the hull to help loosen it? Something like what they use to vibrate concrete while pouring it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tV4sTbpa7Hc

If they can dig a tunnel along the boat a 100 feet deep, that would probably be enough to set it free. No need for a boatload of C4 then.

Elon Musk probably has a team working on it.

How do you stop the ship from collapsing onto the boring device?

So... you want to be the one responsible if it doesn't go as planned? Further blocking the canal, let alone damages to the ship and cargo on board.

Theres a reason wacky, dangerous ideas happen in the movies and not real life. The consequences of trying to look clever and failing are pretty severe.

Well, I'm not trying to look clever. I'm trying to figure out how the hell this can be taken care of in less than a week.

Works in cartoons!

I say we attach a giant helium balloon!

Or, use airships to unload the containers (as choppers can't lift enough weight)...

Can we just drop some anvils while we are at it? Why ask Tesla to help when ACME has never let us down?

Not just a professional in the field, he works for the company that got the assignment.

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