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Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

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Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#81

Post by gherkin0 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #33
intrasight wrote: post #28

Rest assured that this mystery will be solved. Petabytes of data? Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. The fact that we can't successfully crowd-source this search is indicative of our having very incomplete maps of the ocean floor. Eventually (could be a hundred years but I expect less) there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans. They will find all kinds of int…

>Please give it to Google so they can add it to Google Maps. What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish? What makes you think the data analysis is easily crowd-sourced? I.e, what makes you think that analyzing the data requires no special experience or expertise? >there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans Why? What would be the economic case for doing this? Build…

> What do you think "add[ing] it to Google Maps" would accomplish?

Give us better publicly-accessible seafloor maps for that bit of ocean?

>> there will be a swarm of autonomous submersible robots doing detailed scans

> Why? What would be the economic case for doing this?

Immediately? Who knows. He did qualify his statement with an "eventually/100 years," though. I can imagine such robots would be useful for environmental monitoring, mineral prospecting, and defense reasons. Especially if the cost decreases.

IIRC, there already are automated scientific buoys that drift with the currents, do programmed dives, and transmit their measurements by satellite.

Edit: here is a link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underwater_glider

Edit2: here is a paper about installing mapping sonar in such a vehicle: http://www.physics.mun.ca/~bdeyoung/Zhou_Icebergs_2014.pdf

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#82

Post by baddox »

notatoad wrote: post #79
baddox wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called "long-form journalism." It's apparently extremely popular, but I consider it to be the worst medium ever invented.

There's nothing wrong with long form journalism if you have a complex story to tell with lots of information to convey. The problem is not with the format, it's with journalists trying to pad out a tweet's worth of information into a long-form article.

I'm much less forgiving of the format. Every example I've seen has been a colossal and seemingly deliberate waste of the reader's (my) time. Even when it is reasonably skillfully written and contains information on a subject I'm interested in, I vastly prefer the writing style of, say, Wikipedia.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#83

Post by gherkin0 »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #56
hluska wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment would be better if you weren't so aggressive.

Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

> Curious, what language did the poster uses that implies aggression? I see none.

This: "Yeah, I know what quotation marks mean..." It comes off as snappy.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#84

Post by jleader »

dnautics wrote: post #68
willvarfar wrote: post #4

"The company already offers a similar service for ships and boats, which use Inmarsat’s network free of charge for distress signalling." Interestingly, back when I was an intern, BT used to charge an exorbitant rate for those distress calls. I once wrote-up the whole internship thing http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/17282439831/an-ei... "I was pretty uncomfortable when I found that mayday calls were being c…

Isn't that a good thing? £8 is not that much if you are really in distress, and it is enough to keep spurious distress signals from clogging the channel.

It's not £8 per call, it's £8 per minute. I don't know the protocol for satellite calls, but I'd been taught that for both 911 calls and VHF-Marine distress calls, you're supposed to stay in contact with the dispatcher, to update them as the situation changes and to help guide the responders to your location. E.g: "The fire truck is at Smith Street, they can't find you." "No, I'm on Smith Lane, not Smith Street". Or "I can hear the helicopter, it sounds like they just flew by south of me, can you have them fly back 1000 yards further north?" For satellite distress calls, I would imagine this could take a while, though I imagine they'd set up a schedule where you'd only call back periodically.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#85

Post by Splines »

logicrook wrote: post #80
myNXTact wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? This isn't a newspaper article, it is a nonfiction story. Bloomberg contains sections of their magazines written in your format; I always skip them. I prefer the long-form stories.

Honestly, why? After reading a few of them, I was completely sick of this format. It appears to me as information-free fluff, written in a very generic style. What do you like in this format? I genuinely don't understand how it can sell, but if it does, there must be something?

Low density information is easier to digest.

Plus, like a stick of gum, sometimes you just have nothing to do and it fills the time.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#86

Post by grahamburger »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #19
gaur wrote: post #17

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front , instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

> I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

This is exactly what I've wanted but never known how to express it ... is there such a thing? I would love to browse a list of news stories distilled to factual bullet points. Sigh. One can dream :)

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#87

Post by tcpekin »

baddox wrote: post #82
notatoad wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing wrong with long form journalism if you have a complex story to tell with lots of information to convey. The problem is not with the format, it's with journalists trying to pad out a tweet's worth of information into a long-form article.

I'm much less forgiving of the format. Every example I've seen has been a colossal and seemingly deliberate waste of the reader's (my) time. Even when it is reasonably skillfully written and contains information on a subject I'm interested in, I vastly prefer the writing style of, say, Wikipedia.

Why not just read for the pleasure of it? Do you every read anything from The New Yorker, or Esquire, or The Atlantic, etc.? There can be great stories that are enjoyable to read, while still being nonfiction.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#88

Post by draw_down »

cddotdotslash wrote: post #19
gaur wrote: post #17

Another case of a rambling article burying the lede. I skimmed the article and still can't figure out why we're weeks away from a point of no return. Is the search going to be called off? Is there a transponder that's going to give out? Why can't the journalist just put the important information up front , instead of a bunch of irrelevant crap about someone's sleep deprivation?

In the fifth paragraph, it says "Without fresh clues, the hunt should end about June, when four ships are due to finish combing the seas off western Australia." I imagine that the news would be quite boring if every article were written as a bullet-point list of points. Sometimes people enjoy reading a story, not just a two minute summary.

But it's strange to call June "weeks away", June is months away.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#89

Post by wcummings »

rwhitman wrote: post #55

The MH370 tracking problem is unfortunate but what I'm most fascinated by in all of this is the continuing reminder of how powerless we are as a civilization when it comes to the oceans. A plane crashes in an area with no landmass and we lose it. We've overfished many species to near-extinction because we completely failed to understand exactly how many fish there actually are. The sea acts as a natural eraser for hu…

That, or it was stolen by an intelligence agency.

Re: Missing Malaysia Jet MH370 Weeks Away from Keeping Secrets Forever

#90

Post by mariuolo »

jonshariat wrote: post #54
mariuolo wrote: post #48

"Forever" is a long time. It could be found in a few years or in a few decades. Although reading the flight recorders by then could be problematic. It's not the first time anyway, a British plane disappeared on the Andes in 1947 (after sending a cryptic Morse message BTW) and was found 50 years later, so I wouldn't despair.

Mountains and deep oceans are a big difference though. I really hope we do find it and get the families some answers.

Indeed, but technical means also improve with time.
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