Earlier quoted context omitted.
I looked it up and the AP style guide now recommends against using [sic].
Cool callout, super interesting justification[1], had no idea. [1] https://twitter.com/APStylebook/status/1124320764054863873
The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#62Photos of the recovered debris show an intact titanium end bell being lifted by a strap through where the acrylic porthole was. No sign of porthole or carbon fiber tube. Not yet clear what failed first, the tube or the porthole.
The article mentions that at one point the viewport only had a depth rating only 1,300 meters, but it’s not clear if it was upgraded later on. The more I think about it, would it have been able to withstand even the first dive to Titanic depths without it being upgraded?
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Titan is fairly akin to modern software engineering , there's a lot of behaviours in the company that certainly resonates. Mechanical and structural engineers don't behave like this 99% of the time.
To be fair, most modern software engineering doesn't directly lead to someone dying, so in a lot of cases, it makes economic sense to try and push out that additional feature quickly rather than combing every line for potential bugs. Most customers are going to go with the product with more features even if there are a few more bugs, compared with one with zero bugs and much less functionality.
Depends how severe the bugs are. If they're rare edge-case ones that won't result in significant loss of data or functionality, I can believe that; but I've seen far more instances where the product grows so many buggy features that it becomes barely usable as the bugs start affecting core functionality, while the additional features are basically useless to me.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#64Everything is an accident waiting to happen, just with different probability. Waiting long enough and it will happen.
That's why the phrase is used when the probability is high
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#65Everything is an accident waiting to happen. That's what an accident is. Driving to work, that's an accident waiting to happen. Consider all the poorly signed roads, drivers of various states of sobriety and rage. The sub was in use for years, they did well to engineer within their budget. There's always someone pointing out something wrong, nothing would get done if you actioned every single 'concern'
You do know that phrases like that are used when the chance of an accident is considered pretty high?
Language also has a subtext that expresses more than just what the words mean.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#66Off topic, but interesting to me: not sure if I've ever seen an editing mistake in The New Yorker before, and I've been reading it since I was a teenager. In a quote, "Ocean Gate" should be "OceanGate" or at the very least should include a "[sic]".
It's not a mistake if it's verbatim. The [sic] is usually to show that the mistake isn't by the publisher but adding an additional space in a company name probably isn't egregious enough to warrant it.
This is a little more off-topic but when I first encountered uses of "sic" I thought it was an acronym for "spelling is correct", due to how it was being used. Only later did I realise that wasn't the case, but a search of the Internet shows that many others also came up with the same acronym and reasoning.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I heard pressure testing of the carbon fiber wasn't done. They relied on sensors to detect delamination instead. In software engineering, a component is both created and unit tested with tests on relevant functionality. Delamination sensors are poor compensation for a missing test. They probably didn't test the delamination sensors, either.
As the article mentions though, one of the issues with using carbon fiber for this is that unlike titanium, it weakens with each pressure test.
Also that you can't very effectively model a composite materiál the way you can a solid single material.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, the fact that Rush seemed to have designed the company to avoid liability with US alone is worth the read.
Exactly. I think it really shows how reckless and deceitful he was.
In a rare case, the cavalier founder faces natural consequences for their attitudes.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#69Maybe somewhat off-topic, but if you don't know, there is a video on YouTube published 11 months ago by "CBC NL - Newfoundland and Labrador" titled "This submersible takes passengers to The Titanic wreck. Climb in!" (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClkytJa0ghc ) If I put myself 11 months in the past watching that video, I would probably think this company OceanGate is so professional with zero possibility of mer…
I'm not sure the word explorer should ever be diluted to be just sitting down in a vehicle as a passenger. At worst, they sat on a plane to Newfoundland for a number of hours, sat on a boat to get to the launch site and sat in a submarine for a few hours (assuming a successful itinerary).
Mitigating factors for an explorer should be (imho): novel destination, novel experience of natural forces, novel challenge of actively piloting/driving, unusual physical hardship, unusual mental hardship, novel engineering challenge, unusual training requirements, committing to significant unknowns, etc.
Re: The Titan Submersible Was “An Accident Waiting to Happen”
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the New Yorker, you don’t read it for the headlines. There was a fair bit of new stuff in the article.
Yes, the fact that Rush seemed to have designed the company to avoid liability with US alone is worth the read.
Perhaps he forgot the ultimate liability is himself aboard.