Rebane's Ruminations

For lack of a pinger …

George Rebane

The submersible Titan is now most certainly lost with five dead tourists aboard.  The search for Titan has been going on since contact with it was lost within two hours into the mission to visit the wreckage of the sunken Titanic resting at a depth of approximately 12,000 feet. (more here)

As an engineer with some experience in working with submersible systems ranging from nuclear submarines to remotely operated underwater vehicles, I’ve been struggling to figure out how such a tourist cum research vessel could have been designed to get lost in such a way that it could not be found with the latest underwater technology brought to bear.

All the submersible systems of any value on which I worked were always deployed, at a minimum, with a pinger to enable it to be quickly located should the need arise.  A pinger is an electrically powered transducer that emits a loud acoustic signal when activated, one that can be heard tens of miles away.  The simplest pinger can be turned on from inside the submersible by just pushing a button.  More sophisticated pingers, most certainly warranted for vehicles like the Titan, would entail programmable transponders which can listen to a coded interrogation from, say, a support vessel, and reply with a number of responses that report the condition and location of the submersible.  Such pingers can also be programmed to start broadcasting automatically when any one of a number of problems/contingencies is sensed.

In the scheme and cost of underwater operations pingers are cheap insurance.  Even when working with marine mammals on various recovery and attack systems, we always had a pinger on the target vehicle that we wished to recover or determine its location.  These were also standard components strapped on to various test missiles, mines, and other gear to be recovered later.

So it now boggles this technical brainbone to hear days of reports on the Titan recovery effort that lament the loss of the vehicle, designed by a first-rate engineering team, that supposedly passed its man-safe qualifications before submerging with a live crew.  The entire scenario is made even more amateurish by reports of potentially manmade pounding sounds being heard by the transducer field deployed by the rescuers, and still no one has offered the obvious observation about onboard pingers or the lack thereof.  If they didn’t think of it before hearing the possible sounds from Titan, then by now someone should have said, ‘Oh shit, we forgot the pingers!’ or at least reported the presence of dysfunctional onboard pingers when the pounding started.

Having now discovered a debris field potentially from Titan, some may offer that the vehicle suffered a massive and sudden decompression during its descent, thereby not allowing time for a pinger to be manually activated.  But we already covered how that contingency would have been overcome with a programmed pinger.  The sound of silence on the missing pingers deepens the mystery.

Sandbox – 20jun23

[Public service information – The most recent edition of modern strategy makers was just published.  The New Makers of Modern Strategy (2023, Princeton University Press) follows the second edition (1986) of collected writings on transnational strategies that was launched with its first edition in 1943.  The collected essays by history’s notables range in time from 4,000 BC to the present.  Heavy emphasis is on thoughts of 20^th century world leaders and luminaries.  The 1,100+ page tome is edited by Hal Brands and put out through the auspices of the Henry Kissinger Center for Global Affairs.  In its various editions Makers continues to be the handbook for analyzing, understanding, and formulating the strategies of empires and sovereign nation states.  The contributions from Sun-Zi through Mao Zedong are classics which bear on decisions made today on the national objectives and conduct of military, economic, trade, etc strategies.  The book reads well and its heft promotes maintenance of upper body strength for the diligent reader.  gjr]

Scattershots – 15jun23

George Rebane

The latest liberal lies involve their claims of book banning, specifically by Gov Desantis in Florida school libraries.  The lamestream has worked hard and successfully to convince the nation that the Right is the party of book banners.  However, the truth of the matter is that even  in their posterchild state of Florida, no books have been banned in school libraries – they were simply mover from shelves designated for the lower grades to ones for middle grades and above.  The DNC and their lamestream correctly assess their ideological constituencies to be sufficiently ignorant to believe this latest propaganda.  In the 15jun23 Union, columnist Terry McLaughlin gives us the real story of how such books containing sexually explicit content are actually made available to Florida’s public school students.

Today Rick Howell, one of our local Left’s more prominent looney luminaries, takes sometime Union columnist Thea Hood to task on her 10jun23 essay on ‘wokeness’.  Leftwingers with prominent intellectual deficits continue to deny the progressives’ ongoing use of woke as an important socio-political attribute that describes correct-thinking Americans.  Howell follows in the footsteps of Robert Summa who as regional editor oversaw the most recent ownership transfer of The Union.  Last year Mr Summa, now recalled, went overboard when he denied Jo Ann’s discussion of woke in a letter she wrote.  Summa claimed that woke was a rightwing concept not known to the Left and used only by the Right to denigrate the good works of Democrats and their constituents.  And he maintained this ridiculous position in the face of a dozen books and countless commentaries written on the definition of woke and its practice in the public sphere.

Ruminations – 8jun23

George Rebane

The long-anticipated destruction of the dollar is upon us.  Our Federal Reserve is preparing to follow the footsteps of the European Central Bank in their program to expand the use of digital euros.  The strong possibility is that government controlled/monitored digital dollars will replace coins and banknotes, currently still the only way to guarantee the privacy of transactions.  (more here)

The metaverse will arrive on the shoulders of the new large language model chatbots.  Instead of replacing the metaverse as ‘the next big thing’ in technology, the metaverse will be enabled (powered?) by intelligent artificial characters ready to service and interact with humans in various specialty areas. (more here)

Newsom to introduce a 28^th Amendment to “enshrine in the Constitution commonsense gun safety measures” and further restrict gun ownership across the land.  This move is in answer to the recent victories enjoyed by 2A advocates through the nation’s courts and legislatures.  The initiative has zero chance of being adopted, but it does keep our lame-brained governor in the attention span of his progressive constituency as he contemplates replacing Biden on the 2024 Democratic ticket. (more here)