Tw—

• The saddest thing you'll read about since the fate of the Challenger crew.

• Pick yer poison.

• Feeling charitable? Go for it.

• As a favorite musical acquaintance once put it, "Cinderella on the Event Horizon."

If your computer dropped data yesterday, there might be reasons.

Tw— Tennis for manly men!

Tw— Tennis for manly men!

"Wow, look at that. Terrible sportsmanship."

Hey Crid, that link was for a submarine called the Thresher. It was lost with all its sailors on board in 1963. Not the Challenger, but just as tragic. I’d never heard of this before today. It should be more well known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)

Right, that was my point. The Thresher catastrophe was presumed to be an instantaneous death for the crew, leaving only the crushed shell of the boat for location and recovery. Small comfort, but we take 'em where we find 'em.

Instead, as with Challenger, it turns out there was plenty of time for the dear Souls aboard to think about their loved ones and how technology & physics had chosen to end their lives in American uniform.

IIRC, Thresher was one of the wrecks Ballard had to locate before the Navy would let him use their tools to find Titanic.

🚨 INTeRNET GAMESMANSHIP ALERT! 🚨
************************************

I've had a glass of wine, a dry rosé! What are the chances that the words I've just typed are true? Can I strut proudly, or must I eat crow!

Tune in after a few minutes, following a furious Google sesh!

(Ballard didn't disclose that the T-search had been tagged on at the end of the Cold War mission until, like, twenty years later. Or so I affirm…!) GoogleGoogleGoogleGoogleGoogle

Aha! YESSS! My masculinity and good character are affirmed! As memory dims, it's great to get one right occasionally. From your own link, Sheep Mom, it's right there on the Wiki page…

Ballard had approached the Navy in 1982 for funding to find Titanic with his new deep-diving robot submersible. The Navy conditionally granted him the funds if the submarine wrecks were surveyed before Titanic. Ballard's robotic survey showed that the depth at which Thresher had sunk caused implosion and total destruction; the only recoverable piece was a foot of mangled pipe…

The aftermath of the public relations aspect of this major disaster has since been part of various case studies.[34]

Being old, it's easy to fire up a laptop every morning and think 'America sucks now.' But then you look back and see all the ways America has always sucked.

Conan calmed me down shortly after the 2016 election, paraphrase: You're going to spazz because we have another shitty President? Even in that moment of furious resentment, it couldn't be denied that the man had a point.



IIRC, Ballard's robot submersible was named Jason, but let's not risk any more humiliation on a school night. There was a great book about this, but my niece borrowed it and never gave it back, even though she promised she would. So I stopped sending her family Christmas cards.

That's not true.

Also, via Cosh, I just wanted to let everybody know that civilization happened because of a celestial effect called the Milankovitch Cycles, about which I knew nothing heretofore.

So, like, our rich lives are ever more improbable.

I've never seen the guiding principle described in this tweet contraindicated.

Sorry! I misunderstood the connection you were making between the two events. Now that you mention it, I think did hear something recently about survivors of the initial Challenger explosion. It is horrific to think that they might have been alive when they hit the water.

The thread above was very interesting. It’s just a reminder that nature is dynamic, ever changing and pretty much looking to kill us all the time. We need to adapt to what it throws at us, or die.

In addition to farming, I am always interested in the creation of bread. It’s a pretty labor intensive process to get from seed to loaf and yet, every civilization managed to do it.