> “A number of critics have asked if monogamous homosexuals are also culpable. Quite apart from the question of the definition of monogamous (sexual contact with only one person in a lifetime? serial monogamy? some cheating? etc.), I suggest the following analogy: A man joins the Ku Klux Klan. He is not violent, and would never hurt a fly; he just wants a safe place to express his racist feelings. Is he culpable for the Klan's past acts of violence? I believe that even though he is not criminally responsible for acts that occurred before he joined, he is morally culpable for joining the Klan. The Klan has blood on its hands, and anyone who joins must share the guilt. So, too, with the homosexual movement.”
I don't understand the 'junk shot' plan. They're talking about shooting old golf balls, knotted rope scraps, and shredded tire chunks in, followed by cement? I guess I just assumed that in such a highly engineered industry, they'd have a design and spec for the 'junk', rather than relying on what sounds like random, uncontrolled, scrap.
Maybe that's just popular description, and in reality the junk in the junk shot is very well controlled?
I think it really is junk. The NYT(? I think) had an interview with someone who used junk shots to close wells in Kuwait, and his favorite junk was lamp cables because it contained both soft plastic and harder copper wires. My understanding is that they are looking for something that they can pump into the BOP, and that once inside will form a nice big tangle and hopefully plug up the leak. What to use depends on the specifics of each leak and is more an art than a science.
I also read up on the BOPs a bit--very interesting. I would have expected a last ditch line of defense consisting of some sort of powerful spring-loaded ram with a maybe an explosive and/or mechanical trigger, so that if everything goes wrong, you can hook up a sub and yank something to clamp the stem, even with no hydraulic lines connected.
Not that the annular BOP isn't a clever design, using the well pressure against itself to clamp down tight.
> He [Alexander Slocum] has a lot of creative ideas. One in 10 are really brilliant ideas, but nine are dumb,” said MIT professor Wai K. Cheng, a colleague in Slocum’s department.
I don't understand why some scientists come public with this type of negative commentary. It only reinforces the type of closed-off competitiveness that plagues academia. Sometimes I wonder what great advancements haven't been made as a direct result of the lack of collaboration and inherent selfishness within scientific fields.
Maybe he was joking. But whether it was joking or accurate, that was probably a comment he could have kept to himself.
I guess I hear those types of comments all too often in academia from scientists who are trying to make a name for themselves at the expense of others.
Steve Wereley's particle analysis estimate 70,000 bbls / day leakage.
The much publicized 5,000 bbls/day figure is from a surface only estimate by NOAA. It's been discovered that much of the leak is forming large sub-surface slicks. One such below surface slick is 10 miles long, by 3 miles wide, by 300 feet thick.
These guys are not going to be visible til / if they come ashore.
Is it just me or does this not really seem like that hard of a problem? I mean, it obviously is, but I don't see why they can't just attach an open value to the tube, then close the valve when it's on. I mean look at it:
Why not just get bulk carriers full of gravel and start dumping it until it's buried? Are you saying that oil can get through a million tons of gravel?
If that sounds crazy, BP itself was talking about injecting golf balls into the tube.
The oil is pushing back against the force exerted by a column of water 5000ft deep - that's about 15MPa, or 1,500 metric tons per square meter. Again, that's not the force with which the oil is coming out; that's the pressure the oil is working against and still gushing out at a ferocious rate.
I would think that, for example, pumping gravel over that leaking area would be all the more effective. You basically just need a lot of volume of some material, and the extreme pressures from above (and gravity) will work in your favor.
At any rate, it's not like I have any experience in this. But it's a shame to see people downvoting someone for simply offering an idea. Ah, but such is Hacker News..
People are down-voting because it's he starts out saying "Is it just me or does this not really seem like that hard of a problem" which is just not true. He then suggests two bad ideas.
The gravel idea is especially bad. That's like saying you're going to shut down an industrial fan on the floor of a arena by dropping a box of packing peanuts onto it from the ceiling.
The down-votes are people saying "Yes, it's just you. It's a hard problem. Read about it some more and you will see why." Just because it looks simple on Youtube it doesn't mean it's simple.
I don't see why you bemoan Hacker News for down-voting a comment that is effectively a waste of time. It's a slap on the wrist. That's OK. Next time, he'll read more about it and think the idea through more before commenting.
If you look at his entire comment, he's asking questions. What I don't like is that Hacker News sometimes discourages people from asking questions, and promotes a culture of one-upmanship, of putting people in their place (or a 'slap on the wrist').
Perhaps it can't be avoided in an online forum. Perhaps it's the cost of any type of voting system that is trying to save everyone time. But it's a really good way to miss the big picture. Any revolutionary solution to any problem is going to sound wrong at first. It's just worth remembering that sometimes.
If you disagree with someone, it doesn't mean you have to downvote. This may seem like a bit of a stretch (this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1350425 comment got me thinking about it), but there's a reason governments don't last as pure democracies. There's a reason they kill Socrates and make huge mistakes. The cognitive dissonance associated with 'mob rule' is a very terrifying thing. It's why we balance it with other branches of government, etc. Why we have constitutions, bills of rights that protect a minority's viewpoint from majority rule, in law, etc.
Hacker News, newsgroups, the internet...don't have that balance. So the responsibility is with everyone to be even more circumspect, to allow more breathing room, instead of simply reaching for the easy downmod.
Or maybe Hacker News isn't a 'classroom'. Maybe it's only for people who don't take much risk in their posts. I suppose there's some value in that. I admit though it seems less honest, interesting and helpful to me as a site for helping startups or people with a startup-like mentality.
I up-vote well reasoned comments I don't agree with. I also up-vote comments that ask questions. I ask lots of questions on Hacker News.
I would down-vote a comment that starts out dismissive of a complex problem without having a reasonable explanation.
A simple problem and a problem you don't understand will appear the same. We all do it; the Dunning–Kruger effect is a well known cognitive bias. For that reason, I appreciate a humble tone and I use the one tiny tool I have to try to encourage it.
Gravel is porous. If the oil is overpressurized, covering it with gravel may slow the leak down but it won't stop it. And you've then made any other attempt to do something about it impossible.
Imagine the pressure the oil is under to be flowing out under 5000 ft of water. I don't think it's a simple situation. I liken it to people who don't know how to program talking about how simple or complex a particular problem is.
Since oil is lighter than water, it wouldn't need to be under any pressure (just pointing that out; I know that at the rate it is coming out, buoyancy isn't necessarily the dominate effect).
I don't think that's necessarily true. From what other people have said, there are large quantities of oil spreading underneath the surface of the ocean. While some parts of the oil may be lighter than salt water, I think (disclaimer: no background in the subject whatsoever) that a good portion of the oil is actually heaver.
I bet there is huuuuge pressure behind the oil spewing out.
Putting a giant funnel on it and then pumping the resulting oil through the funnel sounded like an even better idea than these plans...
... except when they did that, the flow of oil pulled water into the funnel, formed methane hydrate crystals and caused the funnel to start fill-up and start floating away. They might have tried to melt the crystals but I'm guessing there a chance for them to explode or something...
So it's a messy problem - at 5,000 the behavior of every substance involved is different. Imagine trying to use a baseball mitt to staunch an open wound (or whatever metaphor for awkward futility you'd like).
I agree with you. Any solution they do come up with will probably only have an impact until the relief wells are completed (knock on wood) in two months. Dumping/packing in gravel (not from the surface, but via underwater delivery) does seem like a good idea.
They are planning to divert an asteroid and crash it into the leak.