Well There's Your Problem | Episode 135: Project Plowshare

[@nathaniellindner313]

16:55 I’m glad Alice mentioned that the carbon fiber body was literally one step up from “found lying by the side of the road” like the flavor text for the cheap components from Jeb’s Used Spaceships in KSP

[@TomSedgman]

Love a good KSP reference in the comments

[@G-Cole-01]

Technically _Jebediah Kerman's Junkyard and Spacecraft Parts Co._ is a different manufacturer than "Found lying by the side of the road," but knowing what stuff the Titan was made out of, I doubt any of the parts were obtained with better procurement standards than "Found behind the Clamp-O-Tron factory."

[@leradoms]

When my great aunt died suddenly in her sleep, the funeral director asked my great uncle if "this sort of thing runs in her family". He replied, "what, dying? Yeah I'm pretty sure most of them do it eventually."

[@renerpho]

Your great uncle has (had?) a good sense of humor.

[@renerpho]

I also like the slightly unnerving use of "most of them", implying there's something very wrong potentially with her family.

[@IDOLA149]

Dang, powerful Uncle energy

[@EmissaryofWind]

It's like planes, they've never left one up there

[@leradoms]

@@renerpho still around at 91 and he's still hilarious

[@Asylumrunner8]

Big fan of Devon's militant fact-checking with regard to how fast and how soupifying getting imploded in a submarine would be

[@warmachine5835]

And the survivability of corpses in the deep ocean, which is simultaneously longer and shorter than you think.

[@piparalegal2019]

I literally messaged Devon's fact check of how fast and soupyifing implosion is to my husband over Discord because we're in two different rooms at the moment. Devon is brilliant and I would love to meet them and buy them a proper pint of their preferred alcoholic/non-alcoholic beverage of choice (depending on their preference for cold ones)!

[@ollllj]

A submarine water leak quickly reaches 1to3x the speed of sound below 500m depth, and any additional depth makes next to no difference, because water is very hard to compress, so it does not get much worse at deeper depths. A hair-thin-leak (in a small room) gives you a few more hours to live+breathe, till the breathable air reaches 4x atmospheric pressure, becoming toxic. If that leak (in a small room) becomes 2 cm finger-sized, you only got 10 minutes till air pressure gets toxic. If that leak becomes hand sized, its seconds, if not a near-instant explosive-supersonic-compression-death, and then the room-size becomes irrelevant. I know no submarine movie, that shows the supersonic shock-wave from the interior and most submarine movies barely reach 500m depth.

[@silverXnoise]

We thank Stockton for his very brave manned critical failure testing. So rarely do engineers get such rich data for how bad an idea can be.

[@jamesm5787]

I think the "Running over a toothpaste tube at highway speed" is actually pretty accurate for the speed though. Highway speed (70 mph) is about 1.23 inches per millisecond.

[@tadferd4340]

Stockton Rush was crushed by the free hand of physics.

[@theprojectproject01]

Well That and a column of water two miles high.

[@excrubulent]

@@theprojectproject01 That's exactly how the physics gets you.

[@renerpho]

@@excrubulent To quote Scott Manley: At some point you stop being biology and start being physics.

[@schattey2832]

The invisible hand of pascal

[@gregorybertrand645]

Really thought you were about to make some sort of nursery rhyme.

[@jbarbeau92]

One of the things about Stockton Rush, aside from an obviously fatal case of ‘disruption-brain’ is he DID actually have an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering. Ideally, that would give him an appreciation for the incredibly fine tuned, detail-oriented and data-based thinking required for actual innovation in cutting edge material sciences, as opposed to silicon-valley ‘innovation,’ where innovation is just skirting regulation, but it seems to have combined with his MBA to give him a stupid sense of self confidence in his gut instinct that every other submarine expert was just wrong about how stupid his idea was. And it got a bunch of people killed, luckily including himself.

[@caidurkan2916]

It was pretty cathartic to see that the guy whose invention needlessly killed people died alongside them. Usually they get to make a second, deadlier invention a few years later like the Osprey variants or self driving Teslas or M. Night Shyamalan ghost-directing After Earth.

[@glenmcgillivray4707]

It's like carbon fibers are great in tension. So they should have built the tune under 40 atmospheres of pressure then depressurized it to place it under a tension loading. Oh wait. We can't. Because it's crazy. It sounds like our inventor chose materials be believed to be super strong and forgot to ask for a second opinion. And when confronted by second opinions was just convinced the naysayers were trying to crush the little guy. Yet. The Little guy got crushed by water, and physics. Not economics. His dream lead to Hubris.

[@corbytobin6468]

His thesis project for his undergrad was just building a kit plane... Very groundbreaking research

[@MrJimheeren]

@@corbytobin6468someone has been listening to behind the bastards

[@scottydawg1234567]

This guy worked for McDonnell-Douglas of all companies.

[@jaysea5939]

YAY LIAM! Yay Rocz! Yay Alice! Yay Devon! Yay James! Yay 2.5 hour episode! Edit: Yay Activate Windows Watermark! (thanks y'all)

[@SlimbTheSlime]

smh no love for the Activate Windows watermark

[@realcanadian67]

What about Yay Active Windows Watermark! ?

[@jaysea5939]

Damn, I forgot

[@evit-q1v]

yay!

[@cfredrics]

Yay @jaysea5939!

[@vcostello712]

RE: navy hearing the sub implosion: they did not hide it from the coast guard, they did let them know. the coast guard kept doing SAR ops because it wasn't definitive that that's what the sound the navy heard was, and they needed to be out there searching on the off chance the sub was like bobbing around lost on the surface or something.

[@Frommerman]

@@Lulu_Catnaps But journalists are idiots who don't know anything, and everyone who works for any government institution knows this. They get told nothing whatsoever, so all speculation on their part is just that.

[@MrJimheeren]

@@Lulu_Catnapswell to be fair to the navy they’ve got good reasons not to tell everybody immediately they heard the sub implode. Some of those microphones they’ve got are still top secret.

[@MoarPye]

This is the exact thing that I wanted to gripe about too... It's not the Navy's job to bandwagon onto news stories and insert themselves into media coverage with independent press releases. We should criticise them when they DO that, not when they DON'T do it. It's clear from public reporting that the Navy shared their information and analysis with the Coast Guard the day after it happened, which was the same day that the Search & Rescue effort was really kicking off, not five days later when everything was wrapped up. Whether and when that information was then shared with the media, or with the families of the missing, that was up to the Coast Guard because they were the relevant and appropriate agency. Also, maybe it's worth considering this progress in context? Because if it had happened in the 80's or 90's it probably wouldn't even have been released to the Coast Guard. We likely wouldn't even have learned that the Navy *had* a SOSUS recording of the implosion until the 25 or 50 year classification reviews.

[@helenaoberdries8273]

Thanks for the correct info, I just hope the families were told this, and the searchers - esp the private ones using their own money and time.

[@leechowning2712]

Not just that, Olympus 6,000, the research ROV dropped onto the destroyed Titan Wends afternoon, and the interview from them is that it took about 2 hours to locate it... but they held off until Thurs morning to give them time to talk to the families.

[@GaldirEonai]

47:32 What he was prying open was a beryllium neutron reflector shell. They were smart enough to realize that any test setup where you actually mash two bits of subcritical fissile material together to create criticality was a _very_ spicy kind of experiment and not for everyday tinkering. Instead they relied on these shells to direct escaping neutrons back into the core. The more of the core the shell closed off, the more neutrons got trapped inside and the more spicy the core got. The idea behind the experiment was to find out exactly what happens at the weird, then little-understood threshold between sub-critical and fully critical. So what they did was basically...edge the core.

[@spinecho609]

👀

[@angryowlet153]

The comments from Devon are like an Easter egg! 😸 Edit: Y'all missed the billionaire soup-like homogenate joke. It was right in front of you!

[@dcorbin5779]

That's how you make the rat visara

[@souplike.homogenate]

I'm there for it.

[@carinafreeman6432]

It was right in front of them! And now it’s a soup-like homogenate.

[@realcanadian67]

Human wood pulp

[@debra-sue]

as someone who usually listens first on overcast, devon's comments are peak replay value

[@Frommerman]

I am once again asking for Alice to be informed that smoking makes the lungs more rigid.

[@emilyadams3228]

And the rest of the body, as well. Ever take a good look at the booby tops of a chick who's been smoking for 20 years? It looks like ancient parchment paper. It's unsettling as fuck.

[@davidvenegas6401]

tar buildup lol

[@nothinglikeasongbird]

You know it's gonna be a good WTYP when the first 45 minutes are the goddamn news

[@alaeriia01]

I'm only six minutes in, and hoping they mention the underwater billionaire-crushing device. EDIT: they talked about it.

[@Full_Otto_Bismarck]

Oops Its All News is my favorite flavor of WTYP cereal.

[@QuatrinaVR]

Lets face it, we were all anticipating this particular news segment

[@weir-t7y]

Everything is happening so much

[@ernekid7241]

I've had 5 beers, 2 glasses of wine, its Thursday night, the air is poison outside and I'm wearing sunglasses at night. let's do this

[@ca44444]

Brb gonna get crossfaded

[@ca44444]

I’m back and has my whiskey and special chocolates

[@castillogrande8926]

It's Thursday, I'm getting ready to protest Trump and DeSantis in Philly by hammering Twisted Teas and the air is also poisonous outside. Let's goooooooo

[@HamburgerTime209]

It’s 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it’s dark, and we’re wearing sunglasses.

[@PobortzaPl]

​@@HamburgerTime209Hit it.

[@rawbebaba]

I demand a 14 hour episode on disaster tourism 😅

[@michaelhawk6847]

I don't think they've done flight 901 have they?

[@danielled8665]

Oooh. Yes. We will allow them potty breaks and one nap each.

[@debra-sue]

you mean titanic part 3?

[@rawbebaba]

@@debra-sue yes, they should name it " The Titan ick"

[@jeffstaples347]

Patreons demand this

[@NukaLemonade]

we have determined that nukes are very useful when you need to construct a Very Large, Radioactive Hole

[@SlimbTheSlime]

especially don’t go in the hole in this scenario

[@xmlthegreat]

@@SlimbTheSlime The Crazy/Hot threshold graph looks very different in this scenario.

[@Alevuss92]

Plutonium - good for big radioactive hole, bad for party tricks

[@segarallychampionship702]

@@Alevuss92 Unless the party trick involves watching an inanimate rod boil water without any external input and the die to radiation sickness as a happy person

[@abigailwharton6271]

​@@xmlthegreatFlawless joke.

[@dougpowers]

Only the deep sea submarine Titan can reduce five naive adventurers to a soup-like homogenate in under 10 milliseconds.

[@EmyrDerfel]

4 naive adventurers and a child.

[@Frommerman]

@@EmyrDerfel The "child" was 19 years old. Definitely browbeaten by his billionaire dad with way more power over their relationship than him, but still an adult legally capable of making his own decisions.

[@dracorex426]

Starlink was how the mothership connected to the Internet. The submarine sent text messages to the mothership by screaming.

[@MortenK65]

Yeah, that's a bit weird. They already had a microphone in the water. Wouldn't it register something when the thing mushed?

[@renerpho]

@@MortenK65 You'd be surprised how loud it can be under water. It can be surprisingly difficult to pick up a submarine's implosion from just a few miles away. "Was that a whale, an implosion just below us, or tectonics 2,000 miles away?"

[@cattibingo]

It's weird the surface ship got a message that just read "AAAAAHH-" and then the sub never responded to the surface ship after that, how rude.

[@hurrayforvideogames]

Wife came into the bathroom to check on me because of the sound I made when I read this and tried not to lol too obnoxiously

[@fernandomarques5166]

​@@renerphobased Hunt for the Red October reference

[@TheRandomAustralian]

"I guess gets a big laugh out of a room of nuclear physicists" actually Enrico Fermi told Slotin that if he kept doing that he would be dead in a year.

[@Turbobuttes]

The James Cameron of 1945

[@MySerpentine]

And he was not wrong.

[@philliptrzcinski5243]

Loved James's dogged determination to just push on through everyone else's bullshit. Great guest.

[@highjumpstudios2384]

And it was still two and a half hours

[@jamesgilboy9302]

But we love their bullshit ❤

[@caidurkan2916]

@@jamesgilboy9302 Not to be that guy (and yes I know that counts as being that guy) but it's nicer when the guest speaks up or takes the lead on the subject matter. Otherwise we get an occasional interjection, joke tangents & even more awkward silence than usual. Don't get me wrong I like that vibe, but the quiet guests who go 25 minutes between utterances make me feel bad for them, even if that's completely misplaced & not the case at all.

[@Mickulty]

@@caidurkan2916 Yeah the dynamic works best when there's someone - typically but not always Rocz or Guest - who is trying desparately to deliver their carefully planned presentation. That's why it's a good podcast!

[@Cheesemeister42]

​

[@effluviah7544]

Depression: Engaged. Anxiety: Engaged. Snack: In mouth. Headphones: In ears. Two and a half hours, let's go, hell yeah.

[@reidfann]

​@@BiggestCorvidplease don't do that

[@napalmholocaust9093]

On a weed run, I ended-up going to where a home nurse worked so my chick could meet her. The little house was a guy's who had contributed to/ designed and worked on getting the bugs out of the original synchronous implosion required for the detonation of one dropped. He was dying of cancer. We talked for about two hours. Nice guy.

[@R4baDader]

My heart goes out to Stockton “The Mush” Rush and his detrítivore friends

[@DahVoozel]

His heart will go on in the generations of deep sea crabs nourished.

[@jbutler8585]

Cap'n Crunch.

[@arandomlostsoul753]

29:20 Justin pronouncing blåhaj like it rhymes with Hajj is deeply funny to me, a Swede.

[@TheGolux]

it is approximately "Blow High," for those keeping score at home

[@loaf8506]

as an american i am sorry about how we butcher the swedish language via ikea products

[@cattibingo]

Right? I can't believe they don't know it's pronounced "Bork Bork bork"

[@stefthepef]

@@TheGolux WHHHHHHAAAAAAAT oh wow this completely blows my mind now. I never thought of how it would REALLY be pronounced until you mentioned it.

[@segarallychampionship702]

@@stefthepef Yeah, the å is pronounced like o. I'm not Swedish though and I realized it only recently so I've been pronouncing it like "blaahai" all the time.

[@Mickulty]

Timestamps: 0:00:00 Intro and Weather Update 0:02:52 The GD News: Russia Bad, Okay? 0:13:10 The GD News: Stockton "The Crush" Rush 0:31:34 The GD News: Russian Mercs Invade Russia 0:38:56 The GD News: US Railroads Need One Simple Trick 0:45:21 What is a Nuclear? 0:49:34 What is a Nuclear Weapon? 0:53:54 What is a Nuclear Weapon For? 1:00:42 Nuclear Excavation 1:31:51 Safety Concerns 1:36:50 NUKE FRACKING 1:46:57 The "Liam BRB" Digression 1:49:51 The End of Plowshare in General and Nuke Fracking in Particular 1:54:51 The Soviets Did It Better 2:01:01 The Soviets Also Did It Much Worse 2:09:57 Digression: The Butt Story 2:18:16 Safety Third: Huge Magnet, Contractors, and a WTYP Deep Cut (that thankfully was a Fairly Shallow Cut) Rejected timestamp for 1:54:51: Technically, Both Sidesing Something Involving Russia (sorry alice)

[@dr4d1s]

Thank you so much. I love the podcast but I often have other things to do/other podcasts to listen to. The timestamps help so much in keeping the party moving and to not get sucked into tangents. Appreciate you!

[@nicktorrid]

Thx gd blss

[@Mickulty]

@@dr4d1s Glad to help. Personally I appreciate the tangents - more content! So I think timestamps are a good balance. Sadly my ability to reference in-jokes from twitter (like the Shallow Cut thing) is going to be much more limited going forwards, since I refuse to get a twitter account and you can no longer read tweets logged out.

[@dr4d1s]

@@Mickulty I appreciate the tangents as well but sometimes they get to be a little much.

[@Alex-js5lg]

Regarding the Titan implosion: my understanding of the reason the navy didn't report their detections at the time of the dive is that they couldn't positively confirm that the *source* was actually the Titan - they still needed to find debris to corroborate their evidence. They didn't want to let five people suffocate because of a mistaken, immediate conclusion that there was no hope of rescue. I could be misunderstanding the situation, but that's the explanation I heard that seemed to make the most sense.

[@Rinasoir]

The great upside to Devon editing is that they have the Biology background that makes up for the general gap in knowledge that Liam, Roz and Alice have on that field. Not knocking those three, they all have their own areas of expertise, just saying it's nice to have a more well rounded pod for Devon's inputs.

[@dmrr7739]

As of this moment, the Oceangate website’s main page is still advertising Titanic expeditions. And, I shit you not, there is a disclaimer that says, “Limited Space Available.”

[@geoffreyentwistle8176]

I mean... That disclaimer isn't INCORRECT... XD

[@AbsolXGuardian]

The scariest part of the Titan is that it was bolted from the outside al la Iron Lung. It was possible for the sub to have surfaced and they still suffocate.

[@nataschavisser573]

Yeah, I would not have gone on this sub without plenty of xanax and a substantial financial incentive. It looked like a death trap before I heard about it being bloted closed from outside.

[@Joesolo13]

Ideally, they'd have some kind of Emergency beacon which the mothership (or coast guard) could use to located them fairly quickly after that, but probably cheaped out on that too.

[@wafflepoet5437]

@@Joesolo13They absolutely did. On a previous excursion the mothership couldn’t find them for over five _hours_ .

[@Sivilath_NZ]

@@wafflepoet5437 I would like to remind you all that people were expected to pay $250,000 for that...

[@Joesolo13]

@@Sivilath_NZ You know, personally, I think I could buy several emergency beacons for a quarter of a million dollars

[@Aderon]

I don't think they ever detonated the Demon Core. If I recall correctly, after having 2-3 criticality incidents, there were concerns it wasn't pure enough to avoid a fizzle, so they melted it down and re-refined the plutonium to make new cores.

[@christianweagle6253]

Note to Devon: a shake of a lamb's tail is actually, ironically enough, a recognized unit of time in nuclear explosion physics. It is somewhat quicker than you implied however.

[@JuneNafziger]

Goddamn nuclear physics and their esoteric units, they also have the barn (as in a comically large amount regarding I think like the specificity of an experiment, referencing the idiom (couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn)

[@christianweagle6253]

@@JuneNafziger and also the 'dollar' as a measure of critical mass

[@laggard3122]

@@JuneNafziger it’s actually comically small (though not on the scales of nuclear physics); roughly 10^-28 square metres. it gets worse, however: a microbarn is referred to as an “outhouse”, and a yoctobarn is a “shed”

[@MarcosElMalo2]

A shake of a lamb’s tail is theoretical. The practical application is always two shakes.

[@alexroselle]

46:07 when tickling the dragon’s tail suddenly becomes a supercritical shake of the lamb’s tail

[@p1nkyblue]

26:05 You're right. One of the passengers who was killed has looted a bunch of stuff from the Titanic wreck over the years. His collection only ended up in museums because he went bankrupt and had to sell it all off. And I saw an interview with a man who had gone on an earlier dive with oceangate and he said they straight up landed on the bow.

[@Frommerman]

Of all historic sites, I'm least mad about rich chucklefucks looting and abusing the Titanic. It's so inaccessible only rich chucklefucks are ever going to be able to see it anyway, and it's disintegrating due to exotic bacteria and deep-sea currents so quickly that it literally will not be there next century anyway.

[@spacebees86]

I honestly love how every episode starts cold mid conversation. It feels like I just arrived and sat down with you.

[@ferky123]

52:40 on fogbank they made a pure product and found out that the product didn’t behave the same. They found out that the impurities were needed for it to work correctly.

[@yrobtsvt]

fun fact, this is also true of medieval alchemy texts

[@carlosmn]

Alice's mention of the plane having to withstand 0 or 1 atmospheres is exactly the joke from Futurama that I first thought of when they end up going underwater with their space ship.

[@AndrewJam]

Fun? fact about Stockton Rush, he is named after two ancestors who signed the declaration of independence, if you're curious how he came upon his wealth. Behind the Bastards had some great episodes on him this week.

[@MrJimheeren]

I was amazed how much stuff Robert found out about Stockton in just a few days. The guy has some real reporter skills behind all these layers of sarcasm

[@AsbestosMuffins]

17:10 oh cool its expired prepreg, so for people who don't know what that is, he basically used the equivalent of a 6 month old tube of glue to stick the carbon fiber layers together. couldn't figure out if they meant carbon fiber weave or carbon fiber prepreg

[@theprojectproject01]

Either/or, as soon as I heard "Five-inch-thick carbon fiber" I knew that those folks had been reduced to a soup-like homogenate. You couldn't have pulled that hull apart with cranes and bulldozers; but one void in the lam schedule, and it would fold like a bad poker hand.

[@AtomicAerials]

I was JUST there. RIGHT there, on the edge of the Sedan Crater. Tuesday. I swear to god, for the last few years my favorite youtubers have been putting out videos within days of me seeing the subject matter for myself. Seemingly stalkingmy weirdass adventures. Some nuggets from the NTS tour: "There's no radiation here." Well duh, it's all over the southwest. It's in the milk in Spokane and on the corn in Indiana! "The interesting part of the basin is that all the water here stays here." Ah yes, that thing that water famously does: stays put. "Here's the fenced ped we'd put protesters in, whenever they came out to protest whatever it was they were mad about." "There are four famous WHOOPSIES here. Sedan is one, Baneberry is another. Oh our cafeteria is built on a third one." The whole thing was fucking bananas. They said not to collect soil samples, but on our first fucking stop I managed to step in a goddamn glue trap, and now I have half of yucca flat stuck to my shoe. If you guys have any listeners with access to a radio spectroscope, it would be interesting to see if I have any lingering fission products stuck to my merrells.

[@AtomicAerials]

Oh also: "these joshua trees grow very slowly so you can see how many of them survived okay!" but MYSTERIOUSLY all of the joshua trees suddenly vanish within a gentle arc as we reach 1 mile away from ground zero of the Teapot-Annie test. For fucks sake.

[@themothcourt]

So the main reason there was diesel in the borehole is that drilling mud (a fluid used to remove the shit you are drilling from the hole so you can keep drilling) is essentially diesel fuel. It can be other stuff but diesel is very popular in hydrocarbon drilling

[@JoshSweetvale]

Recycling :v

[@hngldr]

Definitely Scot Manley's video on the submersible was good - "you stop being biology and you become physics" - perfect phrase. Why the hell they used carbon fiber for a submersible is still beyond anyone - yeah you need to get buoyancy right but not weight at all jesus. Even the good stuff - I had no idea it was discount used carbon fiber as well lmao.

[@valeriekravette787]

When I was 8 years old I forced my family to go to Meteor Crater as well as the Grand Canyon. Meteor Crater seemed more impressive to me because of its starkness and scale to its surroundings. The Grand Canyon just looked like a postcard, and I couldn't comprehend it.

[@jamesgilboy9302]

Agree-in that case you’d fucking love Crater Lake. It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever comprehended.

[@abigailwharton6271]

​@@jamesgilboy9302Crater Lake is rad. It's the deepest thing I have been unable to comprehend.

[@Frommerman]

The Grand Canyon becomes more comprehensible once you spend a couple weeks rafting down it. The sheer scale is incredible.

[@valeriekravette787]

@@Frommerman absolutely fair. I think you can't get it from a scenic outlook, which is what we were trying to do.

[@paceg.schwarz7637]

Would love to hear Devon’s hitmarker sound effect (or something similar) back again if it’s not too much trouble. They’re a wonderful addition

[@tadferd4340]

Especially for people who listen while doing other things. The hitmarker sound means I need to go back and see what was posted on the video.

[@xmlthegreat]

WDYM, I heard the hitmarker several times this episode.

[@jijonbreaker]

The hitmarker is in the episode, wut.

[@grmpEqweer]

I heard it. Could be louder.

[@kyle-silver]

It’s inconsistent. Sometimes they include it and sometimes they don’t, I really haven’t been able to figure out the logic for when. I think Devon’s interjections get the hit markers while corrections don’t, but I’m not sure

[@thomasgiles2876]

Look, nukes could be great for clearing out all those dead forests from a few episodes ago, and they'd kill a lot of deer.

[@grmpEqweer]

Next up, mutant deer.

[@ianhomerpura8937]

Or better yet, spicy venison

[@thomasgiles2876]

Venison seasoned with spicy prions

[@jacebeleren9290]

"It is useful to have really big explosives for other reasons" Calls to mind something I witnessed in my time at a coal-burning power plant where a crew was called in by the power company to use literal Dynamite on poles to cause concussion forces inside the boilers that cleared scale and slag off the interior. Now I'm imagining a similar situation but on the scale where you'd need a nuke to do it so my mental image is a fuckin Dyson Sphere or something powered by coal-fire and steam and maintenance crews just bring in fusion bombs to blast scale off a boiler the size of a small moon

[@joshuahadams]

I know some furnaces have like 8-gauge shotgun turrets for blasting scale off the sides.

[@jacebeleren9290]

@@joshuahadams somehow I find that even funnier than Dynamite spears being manually stuck in the furnace of a big boi boiler lol

[@AbsolXGuardian]

Warhammer 40k core

[@sampagano205]

24:49 deep sea scientists are universallh insane and i guarantee they have probably eaten the delicious looking mystery shrimp.

[@jacebeleren9290]

Oh look, it's Activate Windows! Good to see a regular's return

[@ThirdCydonian]

The 1980 Damascus incident where that Titan II ICBM exploded in the silo would be a good topic for an episode.

[@grmpEqweer]

😮 edit: oh, the one with the dropped socket wrench. Tool lanyards are a really good idea.

[@abigailwharton6271]

All of the (publicly known) Broken Arrow incidents would be a great subject for an episode.

[@mixmastermind]

Arkansas Represent

[@joinedupjon]

As uncle joe might have said... 5 guys in a sub is a tragedy, 500 migrants on trawler is a statistic.

[@MarcosElMalo2]

I can’t speak for others, but it’s a lot easier feeling schadenfreude about 5 dummies imploding than hundreds of desperate refugees drowning. I don’t even pity the 19-year old very much. He was an adult and theoretically could have told his dad to F.O. if he really cared about self-preservation. If we want to give the Titan disaster a political context, we should use it as a metaphor for re-electing Donald Trump.

[@airplaneian]

love y'all but as an incident response pro I have to mention that the navy did tell the incident command team about the detection when they heard it... a sound consistent with decompression isn't confirmation and you don't make life safety decisions based on a single piece of raw information, and that's a good thing! I think it's right that we take a conservative approach towards saving people's lives and I am glad we spend money and resources on it. Instead of getting angry that we spend a lot of money on search and rescue, we should get angry that we don't take the same approach towards other issues when we as a country can damn well afford it. Our resources are not scarce we can do really good SAR *and* do all the other things, our government just chooses not to prioritize helping people.

[@airplaneian]

sorry for getting on my soapbox, love y'all

[@grmpEqweer]

​@@airplaneian Yup. Rich people are way more equal.

[@SeeYouInShell]

I never thought my love for engineering disasters would ever intersect with my love of 3d anime women streamers. Yet here it is, in fanfiction form. Glorious.

[@mikeymikey4186]

Thank You Devon for making me aware of a WTYP x Hololive EN fanfiction, you truly are the greatest enby representation we could ask for

[@IndustrialParrot2816]

Nah vaushojo I mean vshojo is better than hololive

[@mikeymikey4186]

@@IndustrialParrot2816 Respect your choice, I'm a Nijisanji person

[@deviant324]

@@IndustrialParrot2816 now I've gotta know if there's some vaush/vshojo crossover because that sounds incredible

[@aaaaa-mw4bi]

​@@deviant324I have never considered the possibility of Vaush fanfiction but thanks to you I am now burdened with the knowledge of 3 slashfics about him existing on ao3

[@snaffu1]

Not the crossover I expected but the one I am glad to see. Daredomo Daisuki

[@PobortzaPl]

Building toll booths might have given Putin enough time to build a mock-up of Moscow some 5 kilometres closer to Rostov-On-Don. And then his guys and Prigozhin guys might have started a brawl, that would spill over to other movie sets.

[@MarcosElMalo2]

Putin isn’t the sheriff, he’s the governor.

[@isaactrockman4417]

Glad to know I’m not the only one who thought that

[@mixmastermind]

Someone's gonna have to go and get a shitload of dimes

[@blackmagemasher4031]

Thank you crew for making this and thank you Devon for editing this monster. AND thank you Activate Windows for being there in the dark times

[@PFMediaServices]

Come back in about a week and it'll be captioned, too, and you can enjoy it all over again but be able to make out ALL the words!

[@sunyavadin]

My favourite bit of hindsight on the Soviet experiments with this was how the infrastructure project they planned to carry out using nukes was shelved because they calculated an unacceptable risk that a consequence of them redirecting rivers around the arctic circle using nukes would be to lower global temperature by 2 degrees.

[@isaactrockman4417]

Imagining an alternate future where NATO is doing global warming-causing mega projects and the Soviet bloc is cooling the planet at the same rate

[@Alex-0597]

The Hot/Cold War

[@DiamondKingStudios]

@@isaactrockman4417Combine this with some sort of Soviet SEELE trying to manipulate the global temperature for whatever reason

[@nanothrill7171]

I have no shortage of love for all the people on this podcast, but Devon's little asides are like delicious icing on a wonderful cake.

[@PobortzaPl]

An-225 was used during several natural disaster to deliver different kinds of help. It was used even during pandemic (or should I've said "the last pandemic"). Also - really, Russia's external policy actions are a combo of troll like behaviour and abusive ex-partner behaviour (yes, I know, it's much more often male ex-partner). To lighten the mood of anybody reading my commented: Yay, Active Windows!

[@agurdel]

Hey Crew! This one is for Devon: Could you keep your annotations on screen for a bit longer? Like the one at 26:57. Its a good bit of correction/information that (at least for me) is not long enough on the screen to read.

[@swayback7375]

I listen at 1-25x or even 1.5x, I can’t even get it paused in time

[@d_kmo]

1:47:55 Liam being a mono-blue MTG player is the most surprising part of this whole thing. Big Gruul vibes imo

[@littlesnowflakepunk855]

i dunno i was getting Jund or Grixis

[@vaiyt]

Mono blue, also known as people who want to win at MtG 😂

[@gizoginjr]

@@vaiyt Not so much wanting to win as wanting your opponent to lose. In that vein, makes perfect sense for Liam.

[@littlesnowflakepunk855]

@@vaiyt mono blue, aka "i want to play solitaire"

[@alchemicpink2392]

@@littlesnowflakepunk855 Lies and slander, Black and Green are the respective solitaire colours.

[@fauxpinkytoo]

28:00 Wait. Alice is obviously having memory issues... None of us will ever forget the brilliant performances of Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston in James Cameron's "Titanic". Classic film.

[@paulpsycho78]

Wet knee Houston was great in titanic

[@xmlthegreat]

James Cameron? Don't you mean.... *searches around for a contemporary director name* uhh... Robert Zemeckis?

[@relwalretep]

​@@xmlthegreatyou mean Clint Eastwood

[@JeepnHeel]

​@@relwalretepI don't think he did "Transtanics" -- that was unfortunately Michael Bay

[@zuthalsoraniz6764]

A fun fact about Pascal-B: Probably the only reason it got launched that fast is because right on top of the bomb, at the bottom of the shaft, they had several tonnes of concrete to plug the hole. This concrete got vapourised by the explosion of course, and turned the shaft into a giant nuclear-powered cannon And re: Clean bombs, the Sedan bomb was still fairly dirty, at "under 30%" of the yield being from fission. The cleanest nuclear bombs ever detonated were probably the ones the Soviet Union designed for blasting the Pechora-Kama canal, at only 2% fission - and more impressively, that low a fission fraction at only 15 kilotons total yield.

[@phoenix5384]

When the thumbnail is just a gigantic hole, I already know this is gonna be a good episode

[@mmmhorsesteaks]

There is an epic "yo mama" joke in there somewhere.

[@bananadictator3032]

I could have sworn that thumbnail was yo mama

[@afroponix3414]

That nucleussy is gonna end up with a prolapse at this rate

[@kwarra-an]

I hope you spill your coffee and stub your toe for making me process that sentence with the only brain I'll ever have.

[@obamabiden]

i do love how insanely into everything radioactive people were like, up to the 70s, if it would be shown in a TV show as glowing green, people were trying to use it for something deeply inappropriate

[@kwarra-an]

God, wouldn't glowing lube be awesome, though? Obviously the terrible radiation burns and acute sickness would ruin it, but it would look SO COOL for a little while.

[@alaeriia01]

Ooh, a Bogdanoff profile picture. Haven't seen one of those in a while.

[@obamabiden]

i still believe

[@vaiyt]

Radium chewing gum, eye drops and baby oil

[@grmpEqweer]

​@@kwarra-an Glow in the dark medium is phosphorus based? That's not gonna be good for your fun bits. ...Bioluminescent stuff might work, but not cheaply.

[@Full_Otto_Bismarck]

I am gonna be disappointed if there isnt at least one JFK impersonation rambling about "and we will choose to beat our swords into atomic weapons"

[@suterb]

I was listening to this on my way home from work, and when Liam said the word "talonjob," I almost crashed my fucking car. Another 10/10 episode, y'all!

[@c.djinmyr]

Literally the whole time the titanic sub was gone, I kept thinking of Roz's voice saying "Don't go in the tube!" 😅

[@FixedGearFox]

Songs that epitomise the submersible thing: Dio - Holy Diver Rod Stewart - Ive Got a Crush On You Edit: Moby - We're All Made of Stars Edit: also at the depth they were at, they were not turned into paste, they were turned into plasma by the sheer crushing force of pressure for a brief moment.

[@bossbeartherock6034]

Ill take holy diver for 200

[@loadeddice4696]

Beatles - Octopus Garden

[@Hapydude101]

Queen - Under Pressure

[@loadeddice4696]

@@Hapydude101 Oh that's good

[@grmpEqweer]

Run silent, run deep, by Iron Maiden seems a bit aggressive...

[@jimbrown5091]

I graduated from a land-grant university in the southeast with a mechanical engineering degree. Most of my college buddies are engineers. We have been having vigorous debates on the OceanGate thing...but one thing we all agree on is that there is no good reason to be 2 miles below the ocean and there's really REALLY no good reason to do so in a slapdash submersible trying to eyeball a 100 year old shipwreck.

[@ianhomerpura8937]

Unless you're an oceanographer or a marine biologist.

[@mattwalker5689]

@@ianhomerpura8937Just use an ROV so you don’t have to go where the water will squish you.

[@jimbrown5091]

@@mattwalker5689 or a properly designed and constructed submersible.

[@Trendyflute]

Somehow your magic scheduling knows when I'm in the middle of cooking dinner, but don't have anything to watch when I sit down. WELL I JUST SAT DOWN and I'm watching a podcast about engineering disasters (with slides) for my dinnertime entertainment! 🥳

[@GaldirEonai]

Also, really appreciate Devon's marine biology and physics interjections, because they happened exactly at the same moment my compulsive-explainer ass felt the urge to speak up :P.

[@freeaudiojungle4407]

fact of the matter is its all political, i just like your brand of political. thanks for another episode fellas might have to leave a glowing 2 star review

[@princeoftonga]

Oh yes! The absolute classic WTYP mood of Liam yelling at people for leaving dumb comments. It just makes my soul sing! YAY LIAM!!

[@haphazardlark1502]

Damn it, I have to get up early tomorrow and march my asthmatic ass through a bunch of smoke that doesn’t even have the decency to contain nicotine or THC to get to a bus stop for a bus that has a 50/50 chance of actually showing tomorrow morning but bedtime has just been pushed back by two and a half hours because I need to know what the hell is up with this big hole

[@grmpEqweer]

Consider a painting respirator. With the filter cartridges.

[@haphazardlark1502]

@@grmpEqweer oh I’ve got my envomask respirator ready and a lighter weight but still decent n95 if the respirator starts making me overheat. Along with my inhalers, lots of water, a parasol, and a little card thst says “if found lying in a ditch just leave me for the vultures” Wish I had better heat tolerance cause this smoke burns my eyes too and at this point a full gas mask looks pretty appealing

[@grmpEqweer]

​@@haphazardlark1502 To do anything in the current 99° heat, I dump icewater on my shirt every few minutes. I have a fleet of plastic bottles that I fill and freeze. YMMV, it's not very professional looking. I work outside too. They can cope.

[@xmlthegreat]

Asthmatics unite, but I live in India and the general pollution is like edging for a respiratory attack. Enough to almost cause it everyday, but not enough to actually trigger one.

[@haphazardlark1502]

@@xmlthegreat extremely weak solidarity high five followed by labored wheezing

[@bobsmith2637]

From the Safety Third, you could cut the zip ties by using some plastic rope to saw through them. Just like using some old bale twine to cut open the next haybale (I guess you'd never think of this if you didn't grow up around livestock).

[@PFMediaServices]

Hey! I just learned about this from the channel Hard Is Easy. Never would have thought that fiber could have that kind of effect, or that I could be even more terrified of rock climbing!

[@tomtrask_YT]

As possibly your oldest surviving listener, a Carryall is an International Harvester vehicle roughly competitive with the Chevy Suburban or Dodge Town Wagon. It should be noted that there was an IH Scout which was around the size of the original Ford Bronco. It's hard to say which size vehicle really fills the role we call SUV today. Carryalls and Suburbans were huge and Scout or Bronco might be owned by a family that didn't live on a farm but probably only if they went hunting or skiing pretty regularly (or had money to burn).

[@realcanadian67]

I thought plow shares was what communal farms do when there's only 1 plow

[@Frommerman]

Plow shares is what happens when crypto guys think fractionalizing agriculture is a good idea.

[@Jablicek]

The work the whole team puts into these pods is brilliant - Devon's finishing touches are just the icing on the cake, and done with care and consideration, viz: slide at 49:35. Lovely person, thank you

[@FlakeSE]

The Navy passed on the information about what the hydrophones picked up to the Coast guard, which took the decision to keep searching until absolute proof like wreckage was found.

[@MarcosElMalo2]

There’s also the time between the accident and it’s being reported, then whatever gap between someone thinking to ask the Navy, then the time it took for some technician to pore over the data to find a squiggle that indicated a possible undersea implosion, then analysis to be relatively confident, then the time it took for intelligence policy makers to consult with wonks about releasing the information to the Coast Guard. When you consider all this, the Navy was quite efficient in passing the information.

[@GoredonTheDestroyer]

-For those curious, the hole isn't -_-supposed-_- to be there, though it is naturally formed - A big-ass rock about 150ft wide smacked into that post ~50,000 years ago give-or-take at somewhere between 20 to 45,000 miles per hour- Ignore all of that, it was the Sedan crater.

[@darthbob88]

1:18:10 You mean the Great Barringer Meteor Crater? Which is just a great name because it tells you what it is, how big it is, who discovered it, and what created it.

[@Frommerman]

Well, it tells you which white guy first had eyes on it. There were definitely some pre-Navajo or Hopi folks who discovered it.

[@darthbob88]

@@Frommerman You have a point, I was unpleasantly colonialist there, but according to Wikipedia, he wasn't even that. White people had known about it for a while before Barringer proved it was a meteor crater.

[@nsnick199]

Ah, submersibles: for when digging an elaborate tunnel system in your estate just isn't *explore-y* enough. Edit: A.K.A. when you want to suffocate somewhere *exotic*

[@ianhomerpura8937]

Aren't chokers chokey enough? They should have gone into BDSM and shit

[@louisvictor3473]

If I am going to suffocate, I wanna donit in style, pleb!!!

[@DanBalan1]

I just lost my Yu-Gi-Oh local store championship. I'm so glad you guys published this for the ride home

[@PsychoEditor]

I hope you had fun!

[@DanBalan1]

@@PsychoEditor Fun had by all!

[@PsychoEditor]

@@DanBalan1 yay!

[@AllisonChainz3718]

2:17:00 MAN, that fart sounds like it was 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure, 50% pain, and 100% reason to remember the name.

[@mdt105]

Justin is kind of wrong about how dependent Ukraine is on irrigation. South-central Ukraine is naturally semi-arid steppe that historically experienced total crop failures one year out of every five (may be hyperbole, the figure comes from an 18th century Russian aristocrat emphasising how terrible for farming the area is), and even in the successful harvests was not very agriculturally productive because it was too dry. It was the network of dams of which the Kakhova Dam was the most important that changed that, and stopped the regular famines the area experianced. Without the dam, pretty much the exact same thing that happened to Crimean agriculture after Ukraine stopped supplying water will happen here; industrial, for-profit agriculture becomes essentially impossible due to lack of water. It took two years for Crimea to revert to its natural climate, it'll probably take about the same amount of time for the rest of the region. Basically, Ukraine has probably gone from a breadbasket region to having to import food for a decade, until a replacement dam can be built and the reservoir refilled. If the war is still going on next year, there won't be a grain export deal because there probably won't be any grain to export.

[@strawmann9183]

It's so cool you guys decided to do an Oppenheimer tie in episode. Now all we need is the Whoppenheimer.

[@TMmodify]

Learned so much about Chernobyl, thanks guys

[@dracorex426]

The Demon Core was never detonated. The ended up melting it for use in other cores.

[@stevendorries]

That’s just what they want you to think. In reality it’s still out there, bloodlust unslacked, biding its time till it can kill again

[@bossbeartherock6034]

Amen the squad is here

[@s4nari]

Reporting for duty sir, ma’am, and non-binary officers.

[@craigstephenson7676]

Mashallah

[@grmpEqweer]

Nonbinary private reporting. 🫡

[@Eloraurora]

​@@s4nari...you're giving me echoes of the irrational anxiety I used to get about the appropriate saluting distance. How _do_ you address an enby officer?

[@Maoistan]

Where we droppin boiis?

[@thomaspalazzolo5902]

Just imagining howling wolves harmonizing with James' fart echoing through the woods.

[@thompkins6796]

1:51:43 thank you Alice. I appreciate your correction and recognition of librarian labor

[@MrWsundstrom]

Yes! Sideling hill is the mountain cut out near Cumberland MD, there's a rest stop where you can get out and see all the layers. When driving to Garrett County my Mom would always thank the late senator Byrd from WV for getting that beautiful highway 70 built to knock a couple hours off his commute to DC 😂

[@lunalangton5776]

It's actually a common misunderstanding that the 'recipe' for Fogbank was lost. It wasn't. They just didn't know how they made it in the first place. They had to add contaminants that they didn't realise were critical in order to make it correctly. Good thing we don't come here for accuracy, or I'd waste a few paragraphs on the news too.

[@XavierTheNeonTiger]

I've been binge watching these in a semi-random order and was confused when they got to the goddamn news and it was current. That's one hell of a hole though.

[@Shredderbox]

"Get in the bomb, Shinji!" 🤣🤣🤣

[@willyroof1]

My grandfather was a reporter at the time and witnessed one of the underground plowshare tests. What a wild time that was, figuring out if nukes were good for anything other than killing.

[@JPR3D]

I was amazed and inspired by the depth of passion that Justin expressed during his rant regarding Titanic, SS United States, and ocean-liner preservation in general.

[@AySoup]

we're gathered here today to yay our liam

[@carinafreeman6432]

Yay our Liam!

[@PaleCentaur]

That fart story is INCREDIBLE. 100% worth sticking around to the end of the podcast for.

[@TheShortStory]

It may seem like a bit of a rote exercise at this point but it’s always worth saying “Yay, Liam!”

[@kaninchenzero8537]

we had a like 2T nmr spec when i was doing analytic, it was about the size of a water heater and the magnetic safety brief was like "uh, probably don't get your watch too close if you want to keep it" and we'd throw paper clips at the helium bottle which indicated field vectors pretty nicely. and was fun. less dangerous to clean up than those monsters, yikes.

[@werebuffalo]

29:04 I love Devon's text-based contributions! I used to listen to this as a podcast, but now I've switched exclusively to watching them on youtube, mostly for Devon's input. :-)

[@nicklanders5178]

The bit at the end with the helium voice reminded me of videos of saturation divers, who because of the depth they work at, often have to breathe a mix of gasses which include helium, and yes, they have helium voice the whole time