Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea | Hacker News Reader

Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea

newyorker.com

84 pointshhs36 comments

This article starts with a cliffhanger. The guy is in his sub at the bottom of the ocean and an electrical failure happens.

Then it goes into his history and builds the story from there... but it never revisits the moment of the beginning cliffhanger. How did he get back up? What was the result of the failure? At what point in the overall story did the failure occur?

According to Wikipedia he's still alive, so I guess it wasn't so serious that it stopped him resurfacing. But yes it would have been nice if the article had clarified what happened. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Vescovo

Hmmm... That seems like a possible editorial oversight. I've been fascinated with this article structure for awhile. In almost all the examples I've collected, the conclusion loops back to the original opener to provide inclusio after covering the background, etc. in the middle.

This was the reason I did read that whole article. To find that info somwhere.

It said there were spares for all systems. So, evidently the spare didn't fail.

Wow. Great story. When I read stuff like this, I never know whether to be utterly amazed with what some ragtag team pulled off or horrified by all of the risks they took.

> Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and improved, for scientists.

This really is the crux of the matter. It's easy to dismiss these sorts of projects as just indulging the fantasies of the super-rich, but because of forward-thinking people, as in this case, they can amount to a great deal more.

FTA :

>>> Vescovo spent three hours at the bottom, and saw a plastic bag through the viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had captured an image of a soda can. Scientists estimate that in thirty years the oceans will hold a greater mass of plastic than of fish. Almost every biological sample that Jamieson has dredged up from the hadal zone and tested in a lab has been contaminated with microplastics. “Does it harm the ability of these animals to feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” McCallum said. “We don’t know, because we can’t compare one that’s full of microplastics with one that’s not. Because there aren’t any.”

A great achievement, a pitiful conclusion.

There's an analogous horizontal phenomenon. Just as the deep oceans are gravitational sinks, the poles are thermal sinks. Cold traps. And so concentrations of persistent atmospheric pollutants are substantially higher there. So it goes.

Do solar winds do anything to strip these pollutants away?

I would not think so. Most of these pollutants are "heavy" and solar winds are only appropriate for the less dense molecules, unfortunately.

Sorry, I neglected to say that they get deposited through precipitation, and incorporated into ecosystems. As I recall, this is mostly about persistent lipophilic organics, some of which are endocrine disruptors. Concentrations are amazingly high in humans (north) and wildlife (north and south).

See http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_f...

36,000 ft = approx. 11 km

This is outstanding science journalism. Tracy Kidder or Neal Stephenson might do as well, but I don't know who else. Ed Yong?

> During one of the demonstrations, a guest engineer began outlining all the ways he would have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCallum said, smiling. “But you didn’t.”

That unnamed engineer would fit right in on many HN threads...

After skimming over the source code, I noticed that the article is transferred to the browser as a JSON containing the article as a string in their own markup language, which is translated to the DOM after the page has loaded.

I am seriously wondering: what are the benefits of this? Why did someone decide to do it this way? I don't see any reason why this page couldn't be served fully "rendered" as HTML, it's a pretty straightforward text page with some occasional figures and images lazily loaded.

The site's score on Google PageSpeed is horrendous:

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...

The New Yorker has done a lot to try, for good or ill, to make the digital experience as similar to the paper one as possible.

My guess is the enormous page is part of this effort.

I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability.

Another factor is probably (again, I'm guessing) that their preferred method of digital consumption is their own apps, where issues are rendered digitally exactly like their paper counterparts, with ads and all. Given the primacy of text at the New Yorker, this actually works out really well. (It's probably worth noting that the New Yorker NEVER does that thing where an article is "continued on page 102" or whatever, which probably makes this work better.)

It's definitely cool that this whole-magazine rendering is available (for subscribers) not just for current issues, but for the entire archive going back 95 years. That's neat.

> I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be commended for the consistency and depth of availability.

They haven't even gotten dropcaps working right; I don't think the issue is having gone too far into diminishing returns, but that their reach exceeds their grasp.

I definitely have my gripes about their technical implementation, but I mostly read either in paper or via the iPad app, so the web presentation is only rarely relevant to me (i.e., when I share a story with someone).

At any rate, the implementation is just that: the package the excellent writing comes in. As long as the words are there, I'm happy. And I _do_ like that they've spent so much time on the wrapper, so to speak, even if it falls short in some respects.

My point is that it's odd to praise them for having gone so far and spent so much time on the wrapper when they haven't gotten the basics right, like dropcaps. Dropcaps are a little fiddly to get right, but they are not that hard. Even my website has correctly-implemented dropcaps, and there are no fulltime web devs maintaining it, shall we say. If you've piled on a mountain of crap in the name of typography and you can't even get dropcaps right, then you aren't making a pretty wrapper (because a pretty wrapper is at least pretty) - you're just making a mountain of crap. The NYer's website, IMO, is as ugly as their reporting is good.

their ios app is frustrating. if you increase the text size it goes from default to huge to ridiculous. those are your only choices.

Headless CMS work this way. It's not an uncommon architecture. Separate your CMS from how it's presented on the web. You could take the same article and display it in a rich UI like this one, syndicate it to another news source, or easily throw it into an email and send it to subscribers.

Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.

> Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.

Are you complaining that they aren't reporting depths in both feet and meters? Or that they aren't reporting depths in only meters?

Also why does it matter? Is the conversion that complicated?

Because it is incongruous to toss around "epipelagic" to sound scientific, but then quote every unit of distance in feet/miles.

But they also convert their photography to black and white to evoke oldschool print journalism, to evoke the nostalgia so loved by their target demographic. The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.

I had no idea you were so plugged in to the intentions of the New Yorker editorial staff.

In fact, not all photography in the New Yorker is black and white.

>The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.

That's a curious and largely indefensible statement not at all supported by facts. What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?

>> What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?

Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this article in particular. The language is very particular, the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable. And they do convert their photos. Every non-animated photo in this article is BW. Despite all the web trickery, this article still pretends to be a print publication.

>Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this article in particular.

That's a pretty loose and fundamentally unsupported statement.

>the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable.

The metric system isn't magic. It's normal to use the system most familiar to the audience being addressed.

It is definitely weird that you're so hung up on this. My assumption, based on your strange snark regarding TNY, is that you just dislike the magazine for some reason you probably haven't really examined.

Fortunately, no one at the New Yorker is listening to you.

Put simply, there is no better source of carefully researched and well written long-form nonfiction in the US. They cover history, politics, entertainment, culture, and (yes!) science, and they do it at an award-winning level. Their coverage of issues around medicine and health care has been and remains especially relevant and fascinating -- folks like Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande (who is, by the way, a MacArthur fellow) produce tremendous pieces in this area, all of which are well worth your time unless you're just too invested in hating on the magazine because they said "foot" instead of "meter."

> Every non-animated photo in this article is BW

But every photo in the New Yorker is not in this article.

>this article still pretends to be a print publication.

That's pretty deliberate, and is also completely unrelated to your complaints about what subject matter is appropriate for the magazine.

Maybe they didn't even notice. It's not like the New Yorker is a science magazine or this was a science article. I didn't notice what unit of measurement was being used, but that is probably because I am accustomed to thinking in feet and miles. That might be the same with the New Yorker authors and editors. It probably didn't even occur to them.

> Because it is incongruous to toss around "epipelagic" to sound scientific, but then quote every unit of distance in feet/miles.

The metric system is not more "scientific". It has certain convenient properties that make it easier to use under many situations, but it's not inherently better. Any "scientist" can make the trivial conversion to their system of choice.

The New Yorker is clearly choosing to target a specific audience where they think that use of units is appropriate. Get over it.

It's an American publication read mostly by Americans. While they passed up an opportunity to pander to the scientific community by using meters it is a wise choice to use typical American units since the numbers at play here are much larger than the quantities people deal with on a day to day basis. People have no intuitive way to understand depths of tens of thousands of feet so they need to relate it to things they know, airplane cruising altitudes, single digit numbers of miles, all of which are denominated in non-metric units, at least in the US. Adding a unit conversion just adds another step that makes it harder for your audience to relate. Picking the units that make conveying the message most efficient is an implied part of the jobs of the writer(s) and editor(s) who touched this article and they're paid to do it so it should come as no surprise that they did it. Obviously I don't speak for everyone but I don't think the scientific community is particularly peeved by a publication targeted at the general public using the units that it's audience uses.

Oh, please.

It's an American publication writing for Americans, where most people think in feet and miles.

And indeed one only has to remember that an inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. Anyone interested and able to read the article can surely make the trivial calculation.

Or, as Americans in a certain age cohort may remember from Saturday morning educational cartoons:

Measuring in metric / is not that hard. / A meter's just a little bit / more than a yard.

I think it's more an issue of bikeshedding than judgement:

Editors and their boards are familiar enough (or think they know enough) about distances to issue blanket policies that might say "all distances should be reported in US customary units and/or familiar references such as football fields".

Pelagic zones are obscure enough that there's no policy that says "Prefer 'light', 'murky', 'dark', 'pitch black', and 'in a hole' to the difficult sciencey terms".

epipelagic isn't even in either of the MacOS dictionaries I have installed (British & American).

To make it worse, MacOS tries to define it as a mis-spelled epileptic, overriding the "pelagic zone" which is more useful.

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