LeChuck

Funny, because I love the baroque cycle. The enormity of it, and how it feels you can just go to this world and look around as the story meanders in the background.

I'm learning chess at the moment. I can't tell you how frustrating it is to slide back in rating every time I learn a new idea and try to incorporate it into my game.

I takes a lot of willpower to stick with it and fully internalize that idea. Then I read a new book and it starts all over again.

It was the brightness I was worried about, yes. Should've probably just looked it up myself!

I don't think astronavigation is used in any serious capacity anymore, so in that sense it's a moot point. Still, it's a cool practice and it would've been too bad to see that go away.

Yeah. That's the problem. Celestial navigation can only be performed during twilight, as you need to be able to see both the horizon and celestial objects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight#Nautical_dawn_and_dus...

I wonder if these things will have any effect on astronavigation. It would be sad to see such a cool practice become impossible.

>If the ships only carry 4 TEU (or 4 FEU), then lashing is likely not needed if they use Twistloc's welded to a boat deck that is designed for the dynamic loads. With only four containers, I wouldn't even dock/undock the ships; keep them continuously moving, and pick and place the containers dynamically as the boats move through canal lock style controlled conditions. There are Twistloc designs that are purpose-built to automatically work with the container cranes with no manual intervention.

on a ocean going vessel you wouldn't need to lash them, no. On a ship this small I would most certainly do. We can probably devise a hypothetical solution for this as well, though.

I tried to illustrate (badly) how hyper-efficient modern container operations are. People don't really realize how much work has been put in optimizing all this stuff.

Let's say a typical call is about 5000 moves. So that would mean about 625 of your small vessels. It won't take 5 minutes to load the containers, because the discharge containers need to be unlashed and the load units need to be lashed (which you can't do during operations). It'll be more like 30 minutes to discharge, load and get the next boat alongside (in the best case). You could shift the boat along the quay for lashing (or shift the crane, but that takes the same amount of time)and get the next boat working. Even then the productivity will be at least half of what a typical terminal can do. The overhead per boat is simply to high.

That's not even taking into account the seaworthiness of these small vessels or the logistics of getting all these boats in and out of port without congestion.

I have. Lots of them, all over the world. On every ship I've worked on the track pilot is used for hands off operation. Hell, some guys would do paperwork or work on stowage plans during their watch.

It's not even close to the Rotterdam metro area.

> Even as the train moves toward you, and you move toward it, the train’s image maintains a relatively constant position on your retina[...]

That's funny. The very first thing you learn on a ship is to watch out for exactly this. Any ship that maintains it's position relative to yours is on a collision course!

Yeah. This is what I always thought. If we could safe many lives with self-driving cars then we could safe many more with augmented humans.

You'd think they'd have their hands full with the robotaxi network, building 1000 solar roofs per week, getting the cars to automatically call a tow truck, getting the cars to autonomously find a valid parking spot, powering the Gigafactory 100% with solar power, building a pickup truck that's a better sports car than a standard 911, outfitting all supercharges affected by blackouts in California with a Tesla powerpack, building more than two semis, building the roadster etc. etc.

Indeed it is. See for example Paris MOU:

https://www.parismou.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_State_Control

That's not quite correct. It happened in 1977 and in 1982.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_election,_1977

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_general_election,_1982

>who actually spends even 1% of their GDP on defense?

Here are the numbers. All but five of the countries do.

You're point still stands, though.

http://www.nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/pdf_2016_0...

Seems to work fine here in the Netherlands, and we have a bit more than ten candidates.

http://i.imgur.com/pdW1ZTe.jpg

Not only far from inevitable but impossible in a lot of cases. When I was looking for an apartment in Germany most (all? I can't remember) landlords wanted to verify that my income was at least three times the rent.

Oh man. Something like the (now cancelled?) BlackBerry Vienna/Rome/Mercury. I'd buy that thing the day it comes out.

http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/135924-blackberry-vienna-mer...

Yes, but with planes and ships (on ships it's almost always called track pilot and speed pilot, by the way) you can let go of the controls for extended periods of time. In cars, right now, that's a recipe for disaster. Functionally they may be the same, but practically speaking it's very different.

You didn't hear these complaints. They where made, and Mercedes pulled the ads. http://www.autoblog.com/2016/07/29/mercedes-pulls-self-drivi...

Great story. Having undergone the hazing on a Dutch merchant ship, what stands out to me is how similar the rituals are across countries.

I had almost the exact same experience as the author, only including head shaving.

P.S. Here is my certificate: http://imgur.com/TPcQ2zu. I always take it with me on board, don't feel a particular need to do it again.

>Low sulphur fuel is 4x the cost.

It's more like double the cost. Your point stands, though.

http://www.bunkerworld.com/prices/port/nl/rtm/

Not to detract from your general point, but fresh water is used for more than just human consumption.

It very far from certain that a ship without propulsion will just stay afloat for a while. Even big ships can disappear in a hurry if the weather's bad enough.

See for example the sinking of the Derbyshire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tN4xROtMjI

Crowded? No. But there are certainly people looking out at the ocean at all times.

I personally like 'aloof', coming from the Dutch word loef which means windward.

The devil to pay is another cool one. From Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey Maturin series (great books by the way):

""'Why, the devil, do you see,’ said Jack, ‘is the seam between the deck-planking and the timbers, and we call it the devil, because it is the devil for the caulkers to come at: in full we say the devil to pay and no pitch hot; and what we mean is, that there is something hell-fire difficult to be done – must be done – and nothing to do it with. It is a figure.’""

It refers to the cat o' nine tails, which was used to punish sailors in the Royal Navy and was, supposedly, kept in a special bag. It's also where "not enough room to swing a cat" is said to come from.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/Cat-o%27-...

There's also treesheets. It's a nested table editor, but the tables can also be rendered as mind maps. My description doesn't really do it justice, but it's pretty cool.

http://strlen.com/treesheets/

Adding to gk1's comment. Adding the power redundancy needed to tow another ship would obliterate all the fuel savings these ships (potentially) can achieve.

I would like to see some redundancy in navigational equipment before this becomes a reality. Currently ships only have traditional navigation methods to fall back on if satellite navigation fails. While there are some projects underway to find a seamless replacement for GNSS [1], none are quite there yet.

[1] http://www.e-navigation.net/index.php?page=resilient-pnt-fro...