Quotulatiousness

August 17, 2013

Delays in India’s submarine program

Filed under: India, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

In the Times of India, Rajat Pandit reviews the state of the Indian Navy’s submarine fleet:

Is India’s aging fleet of conventional submarines threatening to go the MiG-21 way? The Tejas light combat aircraft (LCA), already 30 years in the making, was slated to replace the obsolete MiG-21 in the 1990s but is still at least two years away from becoming fully-operational.

Similarly, the Navy too was to induct 12 new diesel-electric submarines by last year, with another dozen to follow in the 2012-2030 timeframe. This was the 30-year submarine building plan approved by the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS) way back in July, 1999. But the Navy has not inducted even one of the 24 planned submarines till now, and is forced to soldier on with just 14 aging conventional vessels.

“The Navy is steadily modernizing in the surface warship and aircraft arenas. But our aging and depleting underwater combat arm is a big worry. But it also must be kept in mind that INS Sindhurakshak‘s accident is the first such incident we have had in over four decades of operating submarines,” said a senior officer.

Sources said INS Sindhurakshak, after Wednesday’s accident, is “a clear write-off”. Of the 13 submarines left now, as many as 11 are over 20 years old. The setback comes when China and Pakistan are systematically bolstering their underwater combat capabilities, with the former being armed with over 55 submarines.

Update: MarineLink reports on the investigation into the INS Sindhurakshak explosion.

The Indian Navy diving teams have been working nonstop to reach into the compartments of the submarine since rescue operations commenced early noon of August 14. The boiling waters inside the submarine prevented any entry until noon that day. Access to the inner compartments of the submarine was made almost impossible due to jammed doors and hatches, distorted ladders, oily and muddy waters inside the submerged submarine resulting in total darkness and nil visibility within the submarine even with high power underwater lamps. Distorted and twisted metal within very restricted space due extensive internal damage caused by the explosion further worsened conditions for the divers. This resulted in very slow and labored progress. Only one diver could work at a time to clear the path to gain access. After 36 hours of continuous diving effort in these conditions, Navy divers have finally reached the second compartment behind the conning tower in the early hours of August 16.

Three bodies have been located and extricated from the submarine from this compartment. The bodies are severely disfigured and not identifiable due to severe burns. The bodies have been sent to INHS Asvini, the naval hospital, for possible DNA identification which is likely to take some more time.

The state of these two bodies and conditions within the submarine leads to firm conclusion that finding any surviving personnel within the submarine is unlikely.

This game shows why the preseason is necessary

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In a mid-game update yesterday, I said that today’s post “will be equal parts hilarity and doom-mongering”. Let’s see how the sages are reading the auspices…first, here’s ESPN’s Kevin Seifert with a quick overview of the lowlights:

The evening began with left tackle Matt Kalil getting beat for a sack by Bills defensive end Jerry Hughes, and it didn’t get much better, at least for a Vikings offense that again played without tailback Adrian Peterson. Coaches got quarterback Christian Ponder five series of work, but he took two sacks and was jumpy enough to complete only 5-of-12 passes for 53 yards. He led a 62-yard scoring drive, ending in a Blair Walsh’s 36-yard field goal, but otherwise the Vikings gained a total of 20 yards on his other possessions. (Walsh earlier missed from 49 yards.) The Bills’ rush was active, and center John Sullivan launched an early shotgun snap to scuttle one play, but all quarterbacks face adversity during the season. Ponder needed to react better and at times quicker Friday night. If you were hoping for an anxiety-relieving performance from him, this wasn’t it.

For those of you following at home, Matt Kalil’s training camp has been less than stellar according to the various reports … not terrible, but not on the pace he established in his rookie season. Blair Walsh didn’t miss very many field goal attempts last year, so even a miss at 49 yards is somewhat uncharacteristic for him (possibly he’s still adapting to his new holder Jeff Locke). John Sullivan is widely acknowledged to be one of the best centres in the league, so a bad snap from him is also uncharacteristic.

1500ESPN‘s Andrew Krammer averts his eyes from the struggling offence to find a bit of cheer on defence and special teams play:

The Vikings’ starting secondary didn’t get much of a test against the Bills’ quarterback Kevin Kolb, who threw four passes in the first quarter — the second of which was tipped by cornerback Xavier Rhodes, making his NFL debut, and intercepted by safety Jamarca Sanford.

Playing in both the base and nickel formations, cornerback Josh Robinson saw extended playing time at both outside and the slot after just six snaps in the preseason opener. Robinson jumped a route and deflected Kolb’s pass in the second quarter and if he had another step on the ball, could have turned it into a pick-six.

[…]

The Vikings only had three penalties, which puts the total at four across the first two preseason games — the fewest in the NFL so far.

No penalty was [as] inopportune as linebacker Tyrone McKenzie’s holding call after receiver Stephen Burton returned a kickoff for a touchdown.

Although he didn’t have a catch Friday, Burton has made a strong case for the 53-man roster this preseason by demonstrating his value as a run blocker, special teams man and solid fifth option at receiver.

Rookie punter Jeff Locke saw extended work with an inept offense — booting seven punts for an average of 40 yards, pinning three inside the 20-yard line with the help of cornerback Bobby Felder.

Felder played a big role in the field position game on Friday, downing two of Locke’s punts inside the 20 and taking a punt return back for 37 yards.

The Daily Norseman‘s Ted Glover wants to put in a couple of sell orders on the NFL stock market:

The first team offense, minus Rudolph: If I could use a WWII analogy, Ponder was France, the Bills were the German Wehrmacht, and the Vikings big uglies were the Maginot Line. Rudolph was the French Resistance, but everyone else? Yeah, pretty much got blitzkrieged. Ponder was running for his life, Matt Kalil perfected the “lookout block” technique, and John Sullivan demonstrated his otherworldly strength by snapping a football 30 yards behind him.

Matt Cassel: The second team offense wasn’t much better, but again, I think a lot of this goes to the Vikings and their decision to concentrate on what they waned to do as opposed to try and counter what Buffalo was doing. But yeah, Cassel threw a pick and was running around so much it looked like he was auditioning for Dancing With The Stars. Pre-season football fever, catch it!

Buy/Sell:

Buy: The new road uniforms. I like them. If I have a beef on anything about the new uniforms, it’s the weird edges on the numbers. But I like the look. Very nice balance between retro and a new look.

Sell: Not wearing the purple pants: One of the reasons I liked the uniform changes in 2006 was because they added the purple pants. I think I’m one of the few fans that actually like them, and with the new striping down the side of the leg, I think they look cool. Hope we see them from time to time.

Buy: Not game planning in the pre season. Look, this is the time where you try and get game reps and continuity with your first team, and not get anyone hurt. It wasn’t pretty to watch, but I understand the philosophy of what the Vikings did.

Sell: Not running at least one screen pass or draw play. I mean, it’s not like the Vikings don’t have screen passes or draws in the playbook, and really, how much valuable information can you glean from the Vikings first team offensive line playing Olly Olly Oxen free the whole time they were out there? Ponder’s lateral running ability, or maybe his backpedal? At least no one was hurt, so we’ll call it a night and get ready for the next game.

Buy: Rodney Smith’s nice TD catch. It was a nice outside shoulder throw by Thompson that Smith had to adjust for by doing a 180. He went up, got the ball at the highest point, and boom, our lone highlight of the evening, for the most part. Nice effort.

Sell: Joe Webb making the team. I didn’t see a noticeable drop in Joe Webb’s play, but I didn’t see any improvement, either. When you combine that with the fact that Stephen Burton has picked it up as a receiver and a special teams guy (had a TD called back on a kickoff return), and guys at the bottom of the roster coming on (Smith and Chris Summers looked good, for the most part), I’m finding it harder and harder for Webb to find a seat at the table when the music stops.

Fracking and the environment

Filed under: Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

Matt Ridley debunks five common myths about environmental issues with fracking:

The movie Gasland showed a case of entirely natural gas contamination of water and the director knew it, but he still pretended it might have been caused by fracking. Ernest Moniz, the US Energy Secretary, said earlier this month: “I still have not seen any evidence of fracking per se contaminating groundwater.” Tens of thousands of wells drilled, two million fracking operations completed and not a single proven case of groundwater contamination. Not one. It may happen one day, of course, but there’s few industries that can claim a pollution record that good.

Next comes the claim that shale gas production results in more methane release to the atmosphere and hence could be as bad for climate change as coal. (Methane is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time and its concentration is not currently rising fast.) This claim originated with a Cornell biology professor with an axe to grind. Study after study has refuted it. As a team from Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it: “It is incorrect to suggest that shale gas-related hydraulic fracturing has substantially altered the overall [greenhouse gas] intensity of natural gas production.”

Third comes the claim that fracking uses too much water. The Guardian carried a report this week implying that a town in Texas is running dry because of the water used for fracking. Yet in Texas 1% of water use is for fracking, in the United States as a whole 0.3% — less than is used by golf courses. If parts of Texas run out of water, blame farming, by far the biggest user.

Fourth, the ever-so-neutral BBC in a background briefing this week described fracking as releasing “hundreds of chemicals” into the rock. Out by an order of magnitude, Auntie. Fracking fluid is 99.51% water and sand. In the remaining 0.49% there are just 13 chemicals, all of which can be found in your kitchen, garage or bathroom: citric acid (lemon juice), hydrochloric acid (swimming pools), glutaraldehyde (disinfectant), guar (ice cream), dimethylformamide (plastics), isopropanol (deodorant), borate (hand soap); ammonium persulphate (hair dye); potassium chloride (intravenous drips), sodium carbonate (detergent), ethylene glycol (de-icer), ammonium bisulphite (cosmetics), petroleum distillate (cosmetics).

As for earthquakes, Durham University’s definitive survey of all induced earthquakes over many decades concluded that “almost all of the resultant seismic activity [from fracking] was on such a small scale that only geoscientists would be able to detect it” and that mining, geothermal activity or reservoir water storage causes more and bigger tremors.

(more…)

Molly Crabapple in conversation with Warren Ellis

Filed under: Books, Humour, Media — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Any interview introduced with the line “Somewhere, on an NSA server in Utah, there sits an email from Warren Ellis threatening to strangle me to death with my own intestines” has to be worth reading:

You’re semi-crack-addicted to information. Whenever we talk, you have a podcast, the Economist, some ambient drone music, and a reader full of links open. Dead Pig Collector was inspired by an article you read on Chinese garbage disposal. Tell me about your information consumption.

This is going to be just another way for you to insist I listen to the sounds of insects having sex and calling it music while you pollute your apartment with the strains of some idiot with a ukulele wailing about consumption and sodomy.

We call that culture. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t understand.

What would you know about culture? You come from the town that gave the world the cronut.

Cronuts are tasty. As an Englishman, you wouldn’t know what that word means.

We have a joke in this country about American food. It goes like this: “American food.”

I’m sure my information diet isn’t that special. I check the overnight email and RSS feeds in bed, read the Guardian, BBC news, and the Foreign Policy dailies, and scan Twitter over coffee and juice while listening to a couple of podcasts (I subscribe to around fifty podcasts). I have digital subscriptions to the TLS, the LRB, The Economist, National Geographic, and The Wire magazine. I try to read a Kindle Single a week, but I’m getting bad at that. I usually have a few books on the go. I watch Instagram a lot — that service was on the verge of doing some really interesting stuff, and I have a feeling it might die of Facebook disease. You know people are not only running things close to “secret brands” on there, but also selling drugs? I get maybe a dozen email newsletters, maybe less. I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there.

[…]

What’s the relationship between one’s ethics and their art?

I like to say “none” because you have to be able to wear other people’s ethics in order to write personalities other than your own. But the truth, I suspect, is that your own ethics dictate how that should be done, and for which purpose. It’s probably as indelible as a fingerprint. That actually kind of bothers me. If you can’t subsume yourself into an alien ethos, then you’re being caught writing, as it were, in the same way that actors fear being caught acting. I think it’s probably quite different to painting, in terms of expression of ethics in an artform.

Also, I only threatened to strangle you that one time.

Per hour. As a writer of graphic novels, you’re known for Transmetropolitan, which follows Spider Jerusalem, a gonzo journalist living in the twisted future. At a time when journalism is radically mutating, where do you see as medium going?

Oh, ask the small ones, why don’t you …

I remember Nick Davies saying, after his phone-hacking exposes, that even other investigative journalists at his own newspaper — the independent British newspaper the Guardian — were fighting him on the investigation. Not because they or the Guardian were culpable in any way, but because they were afraid of the boat being rocked. The field’s in a pretty dismal place.

People talk about journalism having been fatally disrupted by the Internet, but, honestly, it was coughing blood long before then. The only potentially good thing about the disruption of journalism is that it’s an ongoing process, and the people who’ve made bank on that disruption today will themselves be disrupted into the ground some time tomorrow.

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