Recent comments in /f/todayilearned

tinaoe t1_j6hw0t6 wrote

Reply to comment by Brainiac7777777 in TIL that Titanic crewman Herbert Pitman made an attempt to row his lifeboat over to rescue people in the water, but was overruled by the other occupants of the boat, who were worried about people swarming them and duly complied. Pitman said that this haunted him throughout his life. by ChadExtra

>This is factually incorrect

You wanna back that up with a quote? Because afaik it's the truth:

>At the time, the Board of Trade's regulations stated that British vessels over 10,000 tons (Titanic was just over 46,000) must carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 5,500 cubic feet (160 m3), plus enough capacity in rafts and floats for 75% (or 50% in case of a vessel with watertight bulkheads) of that in the lifeboats. Therefore, the White Star Line actually provided more lifeboat accommodation than was legally required.
>
>The regulations made no extra provision for larger ships because they had not been changed since 1894, when the largest passenger ship under consideration was only 13,000 tons, and because of the expected difficulty in getting away more than 16 boats in any emergency.

You can look up those regulations here. Now, those regulations were heavily outdated due to the massive increase in size and capacity that had happened in the ocean liner industry, but that only became apparant after Titanic sank (Titanic's safety requirements were written at a time where the biggest ship in the world was about a third of her size). Look up the 1914 Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, they changed a bunch of stuff (24 hour radio, lifeboats, ice patrol) in response to the sinking.

The usual idea was that the lifeboats would be let down, the passangers ferried to a nearby ship (as the transatlantic shipping lanes were very busy there should always be one nearby, especially because sinkings were expected to happen closer to port due to collisions or groundings), rinse and repeat. That worked some of the time, but a lot of the times the ships sank way too quickly too launch their lifeboats or conditions were so bad that the lifeboats sank themselves. So lifeboats weren't seen as the massive safety feature they are today. A lot of the time people figured they were safer on board the bigger ship instead of being capsized, dragged into the propellors or left to deal with heavy seas in a small, wooden lifeboat. Especially on a sinking like Titanics which was remarkably calm and steady up until maybe 20 minutes before it went down.

So even if Titanic had more lifeboats? It probably wouldn't have done a lot. She sank slowly (look up Ocean Liner sinkings around that era, a LOT of them go down in 5-20 minutes), but even then they didn't manage to launch all of her boats (that they weren't fully filled isn't the issue, the plan was to fill them consecutively from the lower doors to ensure a safer launch, but that didn't happen for a variety of reasons).

Look at the RMS Empress of Ireland: similar in size to the Titanic, got requipped with more lifeboats following Titanic, sank two years later within 14 minutes, with a list so heavy that they couldn't launch the port lifeboats at all (passangers tried, but they slammed into the side of the ship and got thrown into the water).

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SamtheCossack t1_j6hun5b wrote

Reply to comment by iiSpook in TIL that sperm whales are the loudest animal on Earth, and their clicks can literally kill you with sound by g1ucose

If you were right next to it, I would assume it would be a very unpleasant experience. The force might be moving away from you, but the water won't stop moving once the sound goes through, and you would get a really nasty shockwave going through your body.

It would probably be a similar level of disorientation to being in a fairly high speed car crash.

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iiSpook t1_j6hu4ul wrote

Reply to comment by SamtheCossack in TIL that sperm whales are the loudest animal on Earth, and their clicks can literally kill you with sound by g1ucose

Oh, wow, I did indeed assume it was radial. So cool to hear they can actually precisely aim it. I do understand that you can't compare sound waves in water to air directly, I was just asking for a rough ballpark and you did deliver.

Follow-up question out if interest, if you allow. If I was next to one and they aimed the "beam" away from me, would I hear nothing or just a faint noise or something like that?

Thanks for your initial reply.

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SamtheCossack t1_j6htcig wrote

Reply to comment by iiSpook in TIL that sperm whales are the loudest animal on Earth, and their clicks can literally kill you with sound by g1ucose

Around 230, which is massively more than gunshots, jet engines, and even bomb explosions.

That said, decibels aren't really a good way of measuring sounds like that. It is a tightly focused long range sonar "Beam" that is used for scanning the ocean depths for prey, not a radial blast like the others mentioned. It is also in water, and compression effects in water are massively more dangerous, because the water doesn't compress like air is, so a human body gets hit by the full force.

So yeah, if a whale aimed it a human and did it at full force, it would kill the human. But they don't use it as a weapon, and the whale is very unlikely to do that. Especially since they seem to like people, and act curious and friendly to divers, and never hostile unless you spear them.

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Altreus t1_j6hqrdo wrote

Reply to comment by Mudders_Milk_Man in TIL the term “cloud cuckoo land” goes back to the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, who used it for a utopian city of birds in his farce, the Birds by Mr_Westerfield

Ah! Elegance and class and astounding good taste, fellow redditor! It's What We Want To Believe and today is the day I finally discovered what they're saying.

In my defence, I'm pretty sure he's actually saying crown cuckoo love, which is just as nonsense if you don't know the phrase.

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