The most important thing you'll read today

Update: here's a great summary of the backlash generated in the wake of this issue. You're welcome.

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If you're a believer in personal freedom, read this and send the author your message of support.

I've been through one of the new whole-body scanners at Logan airport. It was either that or enjoy a handjob from a 300-lb TSA agent/bagboy. Have you heard about this? TSA agents now cup your meat as part of the patdown process.
Folks, most mariners travel using one-way tickets bought on short notice. This means 100% "additional screening."

Anyhow, if you're on the fence about clicking above, the author refused to go through the whole body scanner, opting for the metal detector and pat-down. He was informed that the frisky agent was going to check his oil, so to speak, and very politely refused, questioning the crossing of a line between a personal search and sexual assault.


Very awesome. Proving, again, that the government will take our freedoms away only when we allow them to do so.

ew,

Low calorie, low salt, no cholesterol chicken noodle soup. I can SMELL the chicken, but can't taste it. I hate getting old.

Why is this not headline news?

November 10, 2010

White House doctored moratorium recommendation

Someone in the White House office of Carol Browner, Assistant to the President for Energy and Climate Change, changed a Department of the Interior report so that it appeared that a group of industry experts had "peer reviewed" and approved the recommendation that a drilling moratorium be imposed.

That, essentially, is the finding of a Department of the Interior Inspector General's report.

Eight experts made it very public, and very clear that they did not support the moratorium, imposed after the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The IG report says that misleading edits to the Executive Summary of the report were made in Browner's office in the White House.

You can read the IG report HERE

Fwd'd from marinelog.com

volume for volume approximations

This is a smaller cargo tank on a smallish oil tanker.



When dealing in modest volumes of oil- parcels between 200 and 4,000 tons, in my case- there's a surprising amount of estimating and approximating going on regarding the actual volumes during the transfer of custody of the oil. In our era of $3.00 a gallon gasoline, tenths of gallons are precious to some people at your local gas station. In our world, a couple of tons of oil here and there isn't much to worry about. Imagine the money involved, where 5,000 or 10,000 gallons of missing (or extra) oil are the difference between 'good' and 'acceptable' volumes.

There are refiners that always short the barge or ship a minimum of 10 tons of oil. There are tank farm that always overpump 1-2 tons of oil to every barge, or 10-20 tons to every ship. This is the best some groups can do for accuracy.

Oil changes volume rapidly with changing temperature. The density of oil is measured at a standard 60 degrees, but oil is rarely 60 degrees. In fact, at 60 degrees, the Heavy and Intermediate Fuel Oils aren't fluid enough to be pumpable at all. They need to be between 100 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit in order to be pumped comfortably. At that temperature, the oil is much less dense- a volume correction factor must be applied- a multiplier (well multiplicand, really) that normalizes the value and gives one the number of net barrels that are being transferred, were the oil to be cooled to 60 degrees.
In dealing with these large volumes, the US is the only country in the world that still measures their tank depths in feet and inches. In order to make sense of our ancient and outmoded units of measurement, we apply another correction factor that equates barrels of oil (we don't use gallons- the number is too small, and oil is sold by barrel, not by gallon, for the most part) to metric tons of oil. So, when a ship requests 1,300 tons of heavy fuel oil, and 75 tons of LSMGO (Low Sulphur Marine Gas Oil, a type of clean diesel), we have to sit down with a pad of paper and a pen and play with numbers before sitting down with a keyboard and a program and playing with numbers.
Me being a pernicious ass most of the time, I have a nice program that takes the API density (a logarithm that describes the rate at which the oil volume will change with temperature) and the temperature, and give a correction factor out to 5 decimal places- that is, it will calculate to the hundred-thousandth of a barrel the density of the oil in question. In fact, the first beef I ever got in with Grumpy, my counterpart when I go home, was that he deleted my program in favor of a manual calculation that only gives us corrections out to FOUR decimal places. I can be a fastidious dick like that, but then again, .00001 barrels adds up when you're dealing with 30,000 barrels at a time. Well, OK, it doesn't really, because if the man on the shut down switch at the refinery is scratching his balls when I call for a shut down, and doesn't have his finger on the trigger (the shut down I mean), that half second turns into enough oil for me to get from Boston to Los Angeles and back in my truck.
Those oil tanks you see in tank farms at the side of a highway- in some of them, 1/16 of an inch is 7 tons of oil, and it's hard to read 1/16 of an inch from an oily gauge, so some guys round up or down to eigths of an inch, or about 15 tons plus or minus. In fact, the amount at which one's hands shake can change the reading by quite a bit. Being a caffeine aficionado, I lay my gauging tape against something to prevent the shaking hand effect. Not everyone does that, of course.

My view is that when you spend a half million bucks to fuel up your ship for a couple of weeks, you should be getting what you paid for. Little ships that run into shithole ports like Haiti and Rio Haina, or fruit ports in Brazil or Chile, those boats run on only 15 or 20 tons of fuel a day. "Only." Imagine. My little barge carries about 4,000 metric tons of oil, which weighs about the same as two WWII era destroyers. Things have gotten big. I guess when you're dealing with such a large scale, what's a couple of grand in oil between friends?

sea stories II

This is another story from my father's career at sea.

My dad took me aside on the night before my first trip to sea, and warned me not to drink too much when I went ashore. He didn't want to see me make the same mistakes he did, like when he and his friends got drunk and tried to steal the yacht belonging to the richest man in the world.



My dad had done his four years in the Navy, and had gotten out- being an orphan, without family, he turned towards the only organization that had ever taken an interest in his well-being. He became a novice Franciscan monk at a monastery in the Mojave desert.
Luckily (for me), a little over a year later, the Korean war broke out, and my dad got itchy feet. He rejoined, and was immediately assigned to a shitbox WWII destroyer in convoy duty off of Korea.
The ship was a bad-luck ship. On her first port-of-call after the start of the cruise, the ship was hit by a tsunami. A standing wave caught the ship unprepared, and washed several dozen men over the side. My dad was outside having a smoke after lunch. He suffered nothing more than some road rash after having been washed half the length of the ship and getting tangled in the rails. He was lucky, compared to the guys with broken arms, noses or legs, bobbing around in the water. On the way out of port, the ship collided with a tanker, ending the career of the captain.
Eventually, repaired and re-officered, the ship left to join the fleet. An interminable period followed, where the ship was periodically dispatched to escort other ships, and occasionally would join in a battle group and run close to shore while the heavy cruisers and a battleship would engage in shore bombardments. My dad took part in a couple of shore assaults, where his destroyer's shallow draft would allow them to get close to a beach and discourage any resistance.

One such shore assault ended very badly for my dad's ship. Unbeknownst to anyone on our side, the Koreans had installed a shore battery on the plateau of a mountain overlooking the beach that the Marines were taking. The jungle very effectively provided cover for a large number of gun emplacements An shell can wreak havoc on small ships, and the battle group scattered, as they couldn't spot the guns effectively with their own, and couldn't sight the batteries from the ocean.
My dad's ship was pinned on the beach. They were the only ship in the shallows, and also the only one that was under the minimum elevation of the battery. The shells sent their way overshot the ship by about 100 yards. The destroyer was being peppered with small arms and machine-gun fire from the jungle, and the ship returned fire at a constant rate.
An aircraft carrier was part of the battle group out to sea. The mountaintop was well-defended with an AA battery as well, but the planes were able to discern the scope of the gun battery.
About 3 hours after the shore assault was called off on account of having brought knives to a gunfight, my dad's ship was a miserable place to live. The sound of small rounds plinking and denting the ship (and penetrating, up on the bridge and a few other key locales) had everyone aware that they were coming in second place. While all this was going on, however, the fleet's largest battleship (USS Massachusetts, I believe) got into position, 12 miles offshore, and a plan was formed for a response. Rather than shoot at the battery and hope for the best, it was decided to take the top off the mountain and remodel the whole plateau with a general bombardment.
If you're a naval buff like me, you'd know that the 16-inch battleship shell was referred to as a "Cadillac" by the gun crews, as a single shell weighed in at over a ton. According to Wikipedia, a single shell can create a crater 50-feet in diameter and 20-feet deep.
Anyhow, it would take almost a full minute for the shells to land after being fired. My dad was in the engine room for the most part. He had to run and do a few electrical repairs and run-arounds, as part of damage-control. He had to subsist on a blow-by-blow report passed to his station, for the most part.
In the end, the shelling started with a single shot that was well-sighted, and passed over my dad's ship- "like a low whisper" as he was told. After that, a full broadside was presented "like a pretty girl had walked through a crowd of teenagers." A few minutes later, the shelling stopped. The mountain was obscured by the dist cloud.
Not much remained of the shore battery. The Marines were reinforced, and the area secured. The ship left the next morning for a refit.

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The days of shore bombardments are over. The battleship era is passed into history. The shore assault, too, for the most part, although somehow the Marines keep getting new aircraft-carrier-sized assault ships built. My dad was part of the last generation to ever storm a beach as a regular naval operational tactic. I suppose that, given time, this practice will be as difficult to imagine as a bayonet charge, or a line of battle.

ugh

Stupidity reigns supreme back home in the People's Republic of MA. Gov. Do-nothing stays in, as does the ridiculous state tax. I guess everyone in MA likes paying taxes.

nature/nurture

This is me, about 40' underwater. I was thin, and had all my hair (and extra, too! Look at that long hair. Sorry, ma.). It was 1997, and I was in Belize, diving the barrier reef as part of a tropical natural history course at college. Once upon a time I was pretty good at free-diving. I could swim very comfortably at full speed for about a minute and a half underwater, and if I simply rose up and down, two minutes.

In the intervening years, I haven't been doing much diving. Up until three years ago, I did some basic diving services for some local fishermen- changing zincs and cutting rope off of fouled propellers, that sort of thing, when I was home, but even that has stopped. I'm down to about one dive a year, which is too bad. When my boy is a little older, I'm really looking forward to spending some quality time underwater- he's a lot like I was, with a great affinity for spending time in the water. He doesn't have my obsession for being out on the water (preferring to be IN the water), but he's his own person already- that being said, we bond pretty regularly under circumstances involving getting wet muddy feet and then being yelled at by his mother.
Going lobstering was something that I immediately wanted to do the first time I saw a lobster boat up close. I was the same age as my boy is now, 7. I went out once with my friend and his father, and that was it. For the next 10 years, I went out twice a week at a minimum, from May until November. Lobstering wasn't something that my dad passed on to me in his sea stories. It was all my own.
I wonder what my boy will find to be passionate about? I hope it's medicine, or law, of course, but whatever it is, I hope that it fills him with the same satisfaction that it does me, 30 years later.