[0] Since so many magazines and newspapers are going out of business and just selling their domains to dogshit spam factories for the incredible Page Rank they have.
It used to be great, then turned into kind of an airport magazine (you know, the kind you'll read on the plane but not subscribe to), and after it got bought out it's garbage now (see above: I mean this literally). Personally, I'm extra miffed that they took Trail Running magazine with them.
Why do I continue to subscribe? Because along with Outside magazine they (I forget who "they" are, exactly) bought the Gaia GPS app which I use extensively. So I'm basically buying the Gaia subscription and get a shitty print magazine thrown in for free (oh, yeah, and access to their online edition, which redefines "garbage". It's awful, I could spend pages on the topic.) I am currently reevaluating how much I really use Gaia GPS, and what a suitable alternative would be. In many cases, Footpath (an HN user creation, IIRC) might do the trick.
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And, overall, it seems incredibly pointless! If you have a survival ball like this, why not just let it float? Why put it on a dangerously unstable surface?
I think that's the whole point? No "normal" person would think doing this is a good idea -- he wants the thrill of the ride with a minimum of recklessness.
You couldn't pay me enough to do this.
My best guess is that it will be integrated in the center tube. Buoyancy ensures the center of the ball is usually above water, and one end of the tube would always be above water.
This sounds like something Jules Verne could have written. In fact I seem to remember this exact plot device in a book a read when I was a teenager, but the name escapes me.
I read that book as well in my early teen years.
The center of mass of the iceberg is above the center of buoyancy 100% of the time. What prevents the flip is a flat base which hopefully counters the small tilts by moving the center of buoyancy in the same direction as the center of mass.
The "nanosensors" doesn't sound likely at all. If I were to tasked to create a "iceberg sudden flip detector" I would break the problem into two parts. Part 1 is monitoring the shape of the iceberg as it is changing. Part 2 is modelling how stable the iceberg is given the measured shape. Both sounds like a wicked hard problem even if you have a large team of engineers.
For the first maybe you could do periodic ultrasounds from the inside out. Embeding an array of accustic transducers and an array of microphones in the ice and then using signal processing black magic to pick out the shape of the echo you get back from the ice-ocean surface. Or just hang around with a ship mounted side scanning sonar and monitor the iceberg from the outside.
The second one should be a "simple" monte carlo simulation. But to validate it you would need data recorded from the evolution of many icebergs. Which I suspect would be expensive and lengthy to obtain.
Assuming they ever ship any, and to him. This story may just be their marketing to try to get there, anyway.
But I'm also wondering about where fresh water is coming from and where waste products go. It talks about a water storage bladder/tank, but surely that's intended for weeks max, not a year?
> In 2017 I crossed the Vatnajokull, the largest glacier in Europe (Iceland) with skis and a sled in 15 days.
Bullshit.
I_dream_of_Geni•1mo ago
The first part is probably true. The second part is folly. "Remember the Titanic".
danielbln•1mo ago
vineyardmike•1mo ago
Advertising this capsule as uncrushable is a commensurate gamble.
margalabargala•1mo ago
UncleEntity•1mo ago
I think it was on the youtubes I was watching a story about how they built that thing and it was <spoiler alert> not really fit for purpose. I mean, no big surprise in hindsight.
jjmarr•1mo ago
That makes it inherently bad at holding pressure from outside in a submarine and good at holding pressure inside a spaceship or airplane.
IAmBroom•1mo ago
Still completely wrong about that, obv.
sandworm101•1mo ago
nkoren•1mo ago