December 22, 2018 Saturday
Bedtime Story
The Making of Sorcerer II
Recording of Secchi depth is easily carried
out by mounting the disc to a rope and lowering it down the surface till it is
no more visible.
Of course measuring water clarity with
Secchi disc has its limitations and fallacies and yet it is a simple and
straightforward technique that remains popular to this day.
There are nuances that are taken into
account during actual measurements of water clarity but we have no intention in
going into their details.
In our bedtime stories it is the principles
and the concepts that reign supreme rather than intricate details of the kind that
an operating surgeon has to consistently keep in mind each time he performs a
surgery.
The record Secchi depth so far has been 79
meters recorded in the Eastern Weddell Sea of Antarctica.
Weddell Sea of Antarctica is undoubtedly
pristine and untouched by the filth generated by us apes hence the visibility
of 61 meters of Sargasso Sea lying off the coast of North America is indeed
impressive.
Satisfied with this pilot survey project of
2003 in the Sargasso Sea the very next year Venter launched his full expedition
in 2004.
For that he decided to use his own personal
yacht called Sorcerer II which despite being a 95-foot cruising yacht was far
from an ordinary yachting boat.
Sorcerer II was specially designed by
German Frers to be capable of withstanding the battering of nature it was
expected to endure in extreme variability of latitudes during its expedition
around the world.
German Frers is an Argentinean naval
architect who specializes in the designing of racing yachts.
German Frers kept the boat “light” for the
sake of its functionality but keeping it extremely tough at the same time by
lining it with an external coating of Kevlar and E glass lamination.
Kevlar is a heat-resistant extremely strong
synthetic fiber that was invented by the Polish American woman chemist
Stephanie Kwolek when she was working at DuPont.
E glass is the most common type of glass
fiber.
Glass fiber is a material that is made of a
bunch of extremely fine fibers of glass.
The beauty of glass fibers are that they
are more ductile and can undergo more elongation before they break in contrast
to carbon fibers.
I wish to point out a subtle difference
that the glass fiber should not be confused with fiberglass which you may come
across more commonly.
Fiberglass is actually plastic that has
been reinforced with glass fibers and in fact one of the alternative names for
it is “fiberglass reinforced plastic”.
Sometimes glass fiber itself is used
interchangeably with fiberglass which is actually wrong but in the matter of
language it is the convention that is more important rather than the rules of
the language.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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