Discussion on:

Comic relief

An addition to LuckyPhil's "quibble" regarding the largest aircraft ever built. The Hindenburg is only half of the answer to the question of "What is the largest aircraft ever built?" The other half, is her sister ship the Graf Zeppelin II. She is well known to airship enthusiasts, and was completed after the Hindenburg disaster, but never flew in revenue service. She was ultimately dismantled. Her size was the same as the Hindenburg--her only distinguishing characteristic was that she had forward-facing engines instead of the Hindenburg?s rear-facing (pusher prop) engines. For an intro to the Graf Zeppelin II, see www.ciderpresspottery.com/ZLA/greatzeps/GrafII.html. There are also links from this page to other excellent web sites.

R 101 {or was it the R 100) that Vickers built in the UK and only saw the one trip between Britian and the USA via Canada and back she would have to have come close to the same size as the Graff Zeplin 11.

As well Barnes Wallace was probably a better areo enginer than Zeplin ever was as he worked in all disipilines of Aircraft Design.

I find myself wondering about a line in the article regarding the contamination of drinking water.

If the freighter carrying sheep went down "off the shores of Kuwait" then that would put it in the Persian Gulf. The Persian Gulf, being an arm of the Indian Ocean, stands a fair chance of being salt water.

So how was it that the sheep carcasses were going to contaminate the water supply? Do they desalinate the salt water? Do they drink salt water? (Mangroves do, I know, but I don't think Kuwaitis have evolved to that yet

I don't have a quibble about the contamination of the water itself with rotting sheep - that is a given - it is the water supply aspect that I have difficulty with.

Can you explain how the contamination of the Persian Gulf was going to contaminate their water supply, Jay?

Just curious.

Alan

From what I have found, desalination plants in the Persian Gulf are used to purify the salt water into potable (drinking) water. Would this process also effectively treat other contamination from polution or, as in this case decaying animals?

Almost all the desalination research done on earth has benefitted from grants and/or development from these oil rich, desert-type countries (Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Quatar). These countries need potable water for everyday needs just like any "First World" country: drinking water, manufacturing,irrigation, etc.
The facilities that were affected in 1964 were of the highest standard of 1964, but it could not handle the introduction of thousands of decaying bodies (of sheep) in the low circulation of the Persian Gulf. Here in the US of A, a large city in the midwest has suffered similar problems due to "organic growth" just in the past few years.
BTW, desalinated water still gets treatment like any water source for any typical city or region in the modern world.

Would the Apollo rockets apply for the airship classification since they had to go thru the air to reach outer space, or would they be discounted since they might be deemed spaceships?

Just wondering...

Stop quibbling. It's why most of you can't get dates. No one cares. The only reason you quibble is because your poor self-esteem is looking to find a way to prove you're "more intelligent" than the article writer. It's not like you had money at stake on this.

Hey this zone is for quibbling, if you don't like it don't read it.

I'm monitoring a set of blade servers that are currently transfering bulk data around the country and by stealing a bit of bandwidth I imeadiatly know when something goes wrong as I lose my conection.

As I have been married for 25 years or more I'm also not really all that interested in "Getting Dates" either. But I do get to spend the days with my wife most days can you say the same?

Col

My wife doesn't mind my quibbling, but she strongly objects to my dating.

My apologies to Tony K and other readers who were upset by my information. I did not start the "quibble", and I only intended to inform and give additional information that someone might find useful. I am sorry that you felt that you had to make a personal attack in return.

I don't think he was attacking you in particular so much as anybody who would post here in general.

His reply wasn't directly to your post, but was directly to the article. You just happened to post before he did, which is why it appears after yours.

Some people just don't get it. But that's alright.
Anyway, don't you have a date with a comb and a mirror?

Hey! To me, trivia is nothing more than a minor gilty pleasure, and quibbles, in a friendly environment are like, well, power trivia! I don't see it as an attempt to establish superior intelligence any more than doing the occasional crossword puzzle could be taken as trying to prove I'm as smart of the puzzle creator.

There is one very basic truth found between the lines of your post...married for 26 (?!?!?!) years, and you DO NOT quibble with a spouse. Or a prospective spouse.

Enough trivia and quibbles for one day; I've got to go do something useful now. I wonder where I put the tape with the "Simple Life" marathon?

So have the body snatchers taken all the pocket-protected humorous IT guys and replaced them with droning sniveling whining alien grunts with no since or humor or self-esteem.

I can't believe the argument taking place over this. I would say more, but I have an incoming call from the Mother Ship. I think my mail order bride may be here....Goody!!!

Did your Mail Order Bride arrive from the Mother Ship and more importantly is she everything that you expected?

Col

That's baited, not bated ;o). But that brings up the question of how you bait breath. Possibly with peanut butter to catch an elephant, cheese breath for a mouse, minty fresh for the opposite sex??

No, it IS bated (a contraction of abated) and has been, since at least 1596, when the Bard used it that way! Google both spellings and one of the first results confirms that Mark Twain got it right also.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mbated.html
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bai1.htm

Quibble or not, you still took the time to read all of this and reply. So do we count you in that same catagory of people that can't get dates? Personally, I find that exercising your intellect to arrive at other possible solutions to a given factual, quite refreshing. And I, by the way, have no problems getting dates either.

Recipes cannot be patented in the US.

You're serious? I mean, I knew they couldn't be patented in the US, but the Trivia Geek was using that as an ANALOGY, not an EXAMPLE.

Are you seriously quibblin' on somethin' so piddlin'?

After all, that's what quibbling is all about!

Perhaps we could hire these German examiners to handle software patents here in the US. They seem to have a keen understanding of the concept of "prior art."

back to the article...
it took me a second to figure out that polystyrene = styrofoam
so the article says polystyrene foam balls
is there any other form of polystyrene, other than foam?

For all you never really wanted to know about polystyrene...

http://www.psrc.usm.edu/macrog/styrene.htm

I suppose one could quibble to the extent that styrofoam is (by definition?) always foam - you would never have guessed, right? But is only one form of polystyrene, which needn't be foam...

ROFL

Actually, I might quibble with the prior art; in this case, wouldn't Ping Pong Balls implode under the increased pressure when taken down to the depth of the sunken ship?

I know the rule of thumb that you get about one atmosphere of pressure for every 30 feet (10 meters). Therefore, a ship at 90 feet is under 4 atmospheres of pressure (1 for the surface, 2 at 30 feet, 3 at 60, 4 at 90). The ping pong ball's internal pressure would be a constant one atmosphere, though, which would mean that the external pressure would be 3 atmospheres, or 45 lbs/sq inch (roughly, in my back of the envelope way, 3200g/cm2; if my math is off DRASTICALLY, please correct me). Considering that the spherical shape of a ping pong ball would help to resist compression, but that most ping pong balls are not thickly made, how much pressure could they hold? I don't think the tensile strength of the plastic would hold back that much pressure before cracking.... which would make ping pong balls impractical for the effort. Since the packed styrofoam works because it's able withstand the density, I would say that the German Patent office erred, as the patent wasn't for a METHOD so much as a PRACTICAL method of raising a ship; Donald Duck's method wasn't practical.

Of course, IANAGPL (I am not a German Patent Lawyer).

I hadn't thought of that. While using the balls might not be patentable, the process of using a non-compressible (polystyrene, etc.) ball is an excellent example of innovation on a prior idea (even if it wasn't taken from the comic).

The styrofoam will compress under pressure. Worse, back then many foams were made using Freon compounds, so at some pressure the freon would condense, and you'd have virtually solid polystyrene and liquid freon.

A similar idea was used in Clive Cussler's "Titanic", and as the ship rose the bouyant material expanded, forcing water out and making the ship even more bouyant. The ship could literally be blown apart by the expansion.

This idea only works well at shallow depths.

Styrofoam is a trademark name of a group of products made by Dow Chemical Corp.

In other words "Styrofoam" is what "Kleenex" is to tissue.

They could have made it out of a phenlic resin instead and still called it Styrofoam or anything else.

Being a patent attorney, I was very interested in how much truth there was to it. So I did some research on this story.

It turns out that
a) the Duck story would have been novelty-destroying prior art: given the story, any Patent Office would have rejected Kr?yer's patent application.
b) there's no evidence that the Duck story has *actually* been used to refuse a patent application.

All this and more details on my website at
http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/priorart/donaldduck/

Arnoud Engelfriet