Pats by 3, San Fran in Drydock

And the title -- though it sounds like it could be -- is not a snide comment about the 49ers' season!

Bean Town 24, Philly 21

Well, as soon as I saw John McClain making the case for the Patriots in a point-counterpoint format in this morning's Houston Chronicle, I figured it would be the Pats in today's game. Lindeskog should be is doubly happy: his favorite team won on the margin provided by Adam Vinatieri, who is, I believe, his favorite player!

My interest in professional football has waxed and waned over the years, but it took a nosedive this year, mainly because my employer blocks access to fantasy football sites. No blockbuster trades or waiver wire wizardry for me over lunch this season! The year Kurt Warner materialized from nowhere to lead the Rams to a Super Bowl victory, I picked him up from the waiver wire after losing half of my team to injuries. I salvaged a winning season. No such luck this year. I had a good team, started 2-0, and then hit a run of awful luck. I went on an 0-5 run that featured three weeks of scoring the second-most points in the league while playing the top scorer! I could only log on at home, at the end of the day, to work the waiver wire, and that was invariably picked clean by everyone else. I went .500 for the remainder, and quickly dropped from playoff contention in a division that had both of the winningest teams in the league.

And I've been so bloody busy, I've missed the entire playoffs but for snatches of today's game. It looks like this year's crop of commercials was pretty lackluster, but maybe I missed something. The wife taped them. Anyway, the Super Bowl sneaked up on me to the point that I'd entirely forgotten it until Friday, so I'd neither planned nor inquired about parties, which is the way I've been watching the game for years. The wife was working on her dissertation at school, and I was here working on a presentation, so it was just me and the cats (This is but their second appearance in my blog!), and I'm certain they saw much more of the game than I did.

I don't get too worked up myself over teams from the Northeast, though I discovered I leaned Patriots when there was an apparent fumble by McNabb early on. (It was called back on instant replay.) So I was happy with the result but am hoping that the Texans come of age next year....

But what I really wanted to do was blog, which I'm hurriedly doing now.

Reason Roundup

Go to the Charlotte Capitalist for this week's installment.

Assorted Entries Updated

I updated my Ayn Rand Centenary post to make minor corrections, to include my appraisal of a recent television appearance, and to address a couple of omissions I made when discussing the role of emotions. My well-received beer post has been updated to mention the fact that Jimmy Carter managed to come up with not one, but two good ideas during the four years of his presidency. I have also linked an earlier post to this one as I have further information on the submarine that recently ran aground.

Dry Dock Roundup

Fellow submariner-turned-blogger Bothenook has apparently decided to maintain a list of all bloggers who have served on submarines. As a result, he has done a far better job keeping track of recent events pertaining to the USS San Francisco than I have. Via his blog, I have learned that several bubbleheads have blogged the incipient repairs to that boat. (His lack of capitalization I hate. His motto I like: "Gun control means being able to hit your target.")

Rob Schumacher posts a picture of the boat in drydock and add this about the toughness of U.S. submarines. (This is an executive summary, but the whole thing is worth a read.)

SAN FRANCISCO was traveling at top speed when she struck the planet Earth (in the form of an undersea mountain) head on [and] over 500 feet underwater.

That's about 7,000 tons, traveling about 35 mph, hitting solid mountain and stopping instantly. And after that tremendous blow, she surfaced and drove over 350 miles under her own power to her home port, and stayed afloat an additional two weeks before being drydocked. And due to the rock-solid construction of this submarine, and the training and response of her crew, it was able to survive this collision (one of the worst collisions by a U.S. Navy ship ever with only one casualty.

At The Stupid Shall be Punished, Bubblehead, has more links to photos, an excerpt about some newer Russian charts of the area (that also did not show the sea mount), and this comment on the professionalism of the crew.

I'll need to take a closer look at this later to see what I can figure out, but for now, all I can say is "Wow"... it's an even more impressive indication of the professional seamanship demonstrated by the San Francisco Captain and crew in getting her back home.

There are also copious comments, at least some by submariners. One of them claims that there were a couple of missiles loaded in the damaged section at impact. I hope that the seamanship of the captain, which (as Bubblehead points out) had to be good, is taken into account during the inquiry, but since someone has to hang, I'm not too optimistic.

Subman Dave has a big picture on his blog and a good Q&A. He also praises the captain of the San Francisco. From the Q&A, what I think are the most likely things laymen will be wondering about. (But the whole thing is good.)

[On the presence of the blue tarp:] Under that tarp is one of the ship's sonar arrays. I'm sure it is extremely mangled as well, but there is no reason to provide open source photographs to whomever may be interested ....

[On why the sea mount was undetected:] The ship was reported to be traveling at ... maximum speed. ... [S]ubmarines ... are not outfitted with visual ports as they are of minimal value and degrade watertight integrity.

[On why there was no navigational use of active sonar:] Above certain speeds the utility of active sonar is degraded by the fact that the water rushing over the hull is so loud you can't hear the echo anyway. Additionally, fathometers (i.e. depth finders) are tuned assuming a certain speed range. If you go too fast you basically pass the reflected sound before it reaches you. Short answer: there was no way to detect it given the oper[a]ting parameters.

[On why the sea mount was uncharted:] Some places in the world have been traversed so much and the depths of the water have been sounded so often that the charted soundings have been checked and verified to the point of near absoluteness (for example, the Mediterranean Sea). Other bodies of water, however, have been relatively seldomly traveled and sometimes not by ships well equipped to accurately determine the soundings. In the Arctic Ocean, for example, the Navy posesses several classified charts since the line of soundings visible clearly indicate the paths our submarines have traversed. Likewise, in parts of the South Pacific an entire chart may have a couple of dozen clear lines of soundings, some literally from Capt. Cook, and the rest of the chart will simply be blank. I haven't looked at the location the accident occurred, but it would not surprise me to see a low sounding density.

Fascinating reading from the bubbleblogger brotherhood. You can use that as the name of your list if you like, Bothenook, but use a capital letter once in awhile, dammit!

-- CAV