
Thirty-six Thousand Feet Under the Sea - hhs
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/05/18/thirty-six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea#intcid=recommendations_default-popular_1f63b3f2-e33d-4bae-8988-e60497faed01_popular4-1
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damontal
This article starts with a cliffhanger. The guy is in his sub at the bottom of
the ocean and an electrical failure happens.

Then it goes into his history and builds the story from there... but it never
revisits the moment of the beginning cliffhanger. How did he get back up? What
was the result of the failure? At what point in the overall story did the
failure occur?

~~~
akeck
Hmmm... That seems like a possible editorial oversight. I've been fascinated
with this article structure for awhile. In almost all the examples I've
collected, the conclusion loops back to the original opener to provide
inclusio after covering the background, etc. in the middle.

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sq_
Wow. Great story. When I read stuff like this, I never know whether to be
utterly amazed with what some ragtag team pulled off or horrified by all of
the risks they took.

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greendave
> Lahey saw Vescovo’s mission as a way to develop and test the world’s first
> unlimited hadal exploration system—one that could then be replicated and
> improved, for scientists.

This really is the crux of the matter. It's easy to dismiss these sorts of
projects as just indulging the fantasies of the super-rich, but because of
forward-thinking people, as in this case, they can amount to a great deal
more.

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wiz21c
FTA :

>>> Vescovo spent three hours at the bottom, and saw a plastic bag through the
viewports. In the Puerto Rico Trench, one of the Limiting Factor’s cameras had
captured an image of a soda can. Scientists estimate that in thirty years the
oceans will hold a greater mass of plastic than of fish. Almost every
biological sample that Jamieson has dredged up from the hadal zone and tested
in a lab has been contaminated with microplastics. “Does it harm the ability
of these animals to feed, to maneuver, to reproduce?” McCallum said. “We don’t
know, because we can’t compare one that’s full of microplastics with one
that’s not. Because there aren’t any.”

A great achievement, a pitiful conclusion.

~~~
mirimir
There's an analogous horizontal phenomenon. Just as the deep oceans are
gravitational sinks, the poles are thermal sinks. Cold traps. And so
concentrations of persistent atmospheric pollutants are substantially higher
there. So it goes.

~~~
darkerside
Do solar winds do anything to strip these pollutants away?

~~~
mirimir
Sorry, I neglected to say that they get deposited through precipitation, and
incorporated into ecosystems. As I recall, this is mostly about persistent
lipophilic organics, some of which are endocrine disruptors. Concentrations
are amazingly high in humans (north) and wildlife (north and south).

See
[http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_f...](http://www.educapoles.org/assets/uploads/teaching_dossiers_files/edd_20_en.pdf)

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srge
36,000 ft = approx. 11 km

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ncmncm
This is outstanding science journalism. Tracy Kidder or Neal Stephenson might
do as well, but I don't know who else. Ed Yong?

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JshWright
> During one of the demonstrations, a guest engineer began outlining all the
> ways he would have done it differently. “O.K.,” McCallum said, smiling. “But
> you didn’t.”

That unnamed engineer would fit right in on many HN threads...

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lqet
After skimming over the source code, I noticed that the article is transferred
to the browser as a JSON containing the article as a string in their own
markup language, which is translated to the DOM after the page has loaded.

I am seriously wondering: what are the benefits of this? Why did someone
decide to do it this way? I don't see any reason why this page couldn't be
served fully "rendered" as HTML, it's a pretty straightforward text page with
some occasional figures and images lazily loaded.

The site's score on Google PageSpeed is horrendous:

[https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...](https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fmagazine%2F2020%2F05%2F18%2Fthirty-
six-thousand-feet-under-the-sea)

~~~
ubermonkey
The New Yorker has done a lot to try, for good or ill, to make the digital
experience as similar to the paper one as possible.

My guess is the enormous page is part of this effort.

I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've
pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to be
commended for the consistency and depth of availability.

Another factor is probably (again, I'm guessing) that their preferred method
of digital consumption is their own apps, where issues are rendered digitally
_exactly_ like their paper counterparts, with ads and all. Given the primacy
of text at the New Yorker, this actually works out really well. (It's probably
worth noting that the New Yorker NEVER does that thing where an article is
"continued on page 102" or whatever, which probably makes this work better.)

It's definitely cool that this whole-magazine rendering is available (for
subscribers) not just for current issues, but for the entire archive going
back 95 years. That's neat.

~~~
gwern
> I think it's pretty misguided in the browser -- or, at least, that they've
> pushed well past the point of diminishing returns on it -- but they are to
> be commended for the consistency and depth of availability.

They haven't even gotten dropcaps working right; I don't think the issue is
having gone too far into diminishing returns, but that their reach exceeds
their grasp.

~~~
ubermonkey
I definitely have my gripes about their technical implementation, but I mostly
read either in paper or via the iPad app, so the web presentation is only
rarely relevant to me (i.e., when I share a story with someone).

At any rate, the implementation is just that: the package the excellent
writing comes in. As long as the words are there, I'm happy. And I _do_ like
that they've spent so much time on the wrapper, so to speak, even if it falls
short in some respects.

~~~
gwern
My point is that it's odd to praise them for having gone so far and spent so
much time on the wrapper when they haven't gotten the basics right, like
dropcaps. Dropcaps are a little fiddly to get right, but they are not _that_
hard. Even my website has correctly-implemented dropcaps, and there are no
fulltime web devs maintaining it, shall we say. If you've piled on a mountain
of crap in the name of typography and you can't even get dropcaps right, then
you aren't making a pretty wrapper (because a pretty wrapper is at least
pretty) - you're just making a mountain of crap. The NYer's website, IMO, is
as ugly as their reporting is good.

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bluenose69
Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as
"epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.

~~~
CogitoCogito
> Sadly, the New Yorker judges that its readers can handle terms such as
> "epipelagic" and "hadal", but not the reporting of depths in meters.

Are you complaining that they aren't reporting depths in both feet and meters?
Or that they aren't reporting depths in only meters?

Also why does it matter? Is the conversion that complicated?

~~~
sandworm101
Because it is incongruous to toss around "epipelagic" to sound scientific, but
then quote every unit of distance in feet/miles.

But they also convert their photography to black and white to evoke oldschool
print journalism, to evoke the nostalgia so loved by their target demographic.
The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.

~~~
ubermonkey
I had no idea you were so plugged in to the intentions of the New Yorker
editorial staff.

In fact, not all photography in the New Yorker is black and white.

>The New Yorker isn't the place for scientific reporting.

That's a curious and largely indefensible statement not at all supported by
facts. What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?

~~~
sandworm101
>> What subjects are within their legitimate remit, then?

Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this
article in particular. The language is very particular, the absence of any
reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific article is notable.
And they do convert their photos. Every non-animated photo in this article is
BW. Despite all the web trickery, this article still pretends to be a print
publication.

~~~
ubermonkey
>Not science. Their stylistic goals are blatant in the work they produce, this
article in particular.

That's a pretty loose and fundamentally unsupported statement.

>the absence of any reference to the metric system in an allegedly scientific
article is notable.

The metric system isn't magic. It's normal to use the system most familiar to
the audience being addressed.

It is definitely weird that you're so hung up on this. My assumption, based on
your strange snark regarding TNY, is that you just dislike the magazine for
some reason you probably haven't really examined.

Fortunately, no one at the New Yorker is listening to you.

Put simply, there is no better source of carefully researched and well written
long-form nonfiction in the US. They cover history, politics, entertainment,
culture, and (yes!) science, and they do it at an award-winning level. Their
coverage of issues around medicine and health care has been and remains
especially relevant and fascinating -- folks like Jerome Groopman and Atul
Gawande (who is, by the way, a MacArthur fellow) produce tremendous pieces in
this area, all of which are well worth your time unless you're just too
invested in hating on the magazine because they said "foot" instead of
"meter."

> Every non-animated photo in this article is BW

But every photo in the New Yorker is not in this article.

>this article still pretends to be a print publication.

That's pretty deliberate, and is also completely unrelated to your complaints
about what subject matter is appropriate for the magazine.

