Whipped Cream Difficulties

I wasn’t all that wild about what the NYT did with this year’s “The Lives They Led” obituary roundup.

But this, this is a swell article:

But the diesel engine was too loud, and the Anna Mary, on autopilot, moving due south at six and a half knots, was already out of reach, its navigation lights receding into the night. Aldridge shouted once more, panic rising in his throat, and then silence descended. He was alone in the darkness. A single thought gripped his mind: This is how I’m going to die.

One aspect of this that fascinates me: the Coast Guard’s use of computers in search and rescue.

The Coast Guard has used computer simulations in search and rescue since the mid-1970s, but Sarops has been in use since only 2007. At its heart is a Monte Carlo-style simulator that can generate, in just a few minutes, as many as 10,000 points to represent how far and in what direction a “search object” might have drifted. Operators input a variety of data, from the last known location of a lost mariner to the ocean currents and wind direction. Sarops then creates a map of a search area — in this case, of the ocean south of Montauk — with colored squares representing each potential location for the search object. Red and orange squares represent the most likely locations; gray squares represent the least likely.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 3rd, 2014 at 9:24 am and is filed under 2014, Clippings, Food, Geek, Lobsters, Reading list. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.