Honey, I Finished The Internet – small dead animals

8 Replies to “Honey, I Finished The Internet”

crossing the panama canal gives one a good appreciation how miniscule the construction of man is in the world scale

Now that is smart thinking. I didn’t know that they pumped the water from lock to lock to save water. Most locks are singles, so there’s no choice in the matter. But with the double locks. you can just keep pumping from the high side to the low side and never draw or release from/to the canal.

Random thought: it’s a tight squeeze and those captains have little room for error when entering the lock. I wonder how good they are at parallel parking when they are on dry land? A little mid-size coupe ought to be a breeze to park for those captains.

Art says:

February 27, 2024 at 8:26 am

Just went through it. The biggest ships have one foot clearance on either side. There are “mules” on rails on either side. By the way those who work on the canal say that the doom and gloom of “drought” causing problems is nothing new and happens every 7 to 9 years

The canal’s history is fascinating for the monumental challenges (like malaria, yellow fever, rain, terrain, jungle, scale of excavation) that had to be overcome. It is a permanent testament to the positive period of the USA’s history. Without the USA there would have been no canal till perhaps decades later. Colonial influence at its finest! It is also perhaps obvious, but needs to be said these days, no fossil fuels for construction there’d be no canal either, at all, ever.

two random things about the canal .

the Atlantic entrance is west of the pacific entrance .

the worlds best palindrome .. A man a plan a canal Panama

It seems to me, with today’s container shipping, that there’s no real need for most ships to cross the canal. Just unload on one side and reload on the other.