Deepwater Horizon: Movie not-a-review

Even though this is not a review, but rather a description of how to enjoy a movie through advanced nerditude knowledge, there are some noteworthy points:

- The beginning gives an idea of how much infrastructure supports offshore exploration and the number of different companies and support industries involved. Maybe this will reduce the "nuclear energy needs a lot of additional infrastructure" comments; I'm not optimistic, though, because those comments are born of ignorance and fear.

- Casting is phenomenal and the actors portray accurately the type of worker one finds in dangerous, rough, hard jobs. Props to John Malkovich who plays the quintessential John Malkovich villain, with additional villainy and a southern accent.

- A scene I thought was "too Hollywood," when Wahlberg runs across a burning rig to start the emergency generators and save the day (well, within possible), is actually true. It actually happened, pretty much the way they showed in the movie.

- Kudos for the minimal "character development," a disease that has made many other movies unwatchable. There was some, obviously, but the movie kept to the story and focussed on the main action (first the decisions leading up to the accident, then the evacuation of the rig).

- Instead of "you should really care about this person because they have a family and lost their dog when they were little"-type "character development," we get credible interactions among human beings (which humanize them a lot more than that usual pap) and an accurate depiction of the culture in heavy industry, epitomized by: Wahlberg (about the skipped cement test): "Is that stupid?" Roughneck: "I don't know if that's stupid... but it ain't smart."

- The class demonstration that Wahlberg's daughter is preparing in the kitchen foreshadows the blowout, but it's a bit Hollywood: the complexity of what happened is beyond the movie and in fact the movie has a lot of situations where it's clear the writers decided to move forward without trying to explain what was happening (it's a movie, after all, not a training film for petroleum engineers).

- For all the entertainment value of the movie, and the educational points one may take away from it, there were 11 fatalities, a large number of injuries, and an ecological disaster involved. So, it was nice of the producers to include the final vignettes commemorating the losses.

Now, to the hard nerditude.

I heard of the incident at the Macondo well (that's the correct name for the location, the Deepwater Horizon is the drilling rig) when it happened and for a while the news were, as usual, full of uninformed speculation, name-calling, mentions of Halliburton (always a good villain for certain parts of the population) and greed, and attacks on fossil fuels.

Not being a petroleum engineer, I assumed that (a) everything the media said was either wrong or very wrong; (b) at some point there would be smart and knowledgeable people looking at this; and (c) reports from these smart and knowledgeable people would be put online, as a prelude to the many many many lawsuits to come.

So, when a friend bought the movie (friends with kids are great: they buy movies that I can borrow), I borrowed it and in a moment of extra nerdiness decided to learn something about the Macondo/Deepwater Horizon incident before watching the movie.

I struck gold with Stanford University:

I had a general idea about how drilling works, but the details are quite important. This video was very helpful:

Being an engineer, I went to the reports too. The easiest to read is the report to the President. Having read the report helped situate the movie, since a few of the important events are not in it (some are referred to in passing):

Halliburton simulated a specific cementing plan for the well, but the actual cementing did not follow that plan. In particular, because of the tight window of usable pressures for the cementing, the cementing pipe had to be centered accurately in the hole using more spacers than were actually used. Halliburton isn't mentioned in the movie because (a) they are scary and have lots of lawyers; or (b) they didn't do what they had simulated, on orders from BP, which makes it BP's responsibility.

Schlumberger (Sch-loom-bear-g-heh, which a roustabout calls Schlam-burger to mock Wahlberg's correct pronunciation) was on site to conduct a test of the cement and see if it had set, but as the action on the movie arrives on the rig, the testing team is leaving without running the test (what happened in reality). There's no doubt that the cementing failed, since that's where the oil and gas got into the pipe and eventually the riser to the surface, so in retrospect that test would have saved the rig and well.

Unmentioned in the movie is the large quantity of highly viscous plugging fluid used as a spacer between the cement and the drilling mud, which might have blocked the narrow pipes of the kill line and shown the zero pressure when there was in fact pressure. This is the part in the movie when the writers gave up, decided that giving an impromptu course in deep-water drilling to the audience was not their job, and moved forward into the actual action.

The most unbelievable scene in the movie, when Wahlberg runs across essentially a field of giant exploding flamethrowers (the burning rig) to start the backup diesel generators, is actually true. The rig was all electrically-operated, including the thrusters; without electricity they had no lights, no PA, and lost control of the rig (it moved off-station enough that it pulled the drill string through the blowout preventer and possibly disabled parts of the blowout preventer that would have cut the pipe and sealed the well).

Watching the movie, I found it difficult to believe that Transocean management, especially HR, was okay with 1 woman and 125 men on a 21-day rotation on a drilling rig, but that is apparently accurate (maybe a few more women, but overwhelming majority of people on the rig were men). The potential for lawsuit-inducing behavior just seemed too high.

All in all, I think that the movie was much more fun to watch having read the report and watched the videos beforehand than it would have been otherwise. I would have been thinking about the discrepancy between the drill pipe and kill line pressure and the blowout preventer failure till the end of the movie, so I would have missed the emotional and action-loaded last thirty minutes.

The Wahlberg/Rodriguez jump was all Hollywood, though.



Update April 5, 2017: the problems in the blowout preventer.

Interstellar delivers truth bombs

Early on in the movie Interstellar there are two important lessons about what makes a society fail (or succeed), both delivered in the parent-teacher conference that Cooper attends.

Lesson one: don't underestimate the power of engineering (and science)

Lesson two: beware of those who would rewrite the truth

(Excerpts from the novelization of the movie by Greg Keyes. No, I'm not a nerd. Ok, I am.)

Andrew Rader points out some problems with the movie:

The main problem was also pointed out by Kip Thorne in The Science of Interstellar: that fighting the blight on Earth would make a lot more sense than going to a different planet.

Thorne also raises the problem of orbital mechanics in chapter 7 of the book:

and proposes a few speculative mechanisms to get the necessary changes in velocity from gravity assists. Note that there are two decelerations one of $c/3$ and one of $c/4$ for a total speed change of  $7c/12$ or $1.75\times 10^{8}$ m/s. Returning to the Endurance requires an increase in speed of $1.75\times 10^{8}$ m/s as well.

To see the size of the problem, let's say they take 500 seconds (8 minutes and 20 seconds) to do each maneuver (while the rest of the Universe ages significantly) and the Ranger's mass is 2 metric tons (for simplicity, we'll assume that the water taken in on the planet makes up for the loss of Dr. Doyle to stupidity, indiscipline, and lack of planning). If we assume constant thrust for simplicity, assume away all friction and ignore the propellant mass loss (yay, infinite specific impulse!), the thrust needed for each maneuver is $7 \times 10^8$ Newton or about the same as 1077 SpaceX Merlin engines (averaging their atmosphere and vacuum thrust to 650 kN). Since there's propellant mass loss, let's say we "only" need the equivalent of 900 Merlin engines. So, yes, only a gravity assist would do.

Yes, it's an oversimplification, but didn't feel like solving the Tsiolkovsky equation. Hence the drop from 1077 to 900 engines. (That's still equivalent to 100 Falcon 9 rockets.) By the way, Thorne appears unconvinced of the feasibility of those gravity assists and hence of the feasibility of whole expedition to Miller's planet. But at least they tried to be accurate with some science in the movie.

Oh, and speaking of nerds:

Non-linearity is a pain in the neck and other smart content of this week

Non-linearity is a pain in the neck

Literally; and I use "literally" literally, not figuratively.

Most of the time we have an implicit linear worldview: if $x$ effort gives you $y$ result, then $(1+\epsilon)x$ effort should give you $(1+\epsilon)y$ result, approximately. And in many cases, where the $\epsilon$ is very small, this tends to be the case.

But the world isn't linear, especially in the gym. Especially in conditioning. (Editor note: conditioning is like cardio, except it actually works because it's high-intensity, short, and paused; that makes it very painful. This is why most people who are happy with no results prefer cardio, which delivers no results with only mild discomfort.)

Along with the basic, more functional conditioning movements (hill sprints, farmer's walks, stair sprints, sandbags), I've been doing medicine ball Atlas stones. Basically, one lifts a medicine ball from between one's feet to a platform above shoulder height (like an Atlas stone), then brings it back to the floor. Like any other conditioning exercise, this needs to be done correctly to avoid injury and not the CrossFit way of "fake it until you break it."

(The real Atlas Stone exercise. Those are not medicine balls.)

Medicine ball Atlas stone lifts have one of the most nonlinear pain response functions in the gym. Basically, for the first 5-10 reps, it feels like nothing is happening; the heart rate raises slowly and the muscles get a little hot. Then, at about 15, you discover muscles that never hurt before; discover them as they start hurting hard and fast. I discovered several new muscles in my neck --- and I regularly train neck as part of the posterior chain.  At 20-25, the ball has become pure neutronium, the platform has relativistically moved up several parsecs, and your blood pressure could drive a nuclear power plant turbine. So you rest 90 seconds, then restart; that's conditioning.

That's non-linearity.

In fact the response function is highly non-linear, not something that could easily be approximated with a low-degree polynomial, so I propose the following model:

Plot of $\mathsf{Pain} \doteq \exp(\exp(\exp( 0.035 \times \mathsf{Reps})))$

One of these days I'll write something serious about the misuse of linearity in everyday thinking; possibly also comment on the use of "exponential" to describe all convex functions and the unprofessionalism of drawing said "exponentials" on slides using the 'draw ellipse segment' tool in PowerPoint instead of plotting the actual function. But that's for another day.

Added Nov 16, 2016: while we wait for that "another day," here's a visual comment on convex functions:

Stephen Wolfram helps popularize science. Real science.

Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica and author of A New Kind Of Science (but don't hold that book against him), helped the producers of the movie Arrival (2016) make less fools of themselves than the usual in scifi movies:

When I watch science fiction movies I have to say I quite often cringe, thinking, “someone’s spent $100 million on this movie—and yet they’ve made some gratuitous science mistake that could have been fixed in an instant if they’d just asked the right person”.

Part of that is the audience, who says "I love science" but really only likes the image (or at most the idea) of liking science and has no interest in actually learning any. It's like those people who like the idea of getting in shape, but don't exercise or change their unhealthy habits.

Occasionally one can see code. Like there’s a nice shot of rearranging alien “handwriting”, in which one sees a Wolfram Language notebook with rather elegant Wolfram Language code in it. And, yes, those lines of code actually do the transformation that’s in the notebook. It’s real stuff, with real computations being done. (Emphasis added.)

Here's Dr. Wolfram (whose alter ego is Mr. Tungsten --- couldn't resist 😀) talking about serious things:

Living in the future is great, never mind those who long for the "good" old times.

I have two words for these who long for the good bad old times: modern dentistry. (Not my original thought, but I've heard it from many sources; don't know original attribution. Still effective at capturing the power of technological change at an emotional level.)

This Intelligent 3D Printer Is Building Big, Beautiful Structures:

Ai Build's system uses video cameras outfitted with machine learning algorithms to allow robots to learn from their mistakes—meaning they can operate more quickly, correcting for errors on the fly instead of moving slowly to prevent them. According to Cam, Ai Build's arms can print in half the time it would take using standard techniques. (Via Singularity Hub.) 

Pill Packing 100 Billion Designer Bacteria Could Be Tested Next Year

In one of the first medical applications of this concept, Synlogic has patented a version of E. coli engineered to develop “an unquenchable appetite for ammonia” and turn it into the amino acid arginine, which, unlike ammonia, is harmless to the human body. (Via Singularity Hub.)  

Media Briefed on New NASA Hurricane Mission

As you can see, NASA is causing all these hurricanes to create a New World Order where scientists will rule and… huh, no. It's just that hurricanes are kind of easier to spot from high above the atmosphere than from the basements where the people who come up with these NASA conspiracies spend their lives.

That's it for this geek-out. Live long and prosper. --JCS

(Mood music.)

Kicking "Angels and Demons" while it's down

First, the ever entertaining Cinema Sins:

Now for some science. Let's assume that the stolen vial contained 1 gram of antimatter. Then, the explosion would release $E = mc^2 = (0.002) \times (3 \times 10^8)^2 = 1.8 \times 10^{14}$ Joule. At 4.184 petajoule per megaton of TNT equivalent, that is an explosion of roughly 43 kiloton.

(The more observant readers will notice that there's two grams in the energy computation. That's one gram each matter and antimatter.)

The operational ceiling of helicopters is around 25,000 ft, but the helicopter piloted by Ewan McObi-Wan Kenobi is nowhere close to that altitude when he jumps. An air burst of 43 kiloton even at say 10,000 ft would create a lot more damage than shown in the movie. (For comparison, Hiroshima's burst was at the yield-optimized height of 2,000 ft and with a yield of about 15 kt.)

So Ewan McThe Ghost Writer would probably be a carbonized carmelengo rather than a usurper to the Vatican throne. And probably so would the faithful in St. Peter's square and the Cardinals in Busch Stadium The Sistine Chapel.

- - - - Fait divers - - - -

Here's the page that CERN put up to address the errors in the movie.

Nikolaj Lie Kaas, who plays the assassin, plays the corrupt CEO of the energy company in the recent Danish series "Follow The Money." I guess he's typecast as the sociopathic type now.

I claim extra nerd points for using RStudio to do the computations (was already open; it's pretty much always open these days):