Morning ☕
I hope everyone is doing well, a 4 day work week for many of you so that’s good news! 🐰
Anyway, C’mere to me…
Bits
More on NFTs
Just a little follow up on last weeks post - NFTs Big Picture 🔮, new things I saw this week I figured were worth sharing.
Jack Dorsey’s tweet did sell in the end, for a crazy $2.9m.
This viral meme made me laugh, taking a dig at NFTs for just being a jpg with a verified badge ☑
BUT he then sold this image as an NFT for 74.00 ETH or currently $125,000…
Shout out to Dublin man Alan Bolton, making waves in the digital art space.
For years he’s been creating insane visuals on Instagram, and finally, there is a digital art market for them to shine, if there were any Irish VFX artists to watch right now I’d keep an eye on him.
Also, thinking about a C’mere to me asset, what would be cool? could be worth something in years to come 🤔
Interesting
Really Quite Stuck… 🚢
You can’t have missed the news about the Ever Given, part of the Evergreen fleet, that has been wedged in the Suez Canal since last Tuesday, but you might not quite appreciate how stuck the thing really is...
For scale, it’s the size of the Empire State Building at 400m long, 59m wide and weighs 224,000 tonnes.
It has a draft of 14.5 meters, so there’s more than a three-story building of it below the water level when floating, so we can’t even see where it’s actually stuck.
This video goes into detail about the frictional force required to straight-up pull it out, which is enormous because things get drastically harder when it’s ‘on land’. I think they’ve overestimated it a little but they got a figure of 33,000 tons of force, for which the average tugboat has a bollard pull of 65 tons, so you can see why that hasn’t worked yet…
Digging it out from the surface is almost impossible too, because of the sheer size and depth of the hole that needs to be dug, and they have to ‘reach’ dig it as on unstable sand you can’t have equipment placed over the spot your digging.
So dredging seems like the best option, removing land from underneath, and salvage teams have been working through the night for the last few days, but this no easy feat either, especially as they don’t want to damage the vessel in the process.
The other option, in conjunction with dredging it, would be to reduce its total mass, by removing containers, so the ship would require less water depth to remain buoyant.
Again though this is an extremely difficult logistics issue, given the location of the ship and the angle it’s at, but equipment and plans to do so have already been called in.
Rhett Allain, writing for Wired, did some rough maths and estimated that to decrease the draft by just 1 meter you’d need to reduce the ship’s mass by 23 million kilograms (remember mass is different to weight, but nonetheless a staggering number). This amounts to somewhere around 600 containers.
According to Lloyds List, a shipping data company, the blockage is costing the global economy a whopping $9.6 billion a day in goods that are held on those ships in the queue on either side, that’s $400 million every hour.
In total, according to the Egyptian shipping agency Leth, at least 327 vessels are stuck waiting to pass through the canal; 134 at Port Said Anchorage (North), 42 in Great Bitter Lake (Midway) and 151 at Port Suez Anchorage (South).
Several vessels in recent days have changed their course, opting to take the route around the tip of South Africa, the Cape of Good Hope, the difference being an extra 12,000km and up to two weeks longer.
The longer this goes on the more significant the effects will be. About 1.9 million barrels of oil a day go through the canal, and yesterday amidst the delays and crucial missed shipments, the Syrian government has said it will start to ration fuel, an even more dire situation for the wartorn country.
QAnon (completely falsely, if that doesn’t go without saying) think this is all the doing of Hillary Clinton, but I think we know who is really behind it…
I thought this was a good quote:
“All in all, the blockage of the Suez Canal has laid bare the vulnerabilities of international shipping lanes and the fragility of supply chains. While the blockage will likely be resolved soon, it raises pertinent questions about the size of vessels and how these giant ships can be accommodated by what are essentially 19th and 20th century, man-made waterways.”
(read more - ArabNews)
Smile 😊
Saved 📷
Think 🌊
Pressing the ‘lock’ button on your car key fob multiple times is the grown up version of saving your game twice
That’s all 🤙🏽
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