Government

Man Overboard

My Memorial day post on the loss of an airman reminded me of the procedures when a man went overboard. Navy ships drill for man overboard at least once a week while they are at sea. The drill goes like this:

An officer throws a mannequin dressed as a sailor into the sea. That mannequin is named “Oscar,” after the flag that is flown from a ship’s mast when they have a man overboard.

There is a watch on the rear end of the ship, called the fantail watch. On aircraft carriers, there are two sailors assigned to this watch 24/7, one one each side of the ship’s rearmost point. They are wearing headsets attached to the lookout circuit. The fantail watch sees what appears to be a sailor in the water, and tosses a smoke float into the water to mark the position of the man in the water. He also calls “man in the water, (starboard/port) fantail” over the lookout circuit. The phone watch on the bridge hears this and notifies the Officer of the Deck (OOD). The OOD immediately orders three long blasts from the ship’s horn, orders the bosun of the watch to sound “man overboard” over the ship’s announcing system (1MC) and stops the ship by reversing the engines. Once it is below a certain speed, the ship will turn around and return to the location of the smoke float (if operations and conditions permit). The navigation crew uses as position tracker called a DRT (dead reckoning tracker) to coordinate the search. (This system uses inputs from the ship’s gyro to track its location. The advantage of the DRT over GPS is that the DRT can’t be jammed.)

The announcing of “man overboard” on the 1MC causes a few automatic actions. The signal bridge will hoist the above-mentioned oscar flag. The rest of the crew begins a face to face muster. There is a phone tree setup, where each crew member reports his location to a superior, who then calls their respective Division office. The division office calls the department office, who calls the bridge with a list of missing sailors. All 6,000 members of the crew must be accounted for in less than 20 minutes. Ten minutes after the initial “man overboard” call, the names of any sailors who remain unaccounted for are called over the announcing system until everyone is accounted for, or until the names of missing sailors are known. In a drill, the training team will randomly grab a couple of sailors just before the drill starts and hold them incommunicado, to make sure that they are reported as missing as a check to make sure divisions aren’t fudging the muster.

Another thing that happens is the ship launches a helicopter if possible, or a small boat if flight operations aren’t possible. The boat or helo has a rescue swimmer in it whose job is to grab the sailor.

Once the rescuers arrive near the man in the water, another smoke float is tossed in the water near him. This is in case they lose sight of him for some reason (waves, weather, darkness). They then deploy the swimmer to pull him from the water.

We used to lose 3 to 5 guys over the side in any given year. Most of the time we would find them, sometimes we wouldn’t. During the six years I was in, I remember two or three that we never found. The one referred to on Memorial day was one of them. I remember one time, we had a helicopter crash where an entire CH-46 Sea Knight went into the water, complete with aircrew. I saw that one happen. Luckily, we rescued the entire crew. That’s a story for another time.

By Divemedic, ago

New Law

A new law in Florida that applies to teachers. (pdf warning) I approve. It has some key points:

The State Board of Education shall waive initial general knowledge, professional education, and subject area examination fees and certification fees for: (d) A retired first responder, which includes a law enforcement officer as defined in s. 943.10(1), a firefighter as defined in s. 633.102(9), or an emergency medical technician or paramedic as defined in s. 401.23.

It goes on to authorize a sign on bonus to retired first responders and honorably discharged veterans who sign on to be full time teachers for a minimum of two years. In my case, it’s too little, too late, but it may attract some better teachers. I only dread the current leftie woke military members entering education.

It then goes on to authorize teachers to use force in self defense:

(i) Press charges if there is a reason to believe that a crime has been committed on school property, during school sponsored transportation, or during school-sponsored activities.
(j) Use reasonable force, according to standards adopted by the State Board of Education, to protect himself or herself or others from injury.
(2) For purposes of this section, in cases in which a teacher faces litigation or professional practices sanctions for an action taken pursuant to subsection (1), there is a rebuttable presumption that a teacher was taking necessary action to restore or maintain the safety or educational atmosphere of his or her classroom.

That would have been a huge help when I was hung out to dry after being attacked in my classroom. This new law isn’t perfect, but it is obvious that Florida is trying to improve some long standing issues in education.

By Divemedic, ago

No Limits

The Republicans this weekend did what they always do. They caved in. They reached a deal for our nation’s debt that allows them to campaign as conservative while actually doing nothing of substance.

The deal allows the government to spend until January 1, 2025 without any limits at all.

It’s what Republicans do best- feather their own nests. That’s why Trump vs. DeSantis is a meaningless debate.

By Divemedic, ago

No Wonder

I just saw this job listed for a Consular Assistant in Namibia. It requires a Bachelor’s Degree and One year of experience. It also requires fluency in Namibian. Ok, a little specialized, but that hardly justifies the $340,000 a year in starting pay.

Compare that to other jobs that earn an average (not starting) pay of more than $300,000: Neurosurgeon, Cardiac Surgeon, and other jobs requiring 12 or more years of school and years of experience.

No wonder our national debt is so high.

By Divemedic, ago

Play Stupid Games…

Two guys in a car that was reportedly stolen in an armed carjacking. The cops do a high risk stop and notice that the driver has a gun in his waistband. They tell him to drop to the ground. He reaches for the gun, gets ventilated, then it turns out that the gun was a toy.

Some say that the cops overreacted, the guy heard “drop” and went to pull the pistol out to drop it on the ground when they were quick to shoot him. I think, “Don’t carjack people at knifepoint and carry a toy gun around in your waistband” What do you think?

By Divemedic, ago

Teaching

Sometimes when you are teaching, you have to simplify a problem so that students can understand the concepts involved. I will explain. When I was a teacher, I was trying to explain to my Honors Class (I think chemistry, might have been physics. It’s been awhile) how to do a unit conversion using a method called dimensional analysis. It’s a pretty common way of solving equations that is used in the physical sciences.

I first learned the dimensional analysis when I was in the Navy at NucField A school and at Nuclear Power School. It’s handy for solving a lot of things. Dimensional analysis is a method for solving various problems that, once mastered, allows for the rapid solution to unit conversions, various physical problems (like Ohm’s law), medication dosage calculations, and more. It reduces calculation errors and is a very handy skill to have. I use this method all the time to calculate drug dosages, and used it as a firefighter to calculate hose pressures and other useful numbers.

I was teaching it to my students by giving the students a list of things I wanted converted from one item to another. The worksheet that I gave them was a list of problems that were easy to solve, but included the following instruction:

Show all of your work, including the proper setup of the dimensional analysis method. Your work is part of your answer, and any problem that does not include the showing of your work in the proper format will be marked as incorrect and will receive no credit.

The questions were things like:

  • Convert a $5 bill to nickels
  • How many toes would 22 people have?
  • How many legs would 123 ants have? (they each have 8 legs)
  • etc

So one of my students answered:

  • 100
  • 220
  • 984

And promptly got a zero for a grade. Yes, the math was correct, but I wasn’t looking for the mathematical solution, but a solution that showed me that he had mastered the method of dimensional analysis. Anyone with fourth grade understanding of arithmetic can tell you that 22 people have 220 toes. I knew that they could do simple math, because it was a requirement to have already passed Algebra and Geometry as a prerequisite to even be in my class. This was an honors course where students could receive college credit at the end of the course.

It was important that they understood the concept so when we went on to more complicated problems, they would have the skills needed to solve them. It wasn’t about the math of that particular problem, it was about knowing HOW to use dimensional analysis. That way, when you get a problem that goes like:

A sample of calcium nitrate, Ca(NO3)2, with a formula weight of 164 g/mol, has 5.00 x 1027 atoms of oxygen. How many kilograms of Ca(NO3)2 are present?

The problem can be solved without too much difficulty. The easy problems were not a test of math ability, they were a means of learning a new method for applying math skills that the student already has. A “learn to walk before you try to run” sort of thing.

The child’s parent wrote me and demanded that he receive full credit because he got the correct answers. I tried pointing out the instructions and explaining the reasons behind showing your work. No go. The parent argued that “in the real world” no one cares how you got the answers, just that you ended up with the correct answers. I tried pointing out that, this being school, demonstrating that you have mastered the method is more important than getting the correct answer. The parent continued to argue and demanded that the student receive credit. I refused. They even told me that they would get a lawyer involved. I told them “good luck finding anyone that will support you not showing your work on math homework, when the instructions clearly required it.” Then I told them if lawyers were to be involved, I would be happy to give them my attorney’s number, and their attorney could call mine to arrange a meeting. They hung up on me.

So the parents went to the principal. Nope. They went all the way to the school board, to no avail. The parent finally pulled the kid out of my class and put them into a low level environmental science class.

In this case, the parent did the child no favors.

EDIT: I am editing this to give an example of how dimensional analysis works. Here is the example:

Convert 1 week into seconds:

*Terms on the top AND bottom of the equation cancel out, leaving: (1*7*24*60*60s)/1=604,800 s

By Divemedic, ago

Book Bans

Stories abound on so-called “book bans.” The right is pulling books from school libraries because they instruct children on how to perform sex acts upon other children or on adults. It’s a disingenuous argument. Librarians are acting all offended because a school is choosing not to carry books that are inappropriate for children. The books can still be purchased by those who choose to do so. They can still be read, are still being published. They haven’t been banned at all.

Not so with other books. It was just five years ago that the left cheered as Amazon pulled a book from its store. That book, published by Defense Distributed, was the text version of the step files required to 3D print the Liberator pistol. That book was subsequently banned by a US judge. It is no longer published. It can’t be bought. No one can read it, unless they find a bootleg copy from a site like Pirate Bay.

By Divemedic, ago