5 ms·

Outside of the Hungarian oil subculture, the practice has been largely ignored I've always wondered whether some technologies have been given less attention in

by t_mann 5y ago

Outside of the Hungarian oil subculture, the practice has been largely ignored I've always wondered whether some technologies have been given less attention in the west because they were considered 'Soviet'. Bacteriophages, an alternative to antibiotics less likely to induce resistances, come to mind as well. But of course, there might be perfectly valid technical reasons for why it didn't catch on.

dvh 5y ago
I remember some Soviet scientist had trouble cutting thin samples for transmissive electron microscope because the cutting itself introduced stress which then ruined the sample so he created a method of slowly cutting the sample with thread dowsed in sulfuric acid, this didn't deform the sample.
- daniel-cussen 5y ago
  The problem with many of those clever things is they're too cheap. Doesn't make for a good business model.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  It's common to employ a similar technique when making cinnamon rolls. Sweet dough/cinnamon/butter/sugar mix is rolled up into a long tube, then you cut the individual rolls using dental floss wrapped around the tube. Generally, the H2SO4 is omitted. And now I know what I'm making for breakfast tomorrow!
rob74 5y ago
TBF, you (fortunately) don't have out of control burning oil wells that often, so such a specialized firefighting vehicle is needed very rarely. But in situations such as Kuwait, it sure is handy to have one...
djmips 5y ago
I saw a small documentary about an American crew in Kuwait where someone said that putting out the fire was the easy part - capping was the hard part. So maybe that's part of it. That being said, the documentary did dramatize a particularly difficult to put out well head but they did manage to put that one out as well by just putting a cap on it which allowed the fire to shoot out above at a higher level and then turning off the valve to choke out the fire. I got the impression that this was an outlier well and that most of the others were extinguished more easily.
- givemeethekeys 5y ago
  I think you mean this one: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUzkF_Dp8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUzkF_Dp8M It is awesome.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
Prior to reading this, I had an impression that the most used method for putting out the burning oil wells is TNT - the blast wave just blows off the burning fire, and it burns no more. However, this article suggests that just blowing off the fire is not enough, because hot sand and air might re-ignite the oil. So, probably, the explosives also damage the well, disrupting the supply of the fuel.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I like the one where an oil well fire was actually put out with a small nuclear explosion - that seems to have worked(multiple times in fact!) https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonated-a-nuke-miles-underground-to-put-out-a-gas-well-fire https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...
- teh_klev 5y ago
  > I had an impression that the most used method for putting out the burning oil wells is TNT You're not wrong. The technique was pioneered by Red Adair who was quite a famous firefighter with a speciality in blowout fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair It's worth doing a search on YouTube for videos of his "work": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+adair https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+adair
  - wrp 5y ago
    Also inspired the movie Hellfighters. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063060/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063060/)
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  Capping the well while burning has a huge advantage over explosives which is that it's much harder for people who don't know what they're talking about to bike-shed the process and therefore has less risk of cost ballooning over time and investing in those techniques/experience/know how often look like the more assured option even if it's the more difficult and costly technique on paper both up front and per use.
yyyk 5y ago
Bacteriophages had serious problems that made them unsuitable for mass deployment. For example, you need to isolate a strain suitable against an infection, and that's a process which was difficult to scale. Another problem is that as far as the body is concerned, the phage is an infection too and it turns out the body can be effective at getting rid of phages. Lastly, resistances also occur against phages.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
  But new phage strains would evolve head to head with the resistant bacteria, right? With antibiotics you have a fixed molecule, which becomes useless if the bacteria develops resistance.
  - t_mann 5y ago
    That's the classical argument pro phages. It's probably not easy to pick a clearly better one, @yyyk seems to have more insight than I do, but I did read an article pointing out that research on bacteriophages in the west only really took off after the cold war.
  - yyyk 5y ago
    Yes, but you can't rely on that on a natural setting. Sometimes the body does get rid of a disease, right? Same thing with bacteria-phage relationship - and the resistant bacteria can then spread (while the better phages are difficult to harvest back from the body, and may not be as effective against the original strain). I think a more personalized medical system can do a lot of good with phages given modern tech, but most medical provision systems would have difficultly deploying it, and certainly no one was able to back when it was developed. AFAIK, the ability to easily scale, transport and deploy antibiotics was what led to antibiotics being chosen over phages just about everywhere.
- sandworm101 5y ago
  https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/ The joke is about cancer cells but is equally applicable to bacteria. Just because something is very very good at killing bacteria doesn't mean that it can also become a practical medicine.
raverbashing 5y ago
Yes, sometimes technologies are forgotten, and sometimes they didn't catch on because there were some complicated gotchas The space pen vs. pencil story comes to mind, and it seems silly they wouldn't use a pencil except that it is a dust hazard, a short-circuit hazard (especially if you're using circuits more densely packed) etc
- t_mann 5y ago
  The space pen vs pencil story is a classic example of a story that catches on because it sounds great, except that it isn't really true when you look more closely. Another classic is the historic tulip bubble, which was far more contained in reality than people tend to assume (there was a price crash, but the financial fallout was largely limited to a few families who could mostly afford it).
EdwardDiego 5y ago
Jet engines are used for mine rescue in our non-Hungarian neck of the woods. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pike-river-2010/66373/pike-river-gag-unit-to-be-handed-back-to-owners https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pike-river-2010/66373/pike-river-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy
- barrenko 5y ago
  This is pretty awesome (in addition to this whole thread).
- sandworm101 5y ago
  For mine rescue? These seem designed to put out fires by suppressing O2 levels. Is this helpful in rescue situations or are these more about simply putting out stubborn underground fires?
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Sometimes you have to put out the fire that's trapped the miners before you can rescue them.
bombcar 5y ago
If there are two technologies, and all else is equal, and one is slightly more efficient or slightly cheaper or slightly anything, it’ll often catch on and completely overtake the other one. Only when they’re perfectly balanced does it seem that both come into play and remain (left vs right hand drive, for example).
- greggsy 5y ago
  To add to this purely economics perspective, the there’s a lot more at play when it comes to take up of new technological innovations: the preparedness the manufacturing sector to produce and deliver the goods, and customer acceptance. The first is probably an economic one, but it’s important to consider that it’s not all about the cost of production - the technique may be prohibitive, and could draw out too many strategic resources from other areas in the sector… and it might not even scale, or has a short shelf life, or, or… The second - customer acceptance - would need to be carefully considered. The doctor offers you two options to treat your babushka, the familiar and reliable antibiotic, or the new drug that sounds like a Matrix virus?
  - bombcar 5y ago
    Yeah, the first point is a good one - if you have a new process that uses parts/procedures that already exist you're going to have a much easier time than if you have a better process that requires all-new parts and procedures. For something to overtake it has to be amazingly exceptionally better; which can be hard to obtain.
- t_mann 5y ago
  There are significant "snowballing" effects wrt to technology adoption, more widely adopted technologies tend to improve far more quickly. So a little bit of noise in the early days about the true potential of a technology could conceivable sway the race in one direction or another, and I was wondering whether there were instances of where the noise signal might have been that it was considered as "Soviet" and thus less likely to receive research funding/grants. A less geopolitical example that I can think of was research in the 50's about limitations of neural networks (XOR problem,...) that some people I take seriously argue has delayed the adoption of these architectures by a generation or two (the only politics here was the battle for government funding by different researchers/labs).

by t_mann 5y ago

dvh 5y ago

I remember some Soviet scientist had trouble cutting thin samples for transmissive electron microscope because the cutting itself introduced stress which then ruined the sample so he created a method of slowly cutting the sample with thread dowsed in sulfuric acid, this didn't deform the sample.

daniel-cussen 5y ago
The problem with many of those clever things is they're too cheap. Doesn't make for a good business model.
HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
It's common to employ a similar technique when making cinnamon rolls. Sweet dough/cinnamon/butter/sugar mix is rolled up into a long tube, then you cut the individual rolls using dental floss wrapped around the tube. Generally, the H2SO4 is omitted. And now I know what I'm making for breakfast tomorrow!

rob74 5y ago

TBF, you (fortunately) don't have out of control burning oil wells that often, so such a specialized firefighting vehicle is needed very rarely. But in situations such as Kuwait, it sure is handy to have one...

djmips 5y ago

I saw a small documentary about an American crew in Kuwait where someone said that putting out the fire was the easy part - capping was the hard part. So maybe that's part of it. That being said, the documentary did dramatize a particularly difficult to put out well head but they did manage to put that one out as well by just putting a cap on it which allowed the fire to shoot out above at a higher level and then turning off the valve to choke out the fire. I got the impression that this was an outlier well and that most of the others were extinguished more easily.

givemeethekeys 5y ago
I think you mean this one: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUzkF_Dp8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tUzkF_Dp8M It is awesome.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

Prior to reading this, I had an impression that the most used method for putting out the burning oil wells is TNT - the blast wave just blows off the burning fire, and it burns no more. However, this article suggests that just blowing off the fire is not enough, because hot sand and air might re-ignite the oil. So, probably, the explosives also damage the well, disrupting the supply of the fuel.

gambiting 5y ago
I like the one where an oil well fire was actually put out with a small nuclear explosion - that seems to have worked(multiple times in fact!) https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonated-a-nuke-miles-underground-to-put-out-a-gas-well-fire https://interestingengineering.com/soviet-engineers-detonate...
teh_klev 5y ago
> I had an impression that the most used method for putting out the burning oil wells is TNT You're not wrong. The technique was pioneered by Red Adair who was quite a famous firefighter with a speciality in blowout fires: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Adair It's worth doing a search on YouTube for videos of his "work": https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+adair https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=red+adair
- wrp 5y ago
  Also inspired the movie Hellfighters. (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063060/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063060/)
throwaway0a5e 5y ago
Capping the well while burning has a huge advantage over explosives which is that it's much harder for people who don't know what they're talking about to bike-shed the process and therefore has less risk of cost ballooning over time and investing in those techniques/experience/know how often look like the more assured option even if it's the more difficult and costly technique on paper both up front and per use.

yyyk 5y ago

Bacteriophages had serious problems that made them unsuitable for mass deployment. For example, you need to isolate a strain suitable against an infection, and that's a process which was difficult to scale. Another problem is that as far as the body is concerned, the phage is an infection too and it turns out the body can be effective at getting rid of phages. Lastly, resistances also occur against phages.

aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
But new phage strains would evolve head to head with the resistant bacteria, right? With antibiotics you have a fixed molecule, which becomes useless if the bacteria develops resistance.
- t_mann 5y ago
  That's the classical argument pro phages. It's probably not easy to pick a clearly better one, @yyyk seems to have more insight than I do, but I did read an article pointing out that research on bacteriophages in the west only really took off after the cold war.
- yyyk 5y ago
  Yes, but you can't rely on that on a natural setting. Sometimes the body does get rid of a disease, right? Same thing with bacteria-phage relationship - and the resistant bacteria can then spread (while the better phages are difficult to harvest back from the body, and may not be as effective against the original strain). I think a more personalized medical system can do a lot of good with phages given modern tech, but most medical provision systems would have difficultly deploying it, and certainly no one was able to back when it was developed. AFAIK, the ability to easily scale, transport and deploy antibiotics was what led to antibiotics being chosen over phages just about everywhere.
sandworm101 5y ago
https://xkcd.com/1217/ https://xkcd.com/1217/ The joke is about cancer cells but is equally applicable to bacteria. Just because something is very very good at killing bacteria doesn't mean that it can also become a practical medicine.

raverbashing 5y ago

Yes, sometimes technologies are forgotten, and sometimes they didn't catch on because there were some complicated gotchas The space pen vs. pencil story comes to mind, and it seems silly they wouldn't use a pencil except that it is a dust hazard, a short-circuit hazard (especially if you're using circuits more densely packed) etc

t_mann 5y ago
The space pen vs pencil story is a classic example of a story that catches on because it sounds great, except that it isn't really true when you look more closely. Another classic is the historic tulip bubble, which was far more contained in reality than people tend to assume (there was a price crash, but the financial fallout was largely limited to a few families who could mostly afford it).

EdwardDiego 5y ago

Jet engines are used for mine rescue in our non-Hungarian neck of the woods. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pike-river-2010/66373/pike-river-gag-unit-to-be-handed-back-to-owners https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/pike-river-2010/66373/pike-river-... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorniczy_Agregat_Gasniczy

barrenko 5y ago
This is pretty awesome (in addition to this whole thread).
sandworm101 5y ago
For mine rescue? These seem designed to put out fires by suppressing O2 levels. Is this helpful in rescue situations or are these more about simply putting out stubborn underground fires?
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Sometimes you have to put out the fire that's trapped the miners before you can rescue them.

bombcar 5y ago

If there are two technologies, and all else is equal, and one is slightly more efficient or slightly cheaper or slightly anything, it’ll often catch on and completely overtake the other one. Only when they’re perfectly balanced does it seem that both come into play and remain (left vs right hand drive, for example).

greggsy 5y ago
To add to this purely economics perspective, the there’s a lot more at play when it comes to take up of new technological innovations: the preparedness the manufacturing sector to produce and deliver the goods, and customer acceptance. The first is probably an economic one, but it’s important to consider that it’s not all about the cost of production - the technique may be prohibitive, and could draw out too many strategic resources from other areas in the sector… and it might not even scale, or has a short shelf life, or, or… The second - customer acceptance - would need to be carefully considered. The doctor offers you two options to treat your babushka, the familiar and reliable antibiotic, or the new drug that sounds like a Matrix virus?
- bombcar 5y ago
  Yeah, the first point is a good one - if you have a new process that uses parts/procedures that already exist you're going to have a much easier time than if you have a better process that requires all-new parts and procedures. For something to overtake it has to be amazingly exceptionally better; which can be hard to obtain.
t_mann 5y ago
There are significant "snowballing" effects wrt to technology adoption, more widely adopted technologies tend to improve far more quickly. So a little bit of noise in the early days about the true potential of a technology could conceivable sway the race in one direction or another, and I was wondering whether there were instances of where the noise signal might have been that it was considered as "Soviet" and thus less likely to receive research funding/grants. A less geopolitical example that I can think of was research in the 50's about limitations of neural networks (XOR problem,...) that some people I take seriously argue has delayed the adoption of these architectures by a generation or two (the only politics here was the battle for government funding by different researchers/labs).