Of Bernoulli, Suez and Roosevelt

From time to time, I will amortize some of my previous belletristic 😁 efforts on recondite facts and convoluted connections 😬, and copy here some of my posts on various Slack and Hangouts channels, which I previously targeted at my friends and co-workers.  They are brave souls and responded to those with either a surprisingly positive acknowledgement, or, at least, at worst, a stoic silence.  I love them for that.

So. The Bernoulli family was a family of overachievers.  The most known of their results is probably Bernoulli's principle in fluid dynamics, which says that faster liquid flows produce an underpressure, which is proportional to the square of the velocity.  It was formulated by Daniel Bernoulli.

It was his uncle, Jacob, who discovered the very important mathematical constant e, which is used, prominently, by much of today's science.  His father, Johann, was one of the first to study and understand calculus and is also the author of the famous l'Hospital rule (it's is not Mr. l'Hôpital).  Johann worked for Guillaume de l'Hôpital, who, by contract, had the right to Bernoulli's discoveries, and he took them without giving any credit.  The textbook on calculus that l'Hôpital wrote (and which is actually recognized for its pedagogical brilliance) consists mostly of Bernoulli's work.

Together with his father, Daniel is also (mostly) responsible for the very important law of conservation, which can exhibit itself in many forms, Einstein's famous E=mc^2 being one of them.

Now here is what I recently noted about that ship stuck in Suez and its relation to Bernoulli's principle:

                                                                                                                               

FYI: The monster container ship, Ever Given, the huge whale that was blocking the Suez Canal, has finally been freed.  Hooray!  We can all sleep better knowing that price of oil and other shipped goods will rise only moderately and not rise as steeply as predicted, given the $9bn/day price tag of the blockage.We were lucky that the accident happened at the time of the approaching Easter, when the Vernal Equinox and Full Moon contribute to the highest tides of the year, which helped to free the ship.  However, it seems that this time of the year also helped to cause the accident, as this is the season when harsh winds (Khamaseens) batter the region.  One of them seemed to be a factor.

Note: The Khamaseen/Khamsin means "50" in Arabic, because their season lasts about 50 days each spring.  They turn the sky red with flying sand and can be quite terrifying.  As a young boy, I was forced to experience one Khamaseen inside a small tent near the Suez Canal, with my father having to secure the tent pole with his hands and his body weight.  It was terrifying for me at that time.As ship sizes are rising beyond reason and scheduling safety margins are lowered, all to cut costs, this was entirely predictable (and predicted).  With the winds/gusts well over 100 km/h, these big winds can push passing ships around quite a bit.  This ship is 400 m long and, loaded with containers, over 40 m tall, which presents a huge sail area for the wind to press on.  If placed in NYC Central Park, it would look huge.

The lateral force/pressure is proportional to the square of that wind speed, which makes matters much worse.

The ship was also travelling around 25 km/h,  well above the 15 km/h speed limit, also, unlike other ships, without any safety tugboats. Due to Bernoulli's principle, the stern of the ship is also sucked towards the nearest bank ("bank effect"), making larger ships harder to navigate.  The ship is also sucked down ("squat effect").  The shape of the canal (an inverted isosceles trapezoid, i.e. a fat rectangle with slanted edges) then causes both effects to increase each other's strength.  Both effects are proportional to the square of the speed, so travelling fast, especially at the time of a sandstorm, is a really bad idea, and you can end up paying for it.  They did.

Fun fact: the cruise ship Oasis of the Seas once used the squat effect to help it pass under a bridge: it sped up to get extra clearance.

                                                                                                                                  

An interesting fact about those container ships: their skin is extremely thin.  This is to save weight.  The strength is achieved by other means in their construction, not by the outer layer.  This also means that they can't be pulled and pushed around while they are beached on a bank, like the Egyptian tugboats seemed to be doing at the beginning.  That might be why the owners hired specialists from Holland (and also Japan) that used big dredgers and much bigger tugboats that gently manipulated the boat without risking ripping it open on a piece of rock somewhere underneath.

Another interesting fact: Ever Given was transferred to the nearby widening in the middle of the Suez route, called Great Bitter Lake (maybe because it is quite salty, being formed on a previously dry thick salt bed).  This lake was the place where, at the end of WWII, president Roosevelt, almost dying at that time, met the founder of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al Saud, aboard the heavy cruiser USS Quicy.

Abdulaziz had spent decades fighting wars to conquer and subjugate the Arab tribes in the neighbourhood and establish his rule over the entire territory.  He succeeded.  His family had a very long, interdependent relationship with the powerful fundamentalist Wahhabi movement, which made that conquest possible.  And just before the war, in 1938, huge oil deposits were discovered in his newly established, finally unified kingdom.At Great Bitter Lake, FDR struck a deal with Abdulaziz, the so called Quincy Agreement. 

America would provide the Saudis with military security and let their dynasty and their Wahhabi friends do whatever they wanted.  In exchange, the Saudis would provide the Americans full and secure access to their oil.  This was the genesis of the very many problems of today's world associated with the flow of petrodollars around the world, from banks that are too big, to the excesses of jihadist terrorism, to the dependence on oil that clouds fair political judgement.  It all started there, at Great Bitter Lake.