Thursday afternoon. I have just moved a meeting to Tuesday so that a future version of me can deal with it.

Anyway. Here’s three things worth knowing, none of which will help you at work.

For about six months in 1989, PepsiCo owned seventeen submarines.

• The USSR had no hard currency, so it paid for cola syrup in ships.
• Seventeen subs at $150,000 each, plus a cruiser, a frigate and a destroyer.
• The 1972 deal had been settled in Stolichnaya. By 1989 vodka wasn’t covering it.
• Kendall told the US national security adviser that Pepsi was disarming the Soviets faster than he was.
• The internet says this briefly made Pepsi the sixth-largest navy on earth. It didn’t.
• The ships were obsolete, unarmed and full of asbestos, on their way to a Norwegian breaker.
• Pepsi was the middleman on a scrap deal. A Whiskey-class sub went for about $50,000.

Foreign Policy →

A Queensland experiment has been running for 99 years and the man who ran it never once saw it work.

• Thomas Parnell poured hot pitch into a funnel at UQ in 1927, to prove that something you can shatter with a hammer is a liquid.
• Nine drops since. Roughly one a decade. The tenth has been forming since 2014.
• John Mainstone took over in 1961 and held the post for 52 years.
• 1988: missed it by five minutes, while it was on display at World Expo in Brisbane.
• 2000: he had installed a webcam for exactly this. A 20-minute power cut. It fell inside the twenty minutes.
• He was given an Ig Nobel for it. He died in August 2013.
• The ninth drop fell in April 2014, on camera, watched by 25,000 people in 158 countries.

The University of Queensland →

The first webcam existed because a handful of Cambridge researchers kept walking to an empty coffee pot.

• Computer Lab, 1991. One pot, in the Trojan Room, on a different floor from most of the people who wanted it.
• A camera on a retort stand, a frame grabber, and a program called XCoffee. 128×128 pixels, greyscale.
• Internal for two years. Put on the web in November 1993, which is what made it the first webcam.
• People in Japan emailed asking them to leave the light on overnight, so it would be visible in their daytime.
• Switched off 22 August 2001, 09:54 UTC. The final frame is a hand reaching for the power switch.
• The pot went to eBay: 71 bids, £3,350, won by Der Spiegel. Krups restored it for free.
• It sits in a museum in Paderborn. It has never done anything except be looked at.

Cambridge Computer Lab →

The longer one

If only His Majesty were at home

Stockholm, 10 August 1628. The Vasa leaves the quay after three years in the building: sixty-four bronze guns, more than seven hundred carvings, a crowd on the waterfront that includes foreign agents invited specifically to be impressed. She sails about 1,300 metres. A light gust catches her, water comes in through the open lower gunports, and she goes down in the harbour with roughly thirty of the hundred and fifty people aboard.

The next day the Council of State starts looking for someone to blame. Captain Söfring Hansson is arrested before his clothes are dry. He tells them the crew was sober and the guns were properly lashed. The shipbuilder is asked why she sank and answers that only God knows.

Then the shipmaster, Jöran Matsson, says the thing nobody wanted said. About a month before she sailed, the captain had arranged a stability test. Thirty men ran back and forth across the upper deck to make her roll. After three passes they were stopped, because the ship was heeling so badly at her own quay that the men watching were afraid she would go over there and then.

Vice Admiral Klas Fleming was standing on the deck. Matsson remembered what he said: “If only His Majesty were at home!” The king was in Prussia, at war, writing letters asking where his flagship had got to. Fleming never told him.

The inquiry ran for months and found nobody at fault. No charges. The testimony pointed at the second-most-senior officer in the navy and, behind him, at the king, and the process quietly stopped there.

She was raised in 1961 after 333 years in the mud, and is now the most-visited museum in Scandinavia. The only ship of her class anyone remembers is the one that didn’t work.

Nobody hid the result. They just couldn’t find anyone willing to be the reason for a delay.

Vasamuseet, The Inquest →

Course materials

That’s it. Go home.

Professional Development  ·  sent Thursdays, when it stops mattering
Issue 04