The MON Blogs

Wow, my first blog post, how exciting. If you’re wondering I’m Matt, also known as Colonel on the Have Your Say forums.

As Drew mentioned in his first entry, this blog is going to be a place where the members of Middle of Nowhere productions will record any sort of random thoughts they have. I like the egocentric nature of blogs that assumes our random thoughts are worth reading, but that’s for another day.

To confirm the random nature of this blog I wanted to quickly write some thoughts I had after watching a documentary on the sinking of the Titanic. The Titanic would have to be one of, if not the, most studied disasters of all time, but in every documentary you see they are all very busy explaining the science of the sinking. We (the Western world) is so obsessed with the scientific explanation of every thing (I notice with a sense of irony that CSI:Miami is currently running in another room). This documentary I was watching was going to great lengths to explain weaknesses in the steel, the way the ship broke apart, things like that. And I thought who cares?

How the ship sunk shouldn’t be the main point of inquiry. It struck an iceberg and because of some structural weaknesses it sunk. But the real tragedy was not scientific but social. It was social factors that ensured the boat was being pushed to travel as fast as possible, social factors that led to it being drastically understocked with life rafts, and it was social factors that led to the decision to load the first class passengers on first and release the rafts when they still had plenty of available space.

It was these factors that should be the main subject of research and interest. It’s of little relevance to know that the ship sunk because the steel was too weak, or too many water tight compartments were flooded, what we should be trying to understand is why so many lives were lost when those deaths could have been avoided.

In light of the tragedy in New Orleans I think this is a reasonably relevant message.