Design flaws, hubris doomed the 'Titanic'

Question: Was it human hubris or flawed design that sank the "unsinkable" luxury liner the "Titanic" on its maiden voyage, killing 1,500 people out of the 2,200 on board, the world's most famous maritime disaster?

Answer: Blame it on a little pride and a lot of bad engineering, says Adam Weiner in "Don't Try This at Home: The Physics of Hollywood Movies." The ship had design innovations that theoretically should have made it safer, such as the hull's 16 separate buoyant compartments divided by watertight doors. It was touted that the ship could stay afloat even if four of its sections were breached, but tragically on that night of April 14, 1912, a massive iceberg that outweighed the ship by about 5-to-1 punctured six compartments near the bow. In under three hours, the ship sank to the bottom of the Atlantic near Newfoundland.

The design failure was that the bulkheads dividing the compartments came up only 10 feet above the waterline, beyond which water would start flooding adjacent sections even if intact. "If the compartments had been completely watertight, that is, if water could not spill over the tops of the bulkheads, the 'Titanic' would not have sunk."

Question: From a societal standpoint, what's one of the most troubling things about unhappy people?

Answer: Their tendency to pass along the bad feelings to others. Unhappiness can be viewed as a form of stress, say Eduardo Punset and Robert Sapolsky in "The Happiness Trip: A Scientific Journey." Depressed people are, in effect, giving up, saying to themselves, "I've tried everything and nothing helps, so why keep trying?" Now the all-too-ready antidote is to dump one's own stress onto others. Statistics show this happens en masse during any national economic downturn, when husbands are more inclined to physically abuse their wives, parents to abuse their kids, and so on.

We humans are such stress-prone beings that the threat to us doesn't even have to be present, such as a lion approaching our camp. We can just imagine an approaching lion or imagine all the problems we might face 10 years from now, after retirement. Unfortunately, there is a lot of evidence that making others unhappy "helps us cope with stress, which contributes to making the world a much worse place. Many people avoid developing ulcers at the cost of causing them in others."

Question: Without looking, can you say whether your big toes are longer than your second toes? Asked another way, do you have a natural athlete's foot?