I understand that the RN has a pretty good museum but I don't know if it's near London or Portsmouth. I became a fan of the Aubrey - Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian, of course, no submarines there but it was a world with technical demands all its own.

During the Kursk disaster I recall walking during the light we have at lunchtime, and looking at a point up a hill reckoning that if I were on the Kursk, that point would be where the water's surface lay. When I was a kid I read some adventure book where the hero and his buddies are trapped under several hundred feet of water, and he tells them to escape they must let the water in, understand they would be taking in pressurized air, so they must start exhaling as they leave the overturned ship, and exhale all the way up or they will explode. It seemed to make sense, but it was juvenile fiction.

The way their own officials and politicos handled the case was a national shame. Remember how a concerned relative was drugged into unconsciousness right at the press conference?

I saw K-19. Medium movie about men placed in a terrible situation. Similar to what happened at Chernobyl where men stepped up to do tasks that would lead them to the grave.

Most designers have an identity they forge with whatever they construct. There have been some very good shows analyzing what brought the Twin Towers down on 9/11. In one of them they interviewed the architect, and you couldn't help but want to give the guy a hug. His office looked out at what had been a design triumph (although frankly, I remember thinking they looked ugly and utilitarian from the outside, I didn't understand their structure until these programs). You could see how deeply responsible he felt, not that he did anything wrong, quite the contrary, but in retrospective analysis it can always be shown how something different might have been done. In fact, he and the design team had done an excellent job. He deserved no more blame than Boeing for the 757 and 767 that hit the Towers.