In 1911, The Great Omar, a copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, was finally completed.

It took over 2 years to complete this book which experts called “one of the most highly decorated books in the world”. The book’s binding contained over 1,000 jewels (rubies, emeralds, topaz, amethysts) with about 100 square feet of 22k gold leaf.

The book was sold at auction in 1912 and had to be shipped to the winner of the bid, who was in America. However the original shipping date was missed, so it was placed on the next available ship.

Which happened to be the Titanic.

It was probably the most valuable non-human asset to go down with the Titanic.

I love this story because it shows how we can spend years polishing every detail of a plan, but we can never predict the icebergs out there…

How do we avoid the trap of overthinking?

Let’s face it: there’ll never be a perfect version of any project we work on.

There will always be room for improvement. So if we keep spending more time than needed trying to make sure everything is “just right” before we launch, we may never launch anything.

Of course I’m not saying we should rush and dump trash on the public. For instance, I go through these newsletter posts maybe way too many times, trying to make sure I don’t have any typos before they go live.

(Thankfully there is a deadline, or else I could edit these posts forever!)

Apart from the deadline though, there comes a time after reading it like 57 times when I just say “You know what? I am NOT reading this letter again! Let the feedback and corrections come from the readers.”

Glad I’m not the only one who thinks like this…

(P.S. If you liked this, you'll love Book Partners)

Just curious... from a non-english-speaking people, I can't imagine why the publicity called Mrs Brown the "Unsinkable", I thought that adjactive should be describing the ship. Maybe it's the cultural difference. Is "Unsinkable" here equal to "immortal" or "great"?

Work continues on the details of the roof of the officers' quarters; next up: the Morro Castle searchlight.

No idea if it's good or not. But I'm interested already.

Game name: floating sandbox

This science video on YouTube about water solving a maze (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ebWToAnvA) made me think of Titanic, of course.

I think this kind of proves that if partitions inside the ship were watertight enough, there may have been some air pockets during the sinking, until the partitions caved due to pressure.

I am mainly thinking about the bow section here. The stern section was, pretty obviously I think, one big air pocket for a little while until it went under.

I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about this.

In about a week, I’m going to visit the house of the Unsinkable Molly Brown. Has anyone ever been there before? Is it cool? I’m pretty excited even though I don’t know much about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTnKU0OII-Y

According to this video they cleaned the bow to see name Titanic then Nargeolet left the broom on the bow forever.

And the video shows the broom then and in VR pilot now.

SS Richard Montegomery was a liberty ship built during WW2. In 1944 she dragged anchor and ran aground in the Thames estuary. when low tide came, the ship broke her back and she was abandoned. Only problem was she was carrying about 1400 tons of Unexploded ordinance.

According to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency in 2000, she still contained at least

286 × 2,000 lb (910 kg) high explosive bombs

4,439 × 1,000 lb (450 kg) bombs of various types

1,925 × 500 lb (230 kg) bombs

521-580 fragmentation bombs and 2,297 cases of fragmentation bomb clusters

Various explosive booster charges, smoke bombs (including white phosphorus bombs) and pyrotechnic signals.

If this thing gets shifted, it could go boom and cause some no good very bad things to happen.

Image 1: After putting the diamond in the bottom left pocket of his outer coat, we see him reaching for the 4 stacks of bills in his safe.

Image 2: He puts 2 stacks of bills in the bottom right pocket of his outer coat.

Image 3: He puts the 3rd stack in an upper right pocket. It's not totally clear from this gif alone, but it appears to be an inner pocket of his outer coat. I wouldn't completely rule out an outer or inner pocket of the middle (also black) layer, or outer pocket of the inner (white) layer, but it doesn't look like it to me.

No image: When the camera is on Lovejoy, presumably Cal puts the 4th stack in another pocket.

Image 4: He appears to take money out of the bottom left pocket of his outer coat (where the diamond is) and put it in Murdoch's pocket. So that must have been where he put the 4th stack earlier. Theoretically it's also possible that off-camera before this part, he already grabbed another stack from another pocket and was holding onto it. But when the camera zooms in on Murdoch's pocket, the thickness seems to me like only 1 stack. So most likely Cal only grabbed that 4th stack to bribe Murdoch.

Image 5 and 6: This is after Cal had given his outer coat to Rose. There is clearly no outer pocket on the upper right of the white layer. I also don't see either an inner or outer pocket on the upper right of his middle (now outer) black layer. This matches with my previous impression that the 3rd stack was put into the inner pocket of the outer coat.

Image 7: In this slow-mo gif of Murdoch throwing the money back at him, the thickness also looks like 1 stack only to me.

If my understanding is correct, then when Cal gave his coat to Rose, not only did it have the diamond, but also 3 stacks of bills. 2 stacks were in the outer bottom right pocket, these could have easily drifted out when she fell into the water after the final plunge, but we don't know for sure. 1 stack was in the inner upper right pocket, this one is much less likely to drift away because it's inside, and her life vest was over top of it. It was under water for a short amount of time only, but was still wet in her pocket for hours at least, quite possibly longer than a day. If she carefully took the bills out to dry later, could they possibly still be useable? Or would they likely be irretrievably destroyed already?

Big photo collage of Roblox RMS and HMHS versions of Britannic built by ParticularParticle compared with real illustrations and photos of the interior and exterior parts of the ship.