Titan Maximum Quotes

I wouldn’t trust you if you were the last life raft leaving the Titanic.”-max

I have a good friend, let’s call him Slim Berriss, who’s devised a schedule for himself that combines practical microdosing and pre-planned 1- to 2-day treks into deeper territory. For him, this blend provides a structured approach for increasing everyday well-being, developing empathy, and intensively exploring the “other.” Here is what it looks like: Microdosing of ibogaine hydrochloride twice weekly, on Mondays and Fridays. The dosage is 4 mg, or roughly 1/200 or less of the full ceremonial dosage at Slim’s bodyweight of 80 kg. He dislikes LSD and finds psilocybin in mushrooms hard to dose accurately. Woe unto he who “microdoses” and gets hit like a freight train while checking in luggage at an airport (poor Slim). The encapsulated ibogaine was gifted to him to solve this problem. Moderate dosing of psilocybin (2.2 to 3.5 g), as ground mushrooms in chocolate, once every 6 to 8 weeks. His highly individual experience falls somewhere in the 150 to 200 mcg description of LSD by Jim later in this piece. Slim is supervised by an experienced sitter. Higher-dose ayahuasca once every 3 to 6 months for 2 consecutive nights. The effects could be compared (though very different experiences) to 500+ mcg of LSD. Slim is supervised by 1 to 2 experienced sitters in a close-knit group of 4 to 6 people maximum. NOTE: In the 4 weeks prior to these sessions, he does not consume any ibogaine or psilocybin.

When the next boat forward, Lifeboat 5, was being swung out, Third Officer Herbert Pitman noted how easily the davits worked compared to the older ones he had used on other ships. Thirty-four-year-old “Bert” Pitman, a farmer’s son from Somerset, had been working on ships since he was eighteen. The Titanic’s new Welin davits were indeed state-of-the-art and were actually equipped to carry more than the one boat each held. But outdated British Board of Trade regulations required a ship the size of the Titanic, which could accommodate 3,511 people, to have only sixteen lifeboats, for a maximum of 962 passengers. White Star had actually exceeded the regulations by including four Engelhardt boats with collapsible canvas sides, making room for a total of 1,178. Yet even if all of the Titanic’s boats had been filled to capacity, there would only have been places for slightly more than half of the 2,209 on board. No one had imagined a situation where such a watertight ship would need to be wholly evacuated before help could arrive.

At breakfast on Friday morning a crowd of curious hotel guests gathered around Arthur Peuchen in the Waldorf-Astoria’s dining room and made him recount his story once again. In the hotel’s largest ballroom, meanwhile, seven U.S. senators were preparing to question J. Bruce Ismay, the first witness to appear before the U.S. Senate investigation. As he began his testimony that morning, Ismay still seemed shaken by the disaster, and his voice was almost a whisper as he expressed his “sincere grief at this deplorable catastrophe” and offered his full cooperation to the inquiry. Yet his answers were guarded and often prefaced with “I presume” or “I believe” and concluded by “More than that I cannot say”—giving his testimony an air of evasiveness. His claims that he was simply a passenger like any other and that the Titanic was not pushed to its maximum speed were greeted with skepticism by the senators and with open hostility by the press. The Hearst newspapers famously dubbed him J. “Brute” Ismay and ran his photograph framed by those of Titanic widows. Edith Rosenbaum was among the few survivors who thought that the White Star chairman was being made a scapegoat and made a point of telling reporters that it was Ismay who had put her into a lifeboat.

I first met Chris in 2008 at a barbecue organized by Kevin Rose (page 340). For my entire life, I’d had a phobia of swimming and an acute fear of drowning. This came up over wine, and Chris said, “I have the answer to your prayers.” He introduced me to Total Immersion swimming by Terry Laughlin, and in less than 10 days of solo training, I went from a 2-length maximum (of a 25-yard pool) to swimming more than 40 lengths per workout in sets of 2 and 4. It blew my mind, and now I swim for fun.

What did you want to do when you were a child, before anybody told you what you were supposed to do? What was it you wanted to become? What did you want to do more than anything else? “If Peter Diamandis or Tim Ferriss gave you $1 billion, how would you spend it besides the parties and the Ferraris and so forth? If I asked you to spend $1 billion improving the world, solving a problem, what would you pursue? “Where can you put yourself into an environment that gives maximum exposure to new ideas, problems, and people? Exposure to things that capture your ‘shower time’ [those things you can’t stop thinking about in the shower]?” [Peter recommends environments like Singularity University.] TF: Still struggling with a sense of purpose or mission? Roughly half a dozen people in this book (e.g., Robert Rodriguez) have suggested the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek.

Before too long, he realized that refining was the critical point where he could exert maximum leverage over the industry.

This set him up to extract maximum advantage from both the railroads and pipelines so long as these two means of transport coexisted in the oil business.

On December 17, 1915, Burlingham suddenly announced that the parties were near settlement. White Star agreed to pay $664,000, to be apportioned among the claimants according to their scaled-down schedule. In return the claimants agreed to drop all suits both in America and in England, and agreed that the White Star Line had no “privity or knowledge” of any negligence on the Titanic. This last constituted an acknowledgment that the ship’s owners were indeed protected by limited liability and presumably barred any suits in the future. The lawyers for nearly all the claimants went along with the deal. Only a few loose ends remained to be cleared up. The loose ends, it turned out, took another six months. Much of the time was spent trying to divide up equitably the $664,000. The maximum allowed, for instance, would be $50,000 for loss of life under certain conditions—which meant that Renée Harris had to come down quite a bit from the $1,000,000 she originally claimed. On the other hand, the cut was far less severe for loss of life in steerage. The average claim had been $1,500; the average award would be $1,000.

The Titanic came under the Board’s regulations governing vessels of “10,000 tons and upwards,” the maximum category at the time the rules were issued in 1894. Since then the size and capacity of ships had increased dramatically—the Titanic was nearly four times as large as any vessel of the 90’s—but the lifeboat requirements remained the same.

By now there was no lack of people willing to leave the Titanic, but a new problem arose. The officers in charge of launching the boats were afraid to put too many passengers in them for fear they might buckle and pitch everyone into the sea. Actually, there was no danger of this. Harland & Wolff had designed all the boats on the Olympic and Titanic to be lowered with their full complement of people. In a test on May 9, 1911, the shipyard even loaded one of the Olympic’s boats with weights corresponding to 65 persons, then raised and lowered it six times without any sign of strain. Neither Captain Smith nor his officers seem to have been aware of the test. Harland & Wolff never told them that the boats could be lowered fully loaded; the builders simply assumed they knew this as “a matter of general knowledge.” If they ever knew, nobody remembered it that night. Boat 6 rowed off with a maximum of 28 people; Boat 8 with 39; Boat 2 with 26. Acting on his own, Lightoller decided he might get more people into the boats by utilizing the portside lower deck gangway. He sent six seamen down to open the doors, and ordered the boats, once afloat, to row down to the opening and receive additional passengers. It didn’t work. The doors were never opened; the men sent down were never seen again. They were probably trapped by some sudden inflow of water before they could get the job done.