Dumb Ideas for Freelancing Dummies

Deepwater Horizon blowout

You know about "bumper-sticker mentality," right? Solutions for complex problems so simplistic they can fit on a 3" x 12" piece of paper in 40-point type? Almost invariably wrong, except perhaps one that says, "My Labrador is Smarter than Your Honor Student"? Well, they're out there; out there everywhere. People come up with them all the time, but we found a particularly interesting set published at InfoBarrel.com by a member who calls himself Dalo. Yeah, if we were dumb enough to publish "The BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico,"¹ we wouldn't use our real names, either...

You'd think that after the so-called Deepwater Horizon spill had been pumping oil into the Gulf for sixty days, with wall-to-wall news coverage, Dalo would have known a little more than to offer up a couple of truly inane ideas. First up is this gem:

"First of all,I would like to know why I haven't heard of anyone using infared imaging to get images of the leaking oil... You should be able to place an infared camera inside a waterproof box,and attach the box to the end of a cable,and then lower the box down into the water,so the camera can obtain pictures of the oil leaking out."

Attach an infrared camera to a cable and lower it? Why would they bother with a cable when there were half a dozen ROVs -- remotely-operated vehicles -- swarming around the mouth of the well? In 5,000 feet of water? Using infrared photography and videography to capture images like the one above, published three weeks before Dalo wrote his suggestion? And what would taking those pictures accomplish, anyway? But wait, it gets better: "Another idea I have is to use liquid nitrogen to freeze the well,and [sic] make it stop leaking... if you cool nitrogen to a temperature of approximately 200 degrees below zero,it [sic] turns into a liquid. I believe that liquid nitrogen could be used to freeze the oil leaking out of the BP oil well. If you had a ship,capable [sic] of carrying several thousand gallons of liquid nitrogen,you [sic] should construct a pipe that can extend from the ship all the way down to the leaking oil well."

What kind of person thinks you could kill a blowout by freezing the fluids at the surface? A dumbass, that's what kind: did Dalo not know that the fluids weren't "leaking" out of the well, but were exiting the wellhead at tremendous pressure? Apparently not - and that's why he's our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ InfoBarrel has deleted all user-generated content and become a "green" website, but this post can still be reead by using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was   infobarrel.com/The_BP_Oil_Spill_In_The_Gulf_Of_Mexico

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