He's going to have to redo the movie, if he wants to get it right.

For the love of no!!! I don't think the world can survive hearing that Celine Dion song over and over and over again....

Ballard's comment "Get over it!" seems a little out of place. But I suspect that he was reacting to the hype.

The History Channel in particular, but some of the other cable channels as well, like Discovery, tend to over-hype minor discoveries as great finds. HC used to have a pretty good show called Deep Sea Detectives, where divers would go down to investigate various wrecks. In a number of cases they made some really interesting and important discoveries. But I often got the impression that a lot of the stuff that they claimed to discover was already known to a small group of researchers and was not really "discovered" by the show at all. I suspect that the same may be true with the Titanic. Given the fact that it has been dived on hundreds of times now (the Russians sell tourist trips to it), how likely is it that this is a new discovery?

Hey, Cameron already Oliver-Stoned the Titanic story. The evacuation was slower than the film suggested, there was no speed record attempt, more than one lifeboat went back for survivors, and the CEO guy was the only person left on deck within his line of sight when he boarded that lifeboat as it was going down.

Compare the flick to Stephen Cox's article on Titanic.

I read the Cox article and find it rather bizarre. It's incredibly long and is certainly informative. But the author clearly has an agenda that is a little weird. He is constantly breaking into the narrative of the story to inject his political opinions.

He tries to make the libertarian case of "good businessmen" vs "evil government," and in the course of it, he makes some really odd claims. For instance, he decides to lay the ultimate "blame" for the disaster on the public, who wanted fast travel across the Atlantic. And he essentially states that the market will take care of safety. After all, after the Titanic sank, cruise lines all put more lifeboats on their ships, so regulation wasn't really necessary. This of course ignores the fact that Titanic only had lifeboats in the first place because they were required (i.e. regulated).

Cox's thinking is an example of libertarian thinking run amok.

The article really should have been two - one about the political stuff (what regulation would and would not make a difference in transAtlantic liner travel) and one about Ismay and the official inquests.

Well, it's a shame that Cox wrote the piece the way that he did, because he has some really provocative ideas.

For instance, was the Titanic captain really being "reckless" by sailing the ship as fast as he did through ice-filled waters? As Cox claims, there was relatively little evidence of the dangers of icebergs before Titanic (most of those ships that hit them tended to sink). And the sea was calm, which gave a false image of tranquility, when the reality was that calm seas don't produce breakers against icebergs that make them more visible. So how fair is it to blame the captain for not foreseeing trouble?

But some of Cox's political leanings really seem stupid. Should safety instructions NOT be posted on the vessels because the vast majority of people ignore them? Is the market really a viable alternative to all (or at least most) safety regulation?

"As Cox claims, there was relatively little evidence of the dangers of icebergs before Titanic (most of those ships that hit them tended to sink)."

I was less than clear on this. Cox claims that because most ships that hit icebergs sank with little trace, there was little clear evidence that icebergs were a threat to shipping. On one level this is absurd. After all, the Titanic captain DID have an iceberg lookout posted, right? So clearly they knew that icebergs posed a danger. But on the other hand, we have seen these kinds of events throughout history, where danger is not really appreciated until after many lives are lost. You can have a vague sense that something is dangerous, but it will not become a conscious sense--and certainly not codified into regulations or procedures or whatever--until after a lot of people have died. Witness the danger of hijacked planes flying into buildings. Both Tom Clancy and the TV show The Lone Gunmen used this as the premise for a story before 9/11. But nobody really considered it a high threat until after it happened.