When I was a kid I read a story about the oil field fires after the first Gulf War. That planted a seed to look at how different cultures solve the same problems. Not unlike code reviews and relationship advice, the problem is always so much easier to see when you're not in the middle of it. Some things are easier to forgive, others harder.
My culture is very efficient at solving some problems, barely equipped to solve others. That's true of everyone. Some holidays or traditions are quaint, even silly, others make me envious. Some ideas are mutually exclusive, but others complement each other.
For the [oil field fires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires) the real story is stranger than I had recalled. Apparently the Hungarians mounted a MiG engine onto a tank and used it to power the water cannon. I had recalled the tank (high thermal mass rather than expensive heat shielding), but not that the water was jet powered.
I really love that whole story. The tank is obviously very badass of course, but there were a lot of other cool ideas too.
Folks from Texas just thrown explosives on the fire until it blown it out.
There was some other nation who lifted in a long pipe over the fire, forcing the oil to go in the pipe which obviously kept burning at the top of the tube. And then they suddenly tipped the pipe to the side. The oil was still flowing of course, but when they got the timing right they could remove the oil stream fast enough from the heat that it got extinguished. That looked like a very ingenious solution from the lower-tech side of the spectrum.
> ... but not that the water was jet powered.
I found this video[1]. It sounds like it's not really that the water was jet powered. They were blowing out the fire with the oxygen-depleted exhaust of the jet engines and they mixed water into the exhaust to further enhance the process with the cooling effect. Or at least that's what the guy in the red helmet next to the machine says in Hungarian.
I think at one point they told the UN it might take 5 years to put out all of the fires. At the beginning they were doing one well a week, sometimes less. By the end they were doing 2 a day. They started in April and were done by November. In six months they were going over 10x as fast. Which means they probably put out half the fires in the last 8 weeks.
> When the vehicle was completed, however, the fires had already been put out by Hungarian turbo fire engines. The vehicle was used experimentally and showed good results. Even so, it was no longer used.
At least that one. Sounds like they had others that were smaller that were used instead?
My culture is very efficient at solving some problems, barely equipped to solve others. That's true of everyone. Some holidays or traditions are quaint, even silly, others make me envious. Some ideas are mutually exclusive, but others complement each other.
For the [oil field fires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuwaiti_oil_fires) the real story is stranger than I had recalled. Apparently the Hungarians mounted a MiG engine onto a tank and used it to power the water cannon. I had recalled the tank (high thermal mass rather than expensive heat shielding), but not that the water was jet powered.