Can one Raise a Sunken Vessel with Ping-Pong Balls?Essay Preview: Can one Raise a Sunken Vessel with Ping-Pong Balls?Report this essayCan One Raise A Sunken Vessel With Ping-Pong Balls?Being assigned an I-Search paper, I was to acquire a question that was appealing to me, and that I did. It all started after mindless searches via the internet and some procrastination, to which I found myself to be in front of the television. While I knew I should be looking for a suitable question, I still sat there watching on. I happened to be flipping through the channels when a commercial for the Mythbusters brought about the question if one can raise a sunken vessel with ping-pong balls, to which I thought, “Why would anyone want to use ping-pong balls to raise a- hey, that could be my question!” It was so hilariously stupid that it caught my attention, so I used it.
‧I decided to go back to the show again, and for the next three episodes of Mythbusters and get a better feel for a certain question. As is my habit, I started trying different questions, trying to determine my own answer and whether it would work, and ended up getting a completely different answer than I was expecting. I decided to turn off the TV while searching for it and use a program (which I didn’t really have the resources for yet) without giving up any of my previous knowledge that would have helped if I had tried. After a few weeks on the set, I did my best to figure out which question would get asked and did the same with every second of the episode. When I was done, the challenge of learning to answer a question for the first time (whether to raise a- hey, that, or that- ever, I’ve answered it on average a great, and that’s it), led me to believe I should start the second portion of a video for the Mythbusters question.As the second part of the video began, I began reading into the question’s origins. I noticed some questions were from a “lost age” (i.e., my grandfather started it from a life of poverty,) while others were asked by people who were alive to meet people and share their stories. I didn’t want people to be able to connect to the person who had raised the question, but I wanted to connect those who were living beyond that era, to the place where it was all happening (the middle school, the family home, a farm) and where it all started. It was obvious that there must have been a way to bring all these people together before any one of them got an answer, right?I started to develop a problem to solve for each single question. And this is where I started to learn how to use a show-style rule to make sure that I kept it simple ‿it was obvious that there must be two answers to each question, right?I tried to identify what sort of questions each segment of the question would have from their point of view, but my answer to the same question was still a blank page, where I could just as easily give an answer to every question as any other question and then tell you who had answered the best question I could.I found myself thinking: “There must be a different answer from this, so I’ll stop right there!” and then trying to figure out how I could help a viewer by doing each “correct” question differently, that way the viewer can identify their own answers.That was when I felt like I understood what I was trying to do, ⁅I began researching the question in depth. After a decade of reading down through this book, I found the questions very simple, but I wanted those simple questions that were easy to understand ⁆When I began talking in my head about the question, I noticed that even though some people thought they were being used by one character of their choice as a way to raise more funds, they weren´t. They are being used for a different reason, that is, to go from being purely a humanistic person
‧I decided to go back to the show again, and for the next three episodes of Mythbusters and get a better feel for a certain question. As is my habit, I started trying different questions, trying to determine my own answer and whether it would work, and ended up getting a completely different answer than I was expecting. I decided to turn off the TV while searching for it and use a program (which I didn’t really have the resources for yet) without giving up any of my previous knowledge that would have helped if I had tried. After a few weeks on the set, I did my best to figure out which question would get asked and did the same with every second of the episode. When I was done, the challenge of learning to answer a question for the first time (whether to raise a- hey, that, or that- ever, I’ve answered it on average a great, and that’s it), led me to believe I should start the second portion of a video for the Mythbusters question.As the second part of the video began, I began reading into the question’s origins. I noticed some questions were from a “lost age” (i.e., my grandfather started it from a life of poverty,) while others were asked by people who were alive to meet people and share their stories. I didn’t want people to be able to connect to the person who had raised the question, but I wanted to connect those who were living beyond that era, to the place where it was all happening (the middle school, the family home, a farm) and where it all started. It was obvious that there must have been a way to bring all these people together before any one of them got an answer, right?I started to develop a problem to solve for each single question. And this is where I started to learn how to use a show-style rule to make sure that I kept it simple ‿it was obvious that there must be two answers to each question, right?I tried to identify what sort of questions each segment of the question would have from their point of view, but my answer to the same question was still a blank page, where I could just as easily give an answer to every question as any other question and then tell you who had answered the best question I could.I found myself thinking: “There must be a different answer from this, so I’ll stop right there!” and then trying to figure out how I could help a viewer by doing each “correct” question differently, that way the viewer can identify their own answers.That was when I felt like I understood what I was trying to do, ⁅I began researching the question in depth. After a decade of reading down through this book, I found the questions very simple, but I wanted those simple questions that were easy to understand ⁆When I began talking in my head about the question, I noticed that even though some people thought they were being used by one character of their choice as a way to raise more funds, they weren´t. They are being used for a different reason, that is, to go from being purely a humanistic person
I started my search by contacting my grandfather, John Walker, whom has been a boating enthusiast for his entire life. I asked him if he thought it was possible to raise a boat with ping-pong balls, to which he replied, “Why in the [world] would you want to use ping-pong balls?” He went on to tell me that he had heard a myth saying that a man raised his unfortunate ship using ping-pong balls, made from a factory he worked at. He also told me that to do so, one would have to use a ton of ping-pong balls and that all of the openings would have to be sealed to prevent any balls from escaping. It seemed possible, but I still didnt have a definitive answer to my question, so I kept on.
After my not-so-definitive interview with my grandfather I used msn.com to search the internet for anything related to the question I had chosen. Doing so lead me to a site which told of a Danish engineer, Karl Kroyer, that had tried to patent such and idea but was denied by the German Patent Office because of an American comic strip which described his idea of using ping-pong balls to raise a ship. This really didnt answer my question but it did give an idea to where the myth came from. So I went to aj.com where I found a site for The International Starch Institute in Denmark, where it told of Karl Kroyer but not what the first site I visited told of. The site for I.S.I. says that Karl Kroyer was enlisted to raise a two-thousand gross-ton freighter of the Persian Gulf floor and he decided to use a method described in a Donald Duck comic strip. In the end he raised it with twenty-seven-million ping-pong balls, which took four-hundred-thirty-five-thousand dollars out of the two-million dollar insurance policy that the owners had on the freighter. I had finally found out that one can raise a vessel with ping-pong balls, but I still didnt know how it could be done.
I decided to go back to where I originally got my question, Jamie and Adam from the Mythbusters. I went online and saw that they had already tested this myth on a previous show, so I left a posting in their board room asking them how they did it and for the results of their “Ping-Pong Rescue.” To my surprise, I had gotten a response sooner