There's a terrific piece in the Seattle P-I today that took us down a 700-foot shaft into New York's Rondout-West Branch water tunnel. "For this, the city has enlisted six deep-sea divers from Seattle-based Global Diving and Salvage who are living for more than a month in a sealed 24-foot tubular pressurized tank complete with showers, a television and a Nerf basketball hoop, breathing air that is 97.5 percent helium and 2.5 percent oxygen, so their high-pitched squeals are all but unintelligible." The P-I picked the story up from the NYT, and it's written in that weirdly compelling style where extreme underwater plumbing somehow speaks to the universal human condition. It's a five-year, $240 million project, which should put our friend who just got a $5300 estimate to dig out his backyard sewer drain into a more philosophical frame of mind. more ›