At Nautilus Labs, we’re advancing the efficiency of maritime transportation by collecting data and recognizing patterns. An interesting side effect of this is that we have insight into a ships' actions, not just day-by-day, but second-by-second. It’s not as simple as dots on a map either; engine power, wind, rate-of-turn, it’s all important. We worked with one of our clients to take advantage of this recently. A few days ago, one of their ships struck a jetty during a berthing maneuver.

It bothered me that the spices in the kitchen were out of order. So, I sorted them using my favorite sorting algorithm, Mergesort. My cats helped.

I started with an un-ordered list of spices.

Then I started to divide the list up into smaller lists. Panther helped. 31 elements became 15 and 16. Then 7, 8, 8, 8. Then 3, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4. Then 1 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2