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Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies
- JoshTriplett 15y agoVery impressive response rate; I'd have expected something significantly lower. I'd love to see a map of all the responses; I suspect it would have quite an interesting geographical distribution. The sad thing: someone will read this and go after the guy for littering rather than saying "awesome!".
- sliverstorm 15y agoWell, he has basically tossed ~2,000 plastic bottles into the ocean that have not been recovered (yet). That's not a small number of bottles. It seems cool, until you try to consider the externalities he has casually handed off. Now, if he had used glass bottles, it would probably work out a little better. Though it still takes a long time, glass can be broken down by the ocean and incorporated into sand, which is part glass anyways.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoI certainly agree that it meets the definition, and this wouldn't work out well for a million people to do, but fortunately a million people don't do it.
- alf 15y agoWhat if a million people throw one bottle?
- burgerbrain 15y agoThen there will be a mere 0.0000000027 bottles per square meter of the ocean. I'll leave working the numbers for cubic meters up to you, but sufficed to say it will hardly matter. And what harm will these bottles cause, to anything but human aesthetic? Little to none.
- alf 15y agoIt hardly matters to these birds. http://animal.discovery.com/birds/ocean-gyre-birds/albatross-ocean-gyre-birds-pictures.html http://animal.discovery.com/birds/ocean-gyre-birds/albatross... The argument that the ocean is so vast that you can dump anything in it without ill effects was proven wrong decades ago. That's why there are laws against it. If you looked, you can find hundreds of sources to back this up. I think this was a cool experiment. But people and animals live in these environments, and certainly matters to them when someone tosses non-degradable material in their backyard. How would you like it if people started dumping plastic garbage in your backyard? What about in your house? Surely it's only effects your aesthetic enjoyment, so it doesn't matter right? What if it's your drinking water?
- burgerbrain 15y ago2000 seems like a large number, until you realize that you have to compare it to the mindbogglingly large number that is the surface area of the ocean. He may as well pissed in it for all the harm he did.
- nhebb 15y agoNot to detract from the man's project (which I think is cool), but every little piece of garbage in the ocean does add up. Oceanographers have mapped garbage patches in each of the oceans, e.g.: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/atlantic-plastic/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/08/atlantic-plastic/
- burgerbrain 15y agoAnd in this case, it adds up to a mere 2000 plastic bottles. If this were a fad, you might have a point.
- kiiski 15y ago2000 plus what others throw there all the time and what was already there. That adds up to a <Big Number>.
- burgerbrain 15y ago'others throw there all the time' - 2000 = <Still a Big Number> He had no meaningful effect.
- epanastasi 15y agoThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch) is a real problem. Estimates put its size between 270,000 sq miles 5,800,000 sq miles of floating trash, most of which is plastic. It pollutes the water, kills marine life, and introduces toxins into the food chain which can end up on your dinner plate. Saying 2000 bottles is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things is shortsighted and irresponsible. Millions of tons of garbage doesn't appear in the ocean for no reason. It exists because everyone thinks to themselves "hey, the ocean is a really big place... what harm does a few bottles really have?" The problem is only getting worse, and after all.. we haven't had plastics for that long. There's no justification for throwing plastic bottles in the ocean. It doesn't improve the environment in any way, but it currently negatively affects hundreds of species.
- spodek 15y agoWhat if he put the notes in empty cans of Spam. They'd break down too, but they'd still be Spam.
- monkeypizza 15y agoWhat matters is the comparison of the 2k bottles to the rest of his garbage production, and his overall garbage production to the average. If they represent only a few percent of his annual plastic-in-ocean contribution, it would be silly to worry about them while ignoring all that other stuff.
- pitdesi 15y agoHere's a map I copied from the original BBC video: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/ag.png http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/ag.png Original video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116
- melvinram 15y agoThe sad thing is that people think "awesome" instead slapping him silly. Join Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Match.com or even GrubWithUs if you/he wants to meet random strangers. But please don't throw trash in the ocean unless it's biodegradable. <stepping off my soap box>
- burgerbrain 15y agoWhat is so special about plastic? In thousands of years there will be geological layers filled with the stuff, fundamentally no different than all the rock layers and fossil layers laid down at any other time.
- MortenK 15y agoPlastic decomposes in "only" 400-500 years. So while we might have a problem with it now, it's all gone in a fraction of a second, when seen in a geological timeframe.
- burgerbrain 15y agoWell that's rather depressing actually...
- lloeki 15y agoFifteen years ago there was no "Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Match.com or even GrubWithUs"... I was barely able to dial up on the nascent and overpriced Wanadoo at that time.
- earbitscom 15y agoThis guy has a better open rate than us. Need to find out what subject line he's using.
- rokhayakebe 15y agoCheap Cost of Acquisition, indeed :). I have a feeling the ocean is about to get flooded with bottles from internet entrepreneurs trying to acquire users.
- Tichy 15y agoHm, there are services that let you send a postcard from your mobile phone. How about sending a message in a bottle from your phone? :-)
- rokhayakebe 15y agoThat's a neat idea.
- chrislomax 15y agoIt's sad to say that my first thought was the marketing aspect of this, then I read some took 10 years to open. I don't think I could justify the response time to a client.
- electic 15y agoThanks for littering our oceans with plastic bottles.
- VonLipwig 15y agohaha this was exactly what I was thinking. Someone should talk to him about littering.
- jay_kyburz 15y ago3099 of the replies were fines for littering.
- jasonabelli 15y agoThe other 1000 are all caught in whale's blow holes!
- joshfraser 15y agoTime to revisit my marketing strategy...
- khakimov 15y agoTCP/IP bottles ;)
- lloeki 15y agoRFC1149 had atrocious enough RTT already. IPoOB would be downright insane.
- bdr 15y agoRelevant enough... my brother was visiting me here in SF and found a message in a bottle, but we can't even identify the language. Some people have suggested Mongolian. Here's a high-res picture: http://andrewbadr.com/files/tmp/bottle.jpg http://andrewbadr.com/files/tmp/bottle.jpg It was in a bottle of cheap California wine, so we figure they probably threw it from here. It's still fun though. Anyone out there who can read Mongolian?
- biot 15y agoYou should show it to a pharmacist. Someone might have misplaced their doctor's hand-written prescription.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mkjones 15y agoI think Mongolian often uses a Cyrillic alphabet, and that doesn't look particularly Cyrillic to me, just smudgy and hard to read (but the latin alphabet).
- mkjones 15y agoActually, it looks vaguely Greek...? Or Elvish? http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/andries/andries_scribalhand.jpg http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/andries/andries_scribalhand.jpg
- Gmo 15y agoActually, it DOES look like Cyrillic ... Look at the second paper, third world, it clearly looks like "хами"(with the "ми"being fairly typical Cyrillic letters). Can't say the precise language though ...
- anatoly 15y agoIt's definitely Cyrillic, and definitely Mongolian. The beginning of the third line on the second page reads хуссэн бухнээ, and googling finds this phrase on Mongolian pages. No idea what any of that means, though.
- huhtenberg 15y agoY U NO LINK TO ORIGINAL, sidwyn? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116 or at least to http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-messages http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-m..., but Yahoo! of all places? Y?
- andrew1 15y agoI find the environmental criticisms here bizarre; do the communication mechanisms the rest of us use suddenly have no environmental costs?
- VMG 15y agoI find your response even more bizarre - just try to imagine replacing email with this method for just half a minute. The real reason this isn't a concern is because of the absolute cost of his experiment, not because of the relative expense of his communication method in comparison to others.
- rcthompson 15y agoPractical implication: If you are stranded on a desert island and you attempt to solicit a rescue by releasing a message in a bottle, you have about a 65% chance of a response (within ten years, I guess). In order to get that above 95%, you would need to release 3 or more bottles. 5 bottles gets you a 99.5% chance. Of course, you'd better have a GPS device so that you can write down your coordinates on the message, or else you'd better hope the bottle turns up at an oceanography instutute that can trace the ocean currents back to where you're stranded.
- kahawe 15y agoConsidering you can provide as many details on HOW you got stranded there (flight numbers, cruise ship name etc.) as possible and add details about WHERE you got stranded, I think that would help search&rescue to at least narrow it down... or maybe you are very lucky and the place has some pretty unique characteristics? I think the biggest problem would be actually getting the people who find your message to turn it in to the police or so and then you got to hope they won't just throw it away or wouldn't even know where to forward the message to.
- gibybo 15y agoHmm, how about sketching the pattern of stars you see on the horizon along with a date and (approximate) time?
- icebraining 15y agoOr learn how to build and use an astrolabe. It's not rocket science and gives them your approximate latitude.
- bobbles 15y agoAt $200 per littered item: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/warr/litterlawdetail.htm http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/warr/litterlawdetail.htm This would have cost the man $960,000 if he did it in NSW, Australia
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoIs it littering if you intend it to be found and returned? Its not litter to leave your wallet in a bar, or you car in a car park.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoWhats the bandwidth if you put a thumbdrive in the bottle? Error rate?
- bmelton 15y agoBandwidth depends on the size of the thumb drive, and error rate depends on the find/open rates of the bottles, as well as perhaps whether or not the thumb drives fail over time or are even used... What really kills you though, is the latency.
- patrickgzill 15y agoYou can't depend on each thumbdrive making it, therefore you need RAIBT (Redundant Array Inexpensive Bottled Thumbdrives).
- arnoldwh 15y agoI think I just found our new marketing campaign. A CPA of a bottle + a handwritten note sounds like a good deal to me.
- amorphid 15y agoI wonder how much his location comes into play. Would he have the same success rate throwing in the same # of bottles from anywhere by the ocean, or are we reading about this because of a unique set of circumstances? Either way, it is a cool story :)
- larrys 15y agoA perfect example of how the media is complicit in spreading half truths. They show no more than 20 examples of letters and expect you to believe that he has received thousands because they are numbered. There is no evidence to prove that he sent out 4,800 letters and even less to show that he received 3,100. Not to mention that the return ratio defies common sense. Edit: My comments are based on watching the video where it would be typical to substantiate a claim like this with more images of boxes of replies along with some random checks of the actual large quantity of replies.