Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/man-throws-4-800-bottled-notes-ocean-gets-003908946.html

by sidwyn • 15 years ago

133 80 15 years ago

news.yahoo.com

JoshTriplett2• 15 years ago

Very 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!".

sliverstorm2• 15 years ago

Well, 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.

JoshTriplett2• 15 years ago

I 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.

burgerbrain6• 15 years ago

2000 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.

spodek• 15 years ago

What if he put the notes in empty cans of Spam. They'd break down too, but they'd still be Spam.

monkeypizza• 15 years ago

What 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• 15 years ago

Here's a map I copied from the original BBC video: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3446069/Screenshots/ag.png

Original video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116

melvinram• 15 years ago

The 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.

burgerbrain6• 15 years ago

What 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.

lloeki2• 15 years ago

Fifteen 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• 15 years ago

This guy has a better open rate than us. Need to find out what subject line he's using.

rokhayakebe2• 15 years ago

Cheap Cost of Acquisition, indeed :). I have a feeling the ocean is about to get flooded with bottles from internet entrepreneurs trying to acquire users.

chrislomax• 15 years ago

It'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.

Tichy• 15 years ago

Hm, there are services that let you send a postcard from your mobile phone. How about sending a message in a bottle from your phone? :-)

electic• 15 years ago

Thanks for littering our oceans with plastic bottles.

VonLipwig• 15 years ago

haha this was exactly what I was thinking. Someone should talk to him about littering.

jay_kyburz• 15 years ago

3099 of the replies were fines for littering.

joshfraser• 15 years ago

Time to revisit my marketing strategy...

khakimov• 15 years ago

TCP/IP bottles ;)

lloeki2• 15 years ago

RFC1149 had atrocious enough RTT already. IPoOB would be downright insane.

bdr5• 15 years ago

Relevant 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

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• 15 years ago

You should show it to a pharmacist. Someone might have misplaced their doctor's hand-written prescription.

mkjones2• 15 years ago

I 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).

mkjones2• 15 years ago

Actually, it looks vaguely Greek...? Or Elvish? http://www.elvish.org/gwaith/andries/andries_scribalhand.jpg

Gmo• 15 years ago

Actually, 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 ...

anatoly3• 15 years ago

It'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.

JoeCortopassi2• 15 years ago

Definitely Greek. I'm teaching myself koine Greek right now, and easily recognize the alphabet. Unfortunately, I don't know it well enough to even attempt a translation right now, but if you bump into someone Greek, you might be able to get a translation

bdr5• 15 years ago

That was my first thought as well, but it turns out to be the wrong alphabet.

zeynalov4• 15 years ago

It's Cyrillic and this is the language of Kazakstan. It's very funny because it says he/she congratulates holy holiday of Muslims, Eid ul-Fitr (wiki it) and it is maximum a week old because it is now holiday of Eid ul-Fitr. I am not kazakh, I couldn't read & understand it fully. It says, he is from NYC, he wishes all the bests and so on...

loxs4• 15 years ago

Hah, thanks. My suspicion (a sibling message). Came out true :).

loxs4• 15 years ago

Eid ul-Fitr was on August 31 this year.

bdr5• 15 years ago

Thank you! Time to find a Kazakh speaker. The bottle was found on October 21st (more than a week ago) by the way, so we'll need a full translation to see what exactly is going on. You've been a great help.

loxs4• 15 years ago

I am a Bulgarian from Turkish descent. Cyrillic is the first alphabet I have learned, and this certainly contains words that do sound articulate when read "in Cyrillic". But it also contains letters that don't exist in Cyrillic. For example, at the second line of the "top" side of the message, I can with almost certainty say that this is a "w". A letter that doesn't exist in Cyrillic (and can't imagine some of the Cyrillic letters being written like that) I can't read all of the message (because as is common with written text, you often need to know the language in order to be able to "make up" some of the letters), but I can certainly read maybe like 50% of it. Mongolians do use Cyrillic. I have no knowledge of Mongolian. But I will bring another suspicion to the table. I wouldn't exclude Turkic (and other) languages from within Russia (and the former USSR). Those peoples all (or most of them) know Russian (Cyrillic) and often use the alphabet to write their own languages. I can certainly identify Turkic (sounding) words like "сайхан"-sayhan(Seyhan), "амед"-amed(Ahmed) - which do sound like very common Turkish names. Of course all of this is pure speculation from my side. It could very well be Mongolian. If it were in some Turkic language, I would expect to be able to make up the meaning of some parts, because of my knowledge of Turkish (which I can't).

bdr5• 15 years ago

Interesting for the context and perspective — thanks!

anatoly3• 15 years ago

I wrote about your message on my blog, and a commenter there, a linguist who knows Mongolian, confirmed it's Mongolian and translated it. His translation is in Russian (as is my blog), so I can only offer it to you re-translated yet again into English :)

"The first page says something like:

make 3 of my wishes come true

1. to go to New York and spend one wonderful year there

2. to all my relatives - good health, peace, success and something I can't make out :)

3. something about spending a good life with my beloved

the second page: I would like to meet my true love, become famous throughout the world, and live a good live with my family."

It seems like the two pages were written by different people.

These are the comments on my blog with these translations: http://avva.livejournal.com/2378561.html?thread=81649985 http://avva.livejournal.com/2378561.html?thread=81650241 http://avva.livejournal.com/2378561.html?thread=81650497

bdr5• 15 years ago

Interesting, I wonder how zeynalov could have thought he read so much in Kazakh. Thanks!

huhtenberg• 15 years ago

Y U NO LINK TO ORIGINAL, sidwyn?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116 or at least to http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-m..., but Yahoo! of all places? Y?

andrew1• 15 years ago

I find the environmental criticisms here bizarre; do the communication mechanisms the rest of us use suddenly have no environmental costs?

VMG• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

Practical 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• 15 years ago

Considering 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.

polshaw• 15 years ago

I'd bet most people would have already been rescued by the time a bottle was found, too.

nyellin• 15 years ago

Hopefully the bottle would be taken seriously.

gibybo• 15 years ago

Hmm, how about sketching the pattern of stars you see on the horizon along with a date and (approximate) time?

icebraining2• 15 years ago

Or learn how to build and use an astrolabe. It's not rocket science and gives them your approximate latitude.

nobody31415922• 15 years ago

It does rather rely on you being on the tip of a continent where the gulf stream goes past the front door.

bobbles• 15 years ago

At $200 per littered item: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/warr/litterlawdetail.htm

This would have cost the man $960,000 if he did it in NSW, Australia

JoeAltmaier2• 15 years ago

Is 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.

JoeAltmaier2• 15 years ago

Whats the bandwidth if you put a thumbdrive in the bottle? Error rate?

bmelton2• 15 years ago

Bandwidth 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• 15 years ago

You can't depend on each thumbdrive making it, therefore you need RAIBT (Redundant Array Inexpensive Bottled Thumbdrives).

arnoldwh• 15 years ago

I think I just found our new marketing campaign. A CPA of a bottle + a handwritten note sounds like a good deal to me.

amorphid• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

A 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.

Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies

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