
Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies - sidwyn
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/technology-blog/man-throws-4-800-bottled-notes-ocean-gets-003908946.html
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rcthompson
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
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.

~~~
nyellin
Hopefully the bottle would be taken seriously.

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

~~~
rokhayakebe
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.

~~~
Tichy
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? :-)

~~~
rokhayakebe
That's a neat idea.

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bdr
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?

~~~
zeynalov
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...

~~~
bdr
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.

~~~
loxs
It could have been sent on Eidul Adha last year :).

~~~
zeynalov
Probability of this Eidul Adha is more than hundred times higer than last
year.

~~~
swordswinger12
Pulled that one right out of the ol' keester, huh?

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bobbles
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

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JoeAltmaier
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.

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JoshTriplett
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!".

~~~
sliverstorm
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.

~~~
burgerbrain
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.

~~~
nhebb
Not 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/>

~~~
burgerbrain
And in this case, it adds up to a mere 2000 plastic bottles.

If this were a fad, you might have a point.

~~~
epanastasi
The 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.

~~~
hnhg
A one-off deposit of 2000 bottles has a negligible impact on the Patch. To
tackle that, we need to fundamentally re-think a lot of the ways we conduct
ourselves.

~~~
sliverstorm
Perhaps starting with modifying our views that tell us since 2000 bottles is
negligible it's ok to do?

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electic
Thanks for littering our oceans with plastic bottles.

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

~~~
jay_kyburz
3099 of the replies were fines for littering.

~~~
jasonabelli
The other 1000 are all caught in whale's blow holes!

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andrew1
I find the environmental criticisms here bizarre; do the communication
mechanisms the rest of us use suddenly have no environmental costs?

~~~
VMG
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.

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amorphid
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 :)

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

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

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

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huhtenberg
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...](http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-
messages), but Yahoo! of all places? Y?

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joshfraser
Time to revisit my marketing strategy...

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khakimov
TCP/IP bottles ;)

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

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larrys
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.

