Man throws 4,800 bottled notes into the ocean, gets 3,100 replies | Hacker News Reader

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

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133 pointssidwyn80 comments

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.

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.

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

Hopefully the bottle would be taken seriously.

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

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

Good point. If the island has WiFi you can look it up on Wikipedia :-)

I learned how to build one in elementary school (as a Portuguese, we have quite an history of sea exploration).

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

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

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.

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.

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? :-)

That's a neat idea.

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?

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

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).

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

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 ...

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.

It is NOT mongolian. In mongolian there are no letters Ә, Ғ, Қ ... This is kazakhish. I am from Germany but have roots from Azerbaijan, therefore I understand altaic-turcis languages. It looks similar to mongolian but it isn't.

These letters aren't there either. Perhaps you see as Ә what's simply э written haphazardly. I'm not sure where you're seeing Ғ, or Қ.

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

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

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

To be fair, the Cyrillic alphabet was derived from the Greek alphabet of the time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic#History

Ah, my bad. What's the saying about a little knowledge being a dangerous thing?

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...

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

Eid ul-Fitr was on August 31 this year.

I am sorry, but should be Eidul Adha not Fitr. Sorry.

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.

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

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

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

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).

Interesting for the context and perspective — thanks!

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

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

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

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.

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!".

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.

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.

What if a million people throw one bottle?

Then 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.

It hardly matters to these birds. 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?

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.

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/

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

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

2000 plus what others throw there all the time and what was already there. That adds up to a <Big Number>.

'others throw there all the time' - 2000 = <Still a Big Number>

He had no meaningful effect.

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.

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.

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

Compared to the amount of oil burned around the world for all the computers reading HN I think you can ignore the bottles

Perhaps a better, and more rational argument, is that we should care more about the oil being burned around the world, and not less about the amount of trash being thrown into the ocean.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Plastic 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.

Well that's rather depressing actually...

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.

Thanks for littering our oceans with plastic bottles.

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

3099 of the replies were fines for littering.

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

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

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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

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

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?

Time to revisit my marketing strategy...

TCP/IP bottles ;)

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

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.

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