The Cornish beaches where Lego keeps washing up
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSC_Napoli
And earlier this year too - cigarettes this time:
http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/11031368.Cor...
I'm lucky enough to live in Cornwall and I'd never heard of the lego thing, very interesting!
WHAT?
I imagined every container to have tracking and identification numbers so the owners could know roughly where it is at all times; and so that various government agencies could prevent import of things not allowed in their countries. A quote a bit later on kind of supports that.
> She says the ship's manifest - a detailed list of everything in the containers - shows a whole range of Lego items, not all sea-themed. After all this time "it's the same old things that keep coming in with the tide", particularly after a bad storm.
I'm surprised about how many containers are lost.
> About 120m containers carried on world's oceans in 2013
> 2011 survey by World Shipping Council estimated an average of 675 containers lost at sea each year between 2008-10
> 2014 survey says average annual loss between 2011-13 was approximately 2,683 containers
2,500 containers out of 120m is a small number, but still. How would you design a pinger suitable for shipping containers so that they could be located after being dropped overboard?
EDIT I should have said that this pinger thing is just a thought experiment. Obviously most containers are no lost, and most of the ones that are are not toxic / valuable enough to bother with. (But thanks to the posters below)
It had happened to him years before I knew him, and he was still having to deal with the paperwork. :(
But I guess it's just cheaper for all concerned to write off the lost goods and file an insurance claim. As they say: worse things happen at sea.
But if you live by the sea (like I do) and go to many beaches all through the year, no one cares if you pick up some of the tons and tons of rubbish that washes up every year. Planks, plastic, bits of container, every type of plastic ever made. Nets (so many nets) buoys, gloves, wellies (so many gloves) fish boxes (so so so many) plastic bottles (like, an infinite amount of them).... light bulbs (yay - glass on the beach! fun for all the family!)
Who could get angry if some locals nab a pair of water logged nikes, or a huge bale of tobacco... it's only heading to the landfill anyway. Every now and then some big-wig gets annoyed with that behaviour and they get on the local news and some clever clogs gets to ask them "If we give you twenty pairs of crocs back, will you clean up the thousands of gallons of oil spilt?".... but for the other 359 days of the year no one gives a shiny shite about anything that gets washed up.
I've never heard of lego being washed up, I'm about 12 miles from that beach. I think it's just a cute story that has become viral.
Regarding scavenging shipwrecks and wrecking -- 99% of that was fiction by Daphne du Maurier. But it's a good story about some poor folk, who can blame them for adding it to the local 'history'. In actual _real_ history, we're better known for the heroic lifeboats and cliff rescue teams of total nutters who risk their lives to go help people.
The tobacco was salty and rank.
That's absolutely 100% casting an aspersion.
Of course, those businesses wouldn't be nearly so profitable anymore, which means it's almost certainly never going to happen.
But as we're on the subject on containers, here's an interesting read from Wired on a radioactive container in Genoa port a couple of years ago: http://www.wired.com/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1
You don't. Black box pingers have a range of approximately 5k meters. Which complicates matters if your depth is in that range.
And for what purpose you'd want that again? Claim the insurance.
Locating things underwater is a tremendous pain because it's radio-opaque. So you have to spend a lot of energy on sonar.
Having a power source for such a thing is a tremendous pain: you want a lot of capacity and low self-discharge. Ideally the battery would be chemically or mechanically inactive until underwater. Compare for example the wet cells in the early radar anti-aircraft shells that were inert until fired out of a cannon. Doable, but it's not going to be cheap.
Also, it's going to be expensive to fish up the container, and the contents will generally be destroyed and worthless. Realistically this is only going to be worth it for (a) things too toxic to leave lying around or (b) gold.
Then sonaring it should be simpler, as we know the rough location.
Yes, that's correct. Every container has a unique ID, and the content of each one is declared in the shipping manifest, of which the port authority, customs, the shipping company, the agricultural service etc etc, have copies. Not knowing what was in the containers is complete bullshit, everyone know at least what was declared to be in them.
Customs checks the truthfulness of the manifest by opening a small percentage of containers at random. Most containers just go through their voyage unopened. This and their standardised size is why container shipping was such a huge efficiency revolution in international transport.
Source: I worked in the industry for 6 years.
When I drove Alaska->Argentina, I had to ship my Jeep in a container from Panama to Colombia. I shared the container with a French couple driving around the entire world. He worked for a company that sent ~500 containers a month around the world for various construction projects.
We toyed with the idea of insurance on our container, and he said in his experience, about 10% of shipping containers are never seen again. They can disappear at the origin port, disappear on the ship, or disappear at the destination port.
Shipping ports are seedy places, in my experience.
We didn't get insurance, and our container did arrive no problems.
Oceanographers have since learned about currents from tracing them.
http://smile.amazon.com/Moby-Duck-Beachcombers-Oceanographer...
[1] : http://www.upsingapore.com/smart-port-hackathon/ [2] : http://www.seatrade-global.com/news/asia/singapore-port-hand...
As a side note: Though a small fraction of the total transported, 675 containers a year floating around the ocean scares the bejesus out of me as an offshore sailor. The fact that many are partially submerged and flow with currents that are unpredictable makes the idea of crossing the channel quite harrowing for anybody without a steel hull.
Don't Lego "keep" washing up? Why would Lego "keeps" washing up? Is it an amorphous blob like an oil spill? Seems to me more like fish.
That's certainly how it works in the Lego Movie!
The title sounds fine to me. I would say "a Lego block" rather than "a Lego" too, similar to how I wouldn't say, "an oil". So calling it an "amorphous blob" sounds about right.
"Lego" (no preceding article) is a mass-noun for the stuff. It's not really an amorphous blob, of course, but it's being thought of that way. Like "sand" even though sand is made up of grains. "Sand keeps turning up in my shoes after that trip to the beach." "Lego keeps washing up on the shore after that container ship sank."
I call the individual bits "Lego pieces" or "Lego bricks" or "Lego blocks" or whatever.
Some people call them "Legos", whose singular would be "a Lego" or something of the kind. In that case it would be "Legos keep washing up".
I have never seen "Lego" used as an actual plural count-noun: "There are thousands of Lego in that box". Either "thousands of Lego pieces" or "thousands of Legos".
(I confess that using "Lego" as a count-noun makes my inner pedant twitch. But language is defined by usage, and it may well be that by now it's correct.)
This is because a trademark identifies a specific source or producer of an item. If a trademark is used as a noun (Kleenexes, Trampolines) it is a step toward generic usage and loss of the trademark.
Hence, the Lego group would want you to talk about Lego bricks and Lego pieces, but everyone else is fine talking about Legos. (Except my autocorrect, which wants it to be Lego's)
A not great example is "sugar keeps washing up".
"A pride of lions", "a pack of wolves" are examples of collective noun.
Lego does not fit that pattern.
Sugar, Bread, or water are example of uncountable nouns.
"A gram of sugar", "a loaf of bread", "a litre of water", "a bag of Lego".
You also wouldn't say "one lego"; you might say "one Lego piece" or "one Lego 2x2 piece".
Same way we'd use sand & grains of sand as plurals.
(Sorry I couldn't resist it. I never thought I'd see a story on here about my home.)
I've never heard to Lego story either, plenty of other things get washed up, but I've never seen or heard of Lego.
Certain ocean currents make some beaches more likely to accumulate interesting detritus than others, including Asian tsunami debris, lost shipping, and the occasional lonely shoe or boot with human foot remains still inside. That last one happens more often than you might think.
The idea that a ton of lost sneakers helped to illustrate ocean currents blew my mind as a kid.
(Ok, maybe not swords which go in minifigures hands.)
Not entirely sure why you think this matters?
Now Lego has a huge range of non-rectangular bricks.
You can still buy basic bricks. Here are two links:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-6177-Basic-Bricks-Deluxe/dp/B00...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/LEGO-5529-Basic-Bricks-More/dp/B004F...