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.
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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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).
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).
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.
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
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.
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.:
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 :)
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...
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.
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.