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.<p>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.
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: <a href="http://andrewbadr.com/files/tmp/bottle.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://andrewbadr.com/files/tmp/bottle.jpg</a><p>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?
At $200 per littered item: <a href="http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/warr/litterlawdetail.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/warr/litterlawdetail.htm</a><p>This would have cost the man $960,000 if he did it in NSW, Australia
Very impressive response rate; I'd have expected something significantly lower.<p>I'd love to see a map of all the responses; I suspect it would have quite an interesting geographical distribution.<p>The sad thing: someone will read this and go after the guy for littering rather than saying "awesome!".
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 :)
Y U NO LINK TO ORIGINAL, sidwyn?<p><a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116" rel="nofollow">http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14859116</a> or at least to
<a href="http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-messages" rel="nofollow">http://www.tecca.com/news/2011/09/26/harold-hackett-bottle-m...</a>, but Yahoo! of all places? Y?
A perfect example of how the media is complicit in spreading half truths.<p>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.<p>Not to mention that the return ratio defies common sense.<p>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.