XKCD: It's more than a comic

I just bought the boxset of all episodes of Rockos Modern Life. Before that I bought the Disney collection DV Ds of Goofy and Silly Symphonies. Also, my room is littered with big LEGO cranes and the like.

The advantage of being an adult is that you can afford those really big toys that your parents would never have bought you.

But you no longer have the time to play with them. That's what I noticed when it comes to video games (I want to buy 8-bit armies, but I won't have time to play both it and XCOM 2).

I started doing my own grocery shopping at 12, since I live in the city (a relatively safe part of it) and can walk to the store. I cannot even begin to tell you how mature my 12 year old self felt carrying my basket through the aisles and paying with a debit card, signing, and taking the receipt with a calm, cool look on my face. That's actually what inspired me learn to cook, and to eat healthy. Buying chips and cookies and junk food made me look like a little kid. But buying fresh vegetables from the produce section, looking through the spice racks for the perfect kind of pepper, now that's what adults did.

Message in a Bottle.

Email is such a weird form of communication, if you think about it. We've created a situation in which the container for the message is spontaneously generated and inexhaustible: we literally have infinite bottles.

And the bottles (almost) always end up where you want them to go.

That's not really true. Email storms wouldn't be so problematic if it was.

That's an issue of human bandwidth, not machine bandwidth. In a nigh-infinite sea filled with bottles, you'd only have time to read a miniscule fraction of them, so the signal-to-noise ratio matters.

It is an issue of machine bandwidth too. An email storm can DDOS a mail server.

But that's if you had a ton of them coming in at once, which does not usually happen. There are a lot of bottles, but the sea at any given time is probably of adequate volume to carry all of them.

edited 2nd May '16 8:36:59 AM by cake1

The capacity of the system to deliver information vastly exceeds the human capacity to comprehend it. That's really what matters. Accidentally DDoS'ing the system by using Reply All is not going to happen.

Ironically, however, the real sea actually is cloggled with bottles, and other assorted crap.

Which always gets me wondering. Why don't we send out a team of trawlers to scoop up that large garbage patch in the North Pacific Ocean? What are they waiting for, a written invitation?

Too expensive? "Not my responsibility" from all involved since it's in international waters? A question of where it would be put? The hope that the Sargasso leads to the evolution of harvestable organisms that can biodegrade all of that crap?

I think the Chinese are planning to build a airfield on it.

I think that last one would only work if we gave the microbes a caffeine boost. ;)

How would that work? :S

Wat.

edited 2nd May '16 9:11:39 AM by Aetol

The great pacific garbage patch isn't made of large chunks of debris. It's made of tons of tiny pieces of plastic.

; )

edited 2nd May '16 11:46:34 AM by DeMarquis

Actually, if you filled the ocean with enough closed-off bottles, they would start displacing quite a bit of water. Eventually, the sea would start flooding the coasts.

Sounds like a good What-If question...

Why do you think anyone would do that? What motivation could they have?

Its not quite as easy as that. Its not like there is garbage bags and recognizable objects floating around. The waves and sunlight break the garbage up into often microscopic particles that you can't see nor can you just fish them out with a big net on the back of a trawler. You'd need a system to suck up tons of seawater and filter the water for these microscopic particles, WITHOUT killing off any marine life. Also, these patches are HUGE, as in, thousands of kilometers across. Just sending a few ships out, no matter how effective, just couldn't do the job, and sending more would become prohibitively expensive.

In simple terms, this is not so much filtering soup to get out the chunks of meat and veggies, as it is filtering the soup to the extent that it turned back into clean water. Also, the bowl is as big as the ocean, and there are FIVE of them (two in the Great Pacific, one in the Indian Ocean, and two more in the Atlantic Ocean (one for the north and south hemisphere each)).

Also, even if you did convince some country to clean it up, and they succeeded, wouldn't it just grow back again? It's not the result of one tanker of garbage losing its cargo, it's the result of ocean currents depositing a long stream of garbage in one spot. You'd have to change people first.

Full-Width Justification.