This story should remind us all how much of our consumer focused life is discarded on a everyday basis and what we will leave behind for future generations.
I don't see how it could "damp", yet in such good condition after such a long time. Ah right; ingress of moisture began just days or weeks before discovery. Very likely!
Did you read the article? The details of the bottle lines up with the ship captain's logs. It would have been quite elaborate hoax to correctly reference the logs, find a vintage bottle, paper and printing press and forge the handwriting... not saying it isn't possible but the museum staff seemed skeptical and were convinced by the evidence.
That's assuming the bottle, paper, and museum staff even exist. From where I'm sitting, this is just pixels and text.
> It would have been quite elaborate hoax to correctly reference the logs, find a vintage bottle, paper and printing press and forge the handwriting.
Ah, from that point of view it seems like a lot of effort. But suppose someone already happens to have the vintage bottle in their possession, from a long time ago. Then they happen to learn about this ship and its logs. "Hey, I have a bottle from around that time, ...".
All sorts of situations and combinations occur in the world without a lot of effort, due to things just falling in place. Then they look like they would require effort if viewed from the point of view of having been contrived.
It's similar reasoning to the greater ease of finding two documents with a colliding message digest hash, compared to finding a colliding document for a given document.
Sure, the given situation is hard to contrive, but it's one of an infinity of possible hoaxes, and there are many people in the world with many experiences and ideas and things in their possession and so on.
Well, I'm not opposed to the idea of Australia in general. It's really just some of the fantastical-sounding stuff you hear. Like do you really believe that there exists an island nation founded by British convicts which once lost a war against emus and is home to egg-laying mammals?
I've personally not been there, so I remain skeptical. And if I did go to "Australia" who's to say the plane wouldn't just fly in loops for 6 hours and land outside Las Vegas in an elaborately constructed set made to look like this fabled land of giant spiders and marsupials?
Seems the people who believe in Australia are the same ones who would blindly accept that the earth is round...
You'd also have to fake the stars in the night sky and trick everyone to not notice the timezone didn't change. Probably easier to fake a moon landing.
Maybe the bottle had been sterilized the interior of the bottle with arsenic or something of that sort? In spite of the ingress of moisture, no mould or bacterium took hold.
What's your alternate theory here? That a ship from the 1800s sailing through tropical oceans is going to fill its bottles with zero humidity air before throwing them overboard? Of course there will be water inside the bottles, the air in the bottles will be humid, and temperature cycling through the seasons and from local weather will lead to formation of dew inside the bottle from time to time.
A permanent retention policy wasn't, apparently, the reason ONRL has those logs, as those records are identified as “records acquired from private citizens”. [0]
Yes, the permanent retention policy came well after the days of the Continental Navy.
Those requirements are currently set out in SECNAV M-5210.1. Nowadays, they're maintained by NAVHISTHERITAGECOM and then transferred to the National Archives after 30-years.
The archives of the Spanish Archive of the Indies are a century older than that, and if the Portuguese Casa da Índia hadn't been destroyed in the great 1755 earthquake we'd have sailing records from the dawn of the Age of Discoveries. The records and maps were national secrets, and for good reason.
You do wonder if the NSA will declassify its records 100 years from now.
Depends on whether they're just being used for day-to-day work or, like a ship's log, they're actively getting archived. I think atm, printing and storing is still the way to go with that.
There are a lot of historical records that you'd never expect to have survived for so long in various archives.
There are massive archives of historical brewing data from various breweries in the UK dating back to the 1800s, this guy has a blog all about old British beer: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com
There are also parish records for births, deaths, and marriages going back centuries in the UK as well as taxation records for centuries.
People love keeping records of things.
If you want to have a look at what weird things we still have records of, have a look at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, it's a treasure trove of old data.
I wonder if in 200 years, they going to have people's browsing and location data from now. If yes that would be an unprecedented amount of records for historians.
Given the way digital storage works, I guess it will be more like us looking at old Egiptian, Mayan, Romman, Greek artifacts while wondering what their purpose was.
I don't think so myself tbf, it's not very informative information - unless maybe it's about someone important or influential. I'm sure most of my internet comments I've left behind over the past decade - tens of thousands of them on numerous websites - will hover around for years to come, but I doubt they'd have historical significance unless I become famous somehow. The writings of Aaron Schwarz became eternalised in a way since his death, they're frequently getting "resurrected" on HN for example.
>>Between 1864 until 1933, thousands of bottles were thrown overboard from German ships, each containing a form on which the captain would write the date, the ship's coordinates and details about its route.
It was part of an experiment by the German Naval Observatory to better understand global ocean currents.<<
Now I wonder: did that actually work to get a better understanding of these currents?
Maybe; I mean, see [0] where an accidental experiment was made when a container with >28k rubber ducks and other floating toys, tipped. New evidence for some models was discovered using roughly the same idea—by tracking the floting toys to their final locations.
I seem to recall reading about a similar event involving a container of shoes that went overboard in the pacific, that allowed some scientists to test a computer model by predicting where the shoes would end up.
I would imagine that since a large part of the duck sits out of the water, that the wind would introduce enough variance to render the data fairly useless.
The Tokio Express[0] Lego spill[1] has provided some data on ocean currents. There was also a spill of yellow bath ducks that turn up on beaches around the world.
I consider that a pro. Instead of buying new sets, the toys get down-cycled to younger children or gifted to some other kids. It's better than toys which because they don't last, they get bought at a higher velocity, thus producing waste.
Of interest, Lego will begin MFG 1-2% of their toys [apropos mostly "vegetation"] from plant-based plastics[1]. Possibly resulting in higher prices for sugar--which may also be a good thing.
ABS can be recycled, but normal municipal recycling (which has to take and sort multiple recyclables mechanically) can't practically sort ABS pieces the size of Lego bricks for proper recycling, which results in them ending up in landfills from municipal recycling. If you set up dedicated collection infrastructure for Lego bricks and delivered them in huge lots (or merged them with another waste ABS stream) for delivery to an ABS recycler you could recycle them, but the logistics and economics don't seem likely to be workable for that.
"Upon his return to Germany and having been appointed as Director of the Deutsche Seewarte, Neumayer conceived and implemented the drift bottle experiment that would last from 1864 to 1933, and include thousands of bottles. Of all these jettisoned bottles only an estimated 8-10% (662 message slips) found their way back to Hamburg"
10% is not bad really.
Also, it gives you a rough estimate of the chance of your 'rescue' message ever reaching anyone.
The text of the ABC article linked above states that the bottle was found sticking out of the sand, looked like a nice old one for the shelves to the finder - and letter was discovered when the bottle was emptied of sand.
Given that most late model portable pocket sized computers have very decent camera sensors in them these days, chances are it was taken on the spot there and then.
If it weren't from gov.au I'd say the story of trying to decipher a message in a bottle in anticipation of sunken treasuries only to find out it was part of hygrographic studies is sure a classic canard - it's even a classic Uncle Scrooge plot.
Write a note on your iPad. Remove that silly pin number, turn it off. Put it in a bag. Put it in the attic. Live your life and forget all about it.
130 years later, the now obsolete technology is found. Boy they are gonna have a hard time reading that note you left.
This is when we get to appreciate a medium such as text. Our information is becoming more and more complicated to the point that it might become impossible to decipher, or near impossible.
You see it happening already, people are finding e.g. old tape drives from MOS Technology (http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5256) which could contain valuable information about the design of some older processors and such, but they're unreadable and/or rotted. Same for older films, which are finally getting painstakingly restored and digitized.
TL;DR if you're making something, and it turns into something great, make sure your older stuff, the stuff you did to work towards it, is archived somehow.
Given the same environments; not really. Given heat and/or UV, vinyl is going to warp before thermoplastic (or foil glue -- except the cheapest cds). Given humidity tape is going to go bad quickly, but so will vinyl.
> " ... The note was damp, rolled tightly and wrapped with string. We took it home and dried it out, and when we opened it we saw it was a printed form, in German, with very faint German handwriting on it.”
It was damp? How does a slip of paper last 130 years when there's water in the bottle?
The article also mentions that the cork or whatever sealed the bottle was missing, so it sounds like the cork got dislodged when the bottle washed ashore and that's when the contents got damp.
Does anybody know what material the bottle cap was made of? Since this was 1886 it couldn't have been plastic. Also I don't think any kind of metal (which most probably would have been non-stainless steel, copper or brass) would have survived the ocean and beach environments for that long.
I found a message in a bottle in Hamburg. Never did figure out what it says though. If anyone on HN is up for the challenge, here's a photo of it: https://photos.app.goo.gl/TximCkxHoliDmnwy1
In the middle right (under BLOND) is the word Schlange, which is German for snake and also a German surname.
At the bottom, there appears to be a repeated sequence of characters which might be the Polish surname Zakrzewski. There's also a digit sequence 098765-543210 012345-567890.
This looks like the work of a schizophrenic. It sounds demeaning but I've seen similarly "encoded" messages, often around some common item (like a cigarette pack). They write them during psychosis and later find them and obsess over their decryption.
This is the sort of experiment I'd like to take part in. "Here's a hundred bottles of gin. All you need to do is drink the gin, fill in the form and the log, put the form in the bottle, seal it, and throw the bottle overboard. On second thought, fill in the paperwork before you drink the gin."
107 comments
[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 140 ms ] threadHoax/fake, I think.
> It would have been quite elaborate hoax to correctly reference the logs, find a vintage bottle, paper and printing press and forge the handwriting.
Ah, from that point of view it seems like a lot of effort. But suppose someone already happens to have the vintage bottle in their possession, from a long time ago. Then they happen to learn about this ship and its logs. "Hey, I have a bottle from around that time, ...".
All sorts of situations and combinations occur in the world without a lot of effort, due to things just falling in place. Then they look like they would require effort if viewed from the point of view of having been contrived.
It's similar reasoning to the greater ease of finding two documents with a colliding message digest hash, compared to finding a colliding document for a given document.
Sure, the given situation is hard to contrive, but it's one of an infinity of possible hoaxes, and there are many people in the world with many experiences and ideas and things in their possession and so on.
Seems the people who believe in Australia are the same ones who would blindly accept that the earth is round...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
Can you provide other pieces of paper from the same time period so we can compare their state of conservation?
Of course we have books and documents form that period that are in good shape.
Note that the bottle was found open, but half-filled with sand.
This note in a bottle knows more about itself than I do.
"Over time, all data approaches deleted, or public." -- Quinn Norton.
Libraries have various traditions of burning. Alexandria (probably several times). The U.S. Library of Congress, in 1814, 1851, and 1825.
http://www.accessible-archives.com/2013/01/the-other-fire-at...
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/22/this-day-in-politi...
[0] https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/0...
Those requirements are currently set out in SECNAV M-5210.1. Nowadays, they're maintained by NAVHISTHERITAGECOM and then transferred to the National Archives after 30-years.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/r...
http://www.medievalandtudorships.org/database/
You do wonder if the NSA will declassify its records 100 years from now.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo_General_de_Simancas
There are massive archives of historical brewing data from various breweries in the UK dating back to the 1800s, this guy has a blog all about old British beer: http://barclayperkins.blogspot.com
There are also parish records for births, deaths, and marriages going back centuries in the UK as well as taxation records for centuries.
People love keeping records of things.
If you want to have a look at what weird things we still have records of, have a look at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/, it's a treasure trove of old data.
It was part of an experiment by the German Naval Observatory to better understand global ocean currents.<<
Now I wonder: did that actually work to get a better understanding of these currents?
——
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_Floatees
The Tokio Express[0] Lego spill[1] has provided some data on ocean currents. There was also a spill of yellow bath ducks that turn up on beaches around the world.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokio_Express#Accident
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-28582621
Yaarr!!
I hope we're able to fix that someday.
Of interest, Lego will begin MFG 1-2% of their toys [apropos mostly "vegetation"] from plant-based plastics[1]. Possibly resulting in higher prices for sugar--which may also be a good thing.
[1]https://www.cips.org/supply-management/news/2018/march/lego-...
10% is not bad really.
Also, it gives you a rough estimate of the chance of your 'rescue' message ever reaching anyone.
ship ships bottle bottles message messages ocean oceans sea seafaring currents ocean-currents weather nautical captain vessel
Given that most late model portable pocket sized computers have very decent camera sensors in them these days, chances are it was taken on the spot there and then.
http://www.bsh.de/de/Das_BSH/Presse/Pressearchiv/Pressemitte...
130 years later, the now obsolete technology is found. Boy they are gonna have a hard time reading that note you left.
This is when we get to appreciate a medium such as text. Our information is becoming more and more complicated to the point that it might become impossible to decipher, or near impossible.
Edit: missing word
... And the NAND flash has long since drained it's charge.
TL;DR if you're making something, and it turns into something great, make sure your older stuff, the stuff you did to work towards it, is archived somehow.
It was damp? How does a slip of paper last 130 years when there's water in the bottle?
At the bottom, there appears to be a repeated sequence of characters which might be the Polish surname Zakrzewski. There's also a digit sequence 098765-543210 012345-567890.
Hope that helps.
"We're out of gin, please send more"
https://www.kymillman.com/oldest-message-in-a-bottle/