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)
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.
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.
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
It had happened to him years before I knew him, and he was still having to deal with the paperwork. :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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)
Same way we'd use sand & grains of sand as plurals.
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.
A not great example is "sugar keeps washing up".
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!
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...
(Ok, maybe not swords which go in minifigures hands.)
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.
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...
(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.
