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Who would have thought?
May. 1st, 2007 06:17 pmThis was a small part of a larger news item recently. The larger news item concerned one of the small southern islands of Japan. It only has 645 people who live there, and is best known for the sea turtles who come up on the beach and lay their eggs there. And that's where the problem is, apparently the currents and tides are such that the beaches are filling up with trash washed up on the shore. Plastic bottles, plastic hypodermics, plastic lighters, plastic sheets, and so forth are overcoming the normal driftwood and shells. The news people made a point of the plastic shell of a TV that sat on the beach during their taping. At least one sea turtle has been found dead tangled in a plastic sheet, and the islanders believe that the baby turtles probably can't get back to the sea easily with all the trash there. They have built a trash disposal station, but need money. However, how can they track down where the trash is coming from?
And this is where it gets odd. Out of all the litter, the one that is helping them identify the sources of the trash is the plastic cigarette lighters! It turns out that there is a researcher who has built a database of cigarette lighters from around the world. Identifying marks, serial numbers, and such. Where are they made and used. All on the computer, so he can look at a lighter and relatively easily tell just where it is from.
The islanders provided him with a large sample from the beach, and he has identified the sources of the lighters. 53% from China, twentysomething percent from Korea, and a chunk from one part of Japan.
It's not really clear whether or not the islanders will be able to get money from any of these governments to help, but that researcher and his database of cigarette lighters caught my fancy. I suspect he's been hoping for some kind of a problem just like this to justify the time and effort he has put in building that database. And now he's got at least one problem to show that even such an odd set of data does come in handy now and then!
I wonder how many times people had told him to give it up, no one would ever need that information?
And this is where it gets odd. Out of all the litter, the one that is helping them identify the sources of the trash is the plastic cigarette lighters! It turns out that there is a researcher who has built a database of cigarette lighters from around the world. Identifying marks, serial numbers, and such. Where are they made and used. All on the computer, so he can look at a lighter and relatively easily tell just where it is from.
The islanders provided him with a large sample from the beach, and he has identified the sources of the lighters. 53% from China, twentysomething percent from Korea, and a chunk from one part of Japan.
It's not really clear whether or not the islanders will be able to get money from any of these governments to help, but that researcher and his database of cigarette lighters caught my fancy. I suspect he's been hoping for some kind of a problem just like this to justify the time and effort he has put in building that database. And now he's got at least one problem to show that even such an odd set of data does come in handy now and then!
I wonder how many times people had told him to give it up, no one would ever need that information?
