message in a bottle

As of the 23rd May 2022 this website is archived and will receive no further updates.

understandinguncertainty.org was produced by the Winton programme for the public understanding of risk based in the Statistical Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. The aim was to help improve the way that uncertainty and risk are discussed in society, and show how probability and statistics can be both useful and entertaining.

Many of the animations were produced using Flash and will no longer work.

At the age of about 10, a couple of friends and I threw bottles with messages into the river. One was found a couple of years later by a kid further downstream, another 5 years later. My friends wrote to their bottles' finders for quite a while. I forgot about mine as time passed and I left home for university. My father, a teacher at the local high school, was confounded when one of his students bought into class the note I'd written, 'Is this your daughter?'. The student had recently moved to the area, having found the bottle near his prior home several hundred kms away near the river mouth. The message in a bottle had taken 11 years to travel down the river, then was bought right back to where it had been initially 'sent'.
Total votes: 198
Date submitted:Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:05:08 +0000Coincidence ID:4998