(This post will be updated as I read the book! This is partly a test also of how my various syndication/cross-posting plugins will work when I edit/update a post on mobile, lol.)
Book Info
Genre: Nonfiction, Popular Science
LibraryThing: https://www.librarything.com/work/book/291465892
Acquired from: Little Free Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA [see log]
Started reading: July 29, 2025
Finished reading: tbd
Reading Updates
Page 1: Found a promo postcard for 4Ocean.com inside the book and am using it as a bookmark
Page 22: Really nice mini bio of one of his students, who partially inspired him to start investigating this story. I love when teachers love their students!
Page 27: He has ambivalent feelings about his impending newborn child and suddenly he wants to go on a year-long adventure in the Arctic, oh brother. Is he seriously going to leave his wife with a newborn for a year? I hope she divorces him
Update: Author blurb in the inside cover says he’s still married and has multiple children
Page 31: Beachcombers’ Alert! website
Also đź“š FLOTSAMETRICS AND THE FLOATING WORLD: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science by Curtis Ebbesmeyer and Eric Scigliano, a memoir from the guy who writes the Beachcombers’ Alert! newsletter and major “character” in this book
Page 36: Getting into the science stuff now. New-to-me terms: OSCURS, geostrophic, Coriolus force
Also noticing author uses a lot of $5 words which makes me a) feel smarter when I know the definitions and b) feel sad that many books (and other publications) nowadays have “dumbed” themselves down to a lower reading level. This book came out in 2011 which isn’t even that long ago, but it feels like it’s from a different era entirely.
I’ve dumbed my own writing down on my for-profit blog, as that’s the general suggestion from all the experts (“aim for a 6th grade reading level”). I didn’t mind it at the time, as generally I think it’s good to be understandable/accessible to many people, but now I feel a little disappointed in myself for not pushing back.
Page 37, Footnote 1:
Confusingly, the conventions for indicating the directions of currents contradict those for indicating the direction of winds. An easterly wind blows from east to west; an easterly current flows west to east.
WHAT???
Page 38, Footnote 2: đź“šIn the Sargasso Sea by Thomas Allibone Janvier (Project Gutenberg) about a guy who unwillingly joins a slave ship and later gets marooned in a ships’ graveyard.
Page 42: Quote Ebbesmeyer: “But 60 percent of plastic will float, and the 60 percent that does float will never sink because it doesn’t absorb water; it fractures into ever smaller pieces. That’s the difference. There are things afloat now that will never sink.” This is horrifying!!
Page 47:
Let’s draw a bath. Let’s set a rubber duck afloat. Look at it wobbling there. What misanthrope, what damp, drizzly November of a sourpuss upon beholding a rubber duck afloat, does not feel a Crayola ray of sunshine brightening his gloomy heart?
See also: Books Read (2025) / Little Free Library Visits
