The Toronto Transit Commission
TTC chair Adam Giambrone
The Toronto Transit Commission
1900 Yonge Street,
Toronto, ON
CANADA M4S 1Z2
Monday, June 29, 2009
Dear Sir,
I write to draw your attention to the repulsive state of the TTC’s web site, in particular the mechanism currently in place which thwarts all reasonable attempts to determine an appropriate bus journey in Toronto.
Before giving a specific example I would like to compliment “Anne” of the help line, not because she agreed with me (I’m unbeatable when it comes to logic), but because she listened to my points and could see just how frustrating it must be for a long-term resident (26 years) or a short-term visitor to make any coherent sense of your system.
The example:
I need to be at Carlson Court by 7:00 p.m. this Monday evening. I live at Bloor Street and Mill Road.
I study the recent PDF route map and see that a 112C is my obvious choice. I used to live at Bloor/West Mall, so the 112C is known to me as one of the two routes that could get me home from Kipling Subway station.
I go to my book marked page (http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=49E&Stop=n.b._on_MARKLAND_at_BLOOR ) and switch immediately to the 112C route (http://www3.ttc.ca/Routes/112/Northbound.jsp ). Bloor Street buses will still be running at frequent intervals, so it’s the 112C route that governs my journey.
I elect to “Read the detailed description of 112 West Mall” and find myself at http://www3.ttc.ca/Routes/112/Routemap.jsp where the second paragraph tells me that “The 112C (Kipling Stn-Disco Rd) is the main branch, and operates at all times, seven days a week”.
Comforting to know.
I choose the Kipling Station link (http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=112N&Stop=KIPLING_STATION ) and determine that 112C buses leave at 6:04 p.m., 6:22 p.m. and at 6:40 p.m.
I choose the West Mall at Bloor link (http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=112N&Stop=n.b._on_WEST_MALL_at_BLOOR ) and see that buses depart at 6:15 p.m., 6:33 p.m. and at 6:51 p.m. That is, about eleven minutes from Kipling subway to The West Mall. That makes sense.
I choose the Renforth at Eglinton link (http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=112N&Stop=n.b._on_RENFORTH_at_EGLINTON ) and see that buses depart at 6:30 p.m., 6:48 p.m. and who-knows-when. That is, about fifteen minutes from The West Mall to Eglinton. That makes sense.
An appropriate major intersection for Atwell & Carlson Court is Skyway and Dixon, but when I click that link (http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=112N&Stop=n.b._on_SKYWAY_at_DIXON ) I learn that there are no Northbound buses after 12:09 p.m.
That makes no sense. It is non-sense or, if you prefer, insane.
Where do all the afternoon buses go?
A call to the help line (again, I must compliment “Anne”) reveals two vital facts:
1. The TTC help line has access to data that we mere mortals do not share. One feels humiliated when the help line tosses off bus times that are sacred and private to them. Why should the public not have access to the scheduled times of publicly-funded buses.
2. In order to determine the remainder of the route one most retreat one page, back to http://www3.ttc.ca/Routes/112/Northbound.jsp, click on the Southbound tab to reach http://www3.ttc.ca/Routes/112/Southbound.jsp, and then click on Skyway at Dixon to reach http://www3.ttc.ca/Schedule/schedule.jsp?Route=112S&Stop=n.b._on_SKYWAY_at_DIXON .
It is, for the time being, beyond my comprehension why one should have to click on a Southbound tab to learn the details of the final stages of an otherwise successful trip on a Northbound bus. I was raised in Australia and despite being known collectively as Down Under, no Australian city has had to resort to this trick.
I could almost weather that blow were it not for the indisputable fact that the Southbound page, most immediately clicked upon, has as its heading “Northbound on SKYWAY at DIXON”.
What conclusions can one draw from this experience?
1) The TTC web site is not to be trusted, and by extension the TTC is not to be trusted.
2) Riders of 26 years experience cannot fathom a system which causes one to switch from a Northbound route to a Southbound route.
3) Visitors, newcomers and tourists alike should avoid using the TTC as much as possible, take taxis, and curse Toronto for being such an expensive city.
At 3:20 p.m. on Monday, June 29, 2009 I remain convinced that a taxi-cab ride will be a shorter, more precise and more secure way of getting to Carlson Court by 7:00 p.m. this evening.
I end this long letter with a confirmation that one of your own employees, Anne, most graciously conceded it must be frustrating for a long-term resident or a short-term visitor to make any coherent sense of your system.
Most sincerely
Christopher Greaves
Contingency Plans
Dear Christopher, Please accept our humblest apologies for postponing this Tuesday’s {name of organization here}. It is due to the pending strike at City Hall and they have cancelled all reservations. Our new date for {name of organization here} will be Tuesday July 21st at 7 p.m. at {location}. It’s called….
Have you ever received one of these emails in response to a strike? The evening you had planned to network and listen to a speaker hold forth on a topic has been cancelled.
Rats!
There go your plans for an early supper, the time-honored tradition of swapping business cards, making new friends, and why?
Because of a strike. Or sometimes a flooded office, a fire, or some other event.
But wait!
Why not meet anyway?
You won’t get the people who arrive late, sit, listen and leave early.
But you will maintain your body of core attendees who come to support each other, to chat, to natter, to discuss, to make new contacts, and they’ll love you for it.
But wait!
Aren’t the facilities closed?
Sure they are, but judicious use of Google Earth will reveal coffee shops nearby.
And with the strike/flood/fire on and nearby businesses closed, they’ll be glad of the extra demands for coffee and sandwiches.
Failing that a family diner would do the trick; after all, we are all family in our organization, aren’t we?
What an opportunity to see how we all perform under adverse conditions.
Lost Forever.
The Message is in the Tiny Detail
More discussion on – in this case – plastic shopping bags.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/654243
And buried right there at the foot of the comments:
Page 1 of 21
Torontonians are up in arms about the use of, or the ban on, plastic shopping bags. Those flimsy plastic things that have been free for yonks, that get caught in tree branches in winter, and get ripped open by raccoons.
21 pages of comments?
The World Is Coming To An End!™
Assuming 2.48 million people live in Toronto (http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_facts/diversity.htm) This is one comment per 10,000 people, or thereabouts; all in the space of about 12 hours.
That’s a hefty proportion of the population who
(1) read the newspaper online
(2) lodge a comment online
(3) are of an age and language ability to do so
Kindergarten Energy – part 2
http://www.thestar.com/article/653925
A 7-year-old boy … was struck by a car at a Cabbagetown crosswalk. The boy was riding a bicycle … the (car in the) curb lane continued and struck him,” said Const. Mig Roberts.
Please see also Kindergarten Energy – Part 1 and http://www.thestar.com/article/654192.
It is why our law-makers have asked parents to raise their children to walk their bicycles across pedestrian crosswalks.
Humans have evolved to be what they are. We are bipedal. We walk upright. We don’t have to think about walking (after age two). We just walk.
(As an experiment, try dictating every part of every step out loud: “Tighten thigh muscles to raise right leg and foot above the ground. Rock forwards slightly on ball of left foot to tilt body beyond center of gravity, tighten knee muscles of right leg to fling the shin bones and foot outwards; move the ankle and foot bones to prepare the right foot for a cushioned landing in front of the body, transfer weight to the ball of the landed right foot. Tighten muscles to raise the left leg and foot above the ground,…” and so on. You’ll not get very far.)
We walk with a reflex action, an instinct if you will, a programmed action if you prefer. It is hard-wired into our brains. It is how we have evolved. Our brain circuitry has an area that just brings it all together. Not for nothing do we utter the derisory comment “Can’t walk and chew gum at the same time!”.
We STOP WALKING with a reflex action. It is hard-wired into our brains. It is how we have evolved. If you have ever been walking along and had a gun pointed at you (I have) or had some other dramatic event take place, you’ll remember how you stopped “dead in my tracks”. We are evolved with reactions that can bring us to a halt quite literally in mid-stride. We sometimes stop so suddenly that we fall over, or fall to one side. Stopping suddenly while walking is one of the things we are really very good at.
Sadly, we did not evolve with bicycles. Bicycles are too recent an invention to have affected our evolution.
Stopping a bicycle is quite a different act from stopping walking.
Stopping a bicycle requires that we shift our hands to wrap around the brake lever, and that we squeeze the brake lever on the handlebars, all the while steering a correct or changed course while applying as much pressure as possible, but not so much pressure that the wheels lock and we slide across the road surface.
There’s more, but I want you to believe that stopping a bicycle does not come as easily, nor can be as abrupt, as stopping walking.
Which is why it makes sense to walk a bicycle across a pedestrian crosswalk.
We have built-in instant-stopping when we are walking on two feet.
We DO NOT have built-in instant-stopping when we are pedaling with two feet.
Our inability to stop instantly (natural laws of evolution) coupled with the energy stored up in a moving bicycle (universal laws of physics) show us that our law-makers had their wits about them when they passed laws and urged us to obey them, when they asked parents to raise their children to walk their bicycles across pedestrian crosswalks.
Parents ought to pass this reasoning on to their children.
If I could teach a child nothing else, I’d teach the ½ *m*v^2 law of energy for moving objects, and the ½ *m*v^3 law for moving fluids.
So many lives could be saved; so many injuries avoided.
Kindergarten Energy – Part 1
http://www.thestar.com/article/653925
A 7-year-old boy … was struck by a car at a Cabbagetown crosswalk. The boy was riding a bicycle … the (car in the) curb lane continued and struck him,” said Const. Mig Roberts.
The raw story – riding a bicycle across a pedestrian crosswalk.
There are two laws against this practice; one of them man-made, one universal. It’s the universal law I want to discuss.
But first – it is absolutely terrible that a 7-year old is struck by someone disobeying the man-made law about stopping at crosswalks. It is also absolutely terrible that drivers don’t stop, ignore or don’t see the warning lights, get distracted, are impatient, and so on. The sadder truth is that these events will always be with us.
How can we guard against them? We pass other laws such as the one that requires all cyclists to dismount and walk their bicycle across the cross walk.
It is called a cross WALK for a reason. And it is further described as a PEDEstrian cross walk for the same reason.
I want to go into that reason in this and the next essay.
Energy. Again.
The energy of a moving body is given by the formulae ½ *m*v^2; energy is proportional to the mass of the body, and energy is proportional to the square of the velocity.
A child walking across a crosswalk has a mass of say 100 pounds. Quantities may vary. The bicycle has a mass of say 50 pounds. Quantities may vary.
For the purpose of our argument a child-plus-bicycle has one and a half times the mass, and so, at any given velocity, will have one and a half times the energy.
A child walks across the crosswalk at, say, 3 miles per hour. A child bicycles across the crosswalk at, say, 9 miles per hour.
Three times the velocity, three SQUARED, or NINE times the energy.
A child bicycling across a crosswalk has then about fifteen times as much energy to dissipate as a child walking without a bicycle.
How will the child-plus-bicycle dissipate so much energy in a short time?
By applying the handbrakes on the bicycle, and perhaps flying over the handlebars into the car, or by just sliding into the front of, or the side of, the car.
Either way the small mass of the child (100 pounds) is about to receive some momentum, and energy back from a much larger object with a mass of, say, 1,000 pounds.
It’s no contest.
It is why our law-makers have asked parents to raise their children to walk their bicycles across pedestrian crosswalks.
Not Non-Polluting
More discussion on – in this case – Diesel vs. Electric.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/651943
And buried right there in the comments this little gem: “Electric trains are used throughout the world for a reason- they are safe, fast and non-polluting!”
It’s not really a gem. Gems are rare and valuable. This regurgitated morsel is common, frequent, and harmful.
Why?
Because practically nothing is “non-polluting”.
I am reminded of the definition of a weed: A plant that is growing where it is not wanted. Dandelions aren’t weeds to me; I love seeing a field of them as I sit on my fourth-floor balcony.
It’s not about trains. An electric ANYTHING pollutes, because the electricity is generated by a coal-fired, oil-powered, nuclear-powered, hydro-electric-powered, wind-powered, solar-powered etc etc etc.
Smoke from the coal-fired generator is a long way away, out of sight, but it is still polluting – just not in my bark yard.
Stand on any street-corner for five minutes and you’ll find someone who can tell you that wind-power is polluting (”It kills birds”), solar power is polluting (“It ruins the pretty desert view”), hydro-electric power is polluting (“It stops the salmon from spawning”).
I suspect the commentator meant “Whereas diesel locomotives spew fumes as they pass the schoolyards, electric locomotives do not”, which is true. Electric locomotives spew fumes out near Nanticoke, and at about 60 other places around Ontario, if you count all the generating stations from this link.
Define, Define, Define
I was asked this morning to examine a handful of different seeds and try to guess which seed type would grow into the largest plant.
I didn’t bother trying to guess, for racketing around in my brain was a simple command: Define “largest”.
Apart from “Why?”, the word “Define” is perhaps the most useful word in solving problems and avoiding traps, pitfalls and snares in daily life.
“Define Largest”, as it applies to the result of planting a seed in the ground, assuming that you plant it after the last frost, water it not too much, and so on.
Largest could be any one of:
1) Tallest unstaked
2) Tallest when staked
3) Greatest number of flowers or fruits yielded
4) Greatest weight of flowers or fruits yielded
5) Greatest girth six inches above the ground
6) Longest path from the ground to the tip of a branch, leaf or twig
7) Total of all paths from the ground to the tip of a branch, leaf or twig
Area mapped out by the horizontal coverage of the plant (in the case of a regular deciduous tree this area is almost a circle).
And that list just ran off the tip of my fingers. I haven’t sat down to think about it.
I’m sure that you can think of many other definitions. Contact Me.
The problem with “largest” or “latest” or “fastest” or “best” is that in each case, no quantifier is given.
Management Measures, and the four common measurements are Numeric (6, $700, 5,280 feet and so on), spatial or Geographic (M9C 2A6, Toronto Ontario, six blocks South and four blocks East of where we are now, and so on), Boolean or logical (Yes/No, On/Off, True/False and the like) and Date/Time (Sunday, June 14, 2009, Five p.m. EST, The third Thursday of each month, and so on).
Without a quantifier, readily obvious by some sort of unit of measurement, whatever you are reading or hearing is usually useless.
Notable exceptions are relative quantifiers. In When Pure Maths is not Enough I perform some calculations based on CHANGE in velocity, and point out that it matters not whether we measure velocity in miles per hour, kilometers per hour, feet per century, or inches per day, providing that we use the common unit to calculate the CHANGE in velocity, that change will always be 10% (in the case of When Pure Maths is not Enough).
Look closely at the next newspaper or magazine article you read.
Look for quantifiers.
If there are no quantifiers, chances are that your time spent reading the article will be wasted time.
Just as for me, trying to determine which seed would produce the largest plant would have been a waste of my time.
Don’t Trust Newspapers. (Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone out of reach!)
If I had a dollar for every blatantly wrong calculation written into newspaper articles, I’d have … a lot of dollars.
Dear old CNN in an article today (http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/06/10/weather.dangerous.storms/index.html) tells us that “The height of these storms also can tower to more than 10 miles in the air. Even if you stacked hundreds of the world’s tallest skyscrapers on top of each other, they still wouldn’t reach the tops of the biggest thunderstorms of the ITCZ (Inter-Tropical Convergence Zone).”
That sounded odd to me, given the number of times I see Toronto’s CN Tower wreathed in cloud.
I know that there are 5,280 feet in a mile, so that in 10 miles we have 52,800 feet.
How many feet in a skyscraper? (“Count the number of bodies and multiply by two”).
I needed to know the height of a typically tall skyscraper.
http://www.skyscraper.org/TALLEST_TOWERS/tallest.htm has a lovely graphic image, with figures.
As does http://architecture.about.com/library/bltall.htm.
The biggest of the big seem to be in Asia, and they tower above the tallest in the United States – Sears Tower, Chicago at 1,450 feet.
The tallest skyscraper in Canada is said to be BCE Place-Canada Trust Tower, Toronto, at 856 feet, roughly half the height of Sears Tower.
I’m going to take 1,500 feet as a typical height for today’s “tallest skyscrapers“.
Dividing that 1,500 feet into a thunderstorm’s 52,800 yields about 35.
Can that be right? Yes. 1,500 feet is about one-third of a mile, so 3 skyscrapers make a mile. Ten miles, 30 skyscrapers.
Even using ever-so-humble Canada’s skyscrapers we still need only 70 of them. And “hundreds” implies at least 200.
CNN is out, easily, by a factor of 3 or it could be argued, out by a factor of 6 or more.
Where does CNN come up with figures that justify statements such as “if you stacked hundreds of the world’s tallest skyscrapers on top of each other”?
And where was the editor?
The message is clear:
Don’t trust newspapers, on-line or off-line, without you first verify their facts against your own sources.
Postscript: Monday, June 15, 2009
Today’s Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/650797) carries a story about a tower to space.
“… build 150-meter sections of the tower on the ground … you make 100 of these components and stack them on top of each other, until you achieve a 20-kilometer tower.”
Hmmm. I get 15 kilometers, and that is assuming no overlap where the sections join. Still, it’s better than “hundreds of the world’s largest skyscrapers”
Don’t click here until you have thought about it
How would you explain the discrepancy between 85% and 71%?
Consider the earth in orbit around the sun, and the origin of the meteors.
Are they likely to be traveling in the plane of the earth’s orbit?
Further thought: When a meteor lands on Antarctica, is it landing (to coin a phrase!) on land or on water?
How about a meteor that lands on the Arctic ice-cap. Does its retrieval from the surface mean that it landed on land, not in the watery oceans?
14-year-old hit by 30,000 mph space meteorite
Ansgar Kortem, director of Germany’s Walter Hohmann Observatory, said: “Most don’t actually make it to ground level because they evaporate in the atmosphere. Of those that do get through, about six out of every seven of them land in water,” he added.“
Huh?
Six out of seven?
I always thought that about 70% of the surface is covered with salt-water oceans.
Six out of seven gives 85%.
A quick search of the Internet (http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/oceans.htm) confirms my figure of 71%, and turns up a figure of 3% of the earth’s surface being drinkable water.
That’s 3% of the total water.
As usual, I’m skeptical of quotations like that.
Does the Worlds Atlas really mean that 3% of 71% of the earth’s surface is fresh water, or do they mean that (71%-3%)=68% is salt water?
In any event, how would you explain the discrepancy between 85% and 71%?
Don’t click here until you have thought about it.
NASA Delays Launch Of Space Shuttle Endeavour
“The problem is a repeat of the same issue that delayed the launch of Endeavour’s sister-ship Discovery in March.”
I understand what is meant here, especially in the context of the full article, but when it comes to project implementation – as distinct from project design – I believe that conservatism rules.
There is a great deal more learned by stepping back and thinking than by ploughing ahead. Also it takes less time to pick up the broken pieces of a failed project.
Project design is a time for airy dream-like frenetic star-bursts of ideas. That’s the time for “Let’s take this idea down the road a little ways and see where it leads us”.
Project implementation is the time for steady-as-she-goes, are all the legs level?
I see the detection of a flaw in the design or implementation as a major success in any project. Ploughing ahead when the design is flawed is a sure recipe for disaster, and your organization will sicken, and maybe die, as a result of that.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
The Toronto Star reports (http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/652034) another delay. Hooray!
“We’re going to step back and figure out what the problem is and go fix it,” said deputy space shuttle program manager LeRoy Cain. “And then we’ll fly as soon as we’re ready to safely go do that.”
Serious, authentic, professional engineering.
No one dies.
The New Descriptive Mathematics
Guilty verdict restored in Virk slaying
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/649830
This is not about the death penalty, it is about language.
Read the last paragraph:
“He was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for seven years and has since been released.”
To my mind this is either bad mathematics or bad writing. Or bad logic. Take your pick. You can’t have it both ways.
“Life in prison” means, and can be taken to mean “To the end of the prisoner’s life”. Barring the obviously potentially short life of a prisoner found guilty of raping the four-year old daughter of a police or prison officer, incarcerated in a medium-size city prison, whose life expectancy might be measured in days, we anticipate “life” here to mean “a standard expectancy”. If the prisoner is 20 years old, we think in terms of another 50 years. If the prisoner is 50 years old, we think in terms of another 20.
At any event, we think of a life that will come to an end on an undetermined day. And in that sense “life” means “an unknown (or unspecified) number of years”.
“No chance of parole for seven years” indicates that after seven years there exists a chance of parole. So that “Life in prison” no longer means “In prison until the end of their natural life”, but “seven years in prison, and after that, a chance of living the remainder of their life outside of prison. That is not Life In Prison. It is Part-life in prison, and ought to be labeled as such (perhaps with a better phrase).
“… and has since been released.” For what it is worth, we are being led to believe that after seven years was up, parole was applied. But the truth is that in this article that is not stated.
It is, of course, quite possible that the prisoner was released ahead of the seven-year limit, perhaps after only five months. But we are not to know that. We are shown a shimmering image of something else.
This is just not clear writing, let alone clear thinking.
And it isn’t Life.
The Trouble With Automation
Air France pilots refusing to fly unless monitors are replaced
It’s not about Air France, nor the Pilots, nor the pilots union.
It’s about the haste to get the news out, the lack of genuine human overseeing of the process, and poorly-tested macros or other automated procedures.
Did you spot it?
“The two towed pinger locators the U.S. is sending are expected to arrive in Brazil late Monday and will be dropped into the ocean near the debris field by Thursday, Berges said. The search is focusing on several hundred square miles (square kilometers) roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast.”
The Toronto Star (and I suspect other major papers) has programmed code to assist what we used to call journalists. Wherever something is keyed in as “miles”, the same phrase must be translated to “kilometers” enclosed in parentheses.
Hence “400 miles” to “(640 kilometers)”.
And sadly, also, “square miles” to “(square kilometers)”, which tells us nothing that we didn’t already know, that is, is NOT news.
When they track down the offending code they will find something like this:
If “[something]square miles” then
Substitute “([something]square kilometers”)
End If
Better they had tested that [something] existed before playing with it!
Once in a Lifetime
I apologize for dragging in the Toronto Star yet again (http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/645731); it is not their fault; you will find reasoning of this kind in all your local media.
“Two bridges were wiped out by a once-in-a-lifetime flood that forced villagers to dump sewage into their pristine waters.”
Sure!
Remember, in every person’s lifetime – no matter when they lived, whether they were dead before you were born, or whether they will follow your great-grandchildren’s generation – there will be, for them, one summer that is the hottest summer of their life, one winter that is the coldest of their life, some other person who runs faster than anyone else in their lifetime, a flood that is higher than any other in their lifetime, and so on.
Always.
Guaranteed by logic.
In every generation there has been a war that claimed more lives than any other war in that generation, or “in my lifetime” as people are quoted.
Do not confuse that previous paragraph with a claim that “This war claimed more lives then any other war in recorded history”. (Why can’t we claim that “This war claimed more lives then any other war in pre-recorded history”?)
In every lifetime there will be a once-in-a-lifetime flood (plague, heat wave, early spring, late fall, wettest winter etc.).
That proves nothing about mankind’s impact on climate or weather.
And remember, about 11,000 years ago, an ice-sheet two miles thick covered Ontario, Canada. Yes, it’s getting warmer when we consider the past 11,000 years, but so little of that warmth can be due to man-made change.
And remember, about 4,000,000,000 years ago this planet was molten rock. Yes, it’s getting colder when we consider a longer time span, but so very little of that chill can be due to man-made change.
More Thoughts On Technology 3
It’s been over a day now since the Airbus crashed. Mystery still surrounds the Air France crash.
“Brazilian officials said the area where they think the jet went down is so remote the first military boats will not arrive there until tomorrow morning. Military jets from France and Brazil were crisscrossing the ocean yesterday.”
Various reports indicate that the “black box” may be three miles down in the depth of the ocean, and that the emitter will last for about 30 days.
“Air France wreckage found in Atlantic Ocean, official says“, so debris is visible, narrowing the surface search area.
On the surface (poor choice of phrase, but let’s see where it leads us), the chance of locating a container little bigger than a shoebox is remote.
But the thought strikes me that the most difficult area to search for a black box must be the ocean, and the globe is about 70% covered with water.
It ought not to be beyond our means to have the black box detect when it is soaked, and have that explosively trigger some form of flotation device.
The oceans still cover 70% of the globe; the emitter still lasts only 30 days; but at least we would be looking on the surface for something akin to an orange life raft, holding a black box, and emitting a radio signal.
If not a flashing light.
