Missing Trackables-Part 06, All Top Performers

[+shellbadger]

Before they disappear, I want my trackables to be active, to travel and to be seen by many cachers as possible. Among the ways to measure trackable activity, I value drops achieved more than miles traveled, age or rate of travel.  In my opinion, the totals of the latter three variables are too easily inflated by a single cacher, at no risk to the trackable. An example is the airline pilot’s trackable that accrued over a million miles, possibly going to many exotic locations, over many years…but the trackable was never released during that journey.  It was a notable occurance to be sure, but what would have been really remarkable was for the same miles, locations and age to have been reached after a series of drops by many cachers.

 

While I believe total drops is the best index of trackable activity, for those readers interested, I have also gathered and tabulated data for age achieved, miles traveled, and rate of travel. Below are four separate tables listing the top 15 performers for each of those parameters. The top 15 are the 0.567 percentile of each parameter (15 of 2,675 missing trackables).  For each trackable listed, the tables also include the ID number, the trackable name, the release date, the release location, the last-log date, and the last log location. The three rightmost columns of the tables are the respective other activity values for the listed top performer. In the first line below the body of the table are the average values for the listed top performers. Under the release and last location columns are the respective percentages of the locations being in the United States versus elsewhere.

 

I included all four tables in this post because I wanted to make some direct comparisons between the them. In later posts I may examine each of the tables more thoroughly.

 

There was no trackable that appeared on all the top 15 lists. There were two trackables that appeared on three of the tables, the Flag or Canada TB (orange cells) and the State Flag of Texas TB (blue cells). There were two trackables that appeared on two tables, the Holly-Buddy Holly Center TB1b (yellow cells) and the Chip-Blue TB07 (green cells). On the basis of two firsts (drops and age) and a 14^th place (miles) ranking, I declare the State Flag of Texas the top performer among my missing bugs. I should point out that I have released many Texas-themed trackables and very few of them have escaped the state. This one was the first released in Europe.

 

There is a caveat. As I scanned the release dates in the tables, it occured to me how premature this designation top performers is. A total 85 percent of the trackables in the tables were released in the years 2010-13. I still have a few 2010-released trackables yet to go missing, and even more from subsequent years. Furthermore, I know I have trackables with more drops, miles and age and, when they go missing, they will supplant many trackables on the present tables. To establish a legitimate baseline, I must wait until all the trackables released in the first year or two are missing.  That may be years in the future and, as I am 84 at this writing, I might not be able to see it done. Still, it was an interesting exercise.

 

In the next post, premature or not, I will examine Table 01 in more detail.