Wednesday, May 18, 2016

Search Challenge (5/18/16): Questions that come up during travel...


As you know, I travel a fair bit... 

.. and one of the pleasures of travel is discovering new things.  And, of course, from a SearchResearch perspective, traveling is just an unending stream of curious moments... many of which bring fascinating Challenges for us to solve. 

Here's this week's Challenge, derived from my travels to San Diego (I'm here to teach a 1-week class at UCSD).  

1.  I found this teapot at the place I'm staying.  Naturally, I have NO idea who this guy is--can you help me figure it out?  FWIW, his image is also on every teacup in the place.  Who is the man, and why would someone have a tea service with his fancy hat on it?



 

2.  Many of the streets here are lined with these beautiful flowering trees.  What kind of tree is this? They bloom so beautifully, are they native here?   


3.  As I was landing at the San Diego airport, I could see a couple of neighborhoods that seemed completely blanketed in these trees.  Where should I go (nearby!) to see a bunch of these trees all lined up? 

I don't know about you, but these are typical questions that come up for me as I travel.  Maybe this happens to you too (if you read this blog, I bet it does!) -- so let's exercise those SearchResearch skills before you head off on summer holidays! 

As always, tell us HOW you figured out the answers.  We all want to learn what great SearchResearch skills you've got.

Search on! 


22 comments:

  1. 1) The man is Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, the former Shah of Persia (Iran).

    I did a reverse image search on the photo of the teapot, which led me to this page: http://goo.gl/eyfeAu selling another antique with the same person. The page is in Arabic, so I ran it through Google Translate, which gave the following phrase in the description: "All the motifs of gold / I do not know of dates back / The role of the Qajar" I could "fix" most of the translation mentally, and the word "Qajar" seemed like it could be the subject of the painted motif.

    Searched [Qajar] in Google, which led me to the Wikipedia on the Qajar dynasty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qajar_dynasty - it has a helpful image gallery of all the shahs, which I scrolled through until I found the one resembling the painting on the teapot. (The moustache is certainly a defining feature!) This led me to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naser_al-Din_Shah_Qajar that tells all about his reign, assassination, and 21(!) children.

    Why would someone have a tea service with his image? Presumably, the owners are of Iranian descent. It seems like this shah was incredibly popular, and even today his portrait is everywhere in the country -- see this page from "A Persian Odyssey" https://goo.gl/b478Xj found by searching [naser al-din shah qajar teapot]

    2 and 3 to come - lunchtime is over...

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  2. I'm from Southern California and so recognized this--and it looks like you can see a jacandera when you get home if you like.

    http://canopy.org/about-trees/canopy-tree-walks/?id=13

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  3. Good day, Dr. Russell and everyone.

    I know the answer to q2 because we have one in home and many in our city. I just need to verify is the same one.

    [jacaranda] and also your photo adding [San Diego Jacaranda trees] and after searching in Images, tried in All with Search Tools; Past Month

    Purple Haze: Jacaranda Fever Hits San Diego (2013) Link shows lots of streets with those trees

    San Diego Botanic Garden Shows facts and origin

    [jacaranda near san diego airport] / [jacaranda trees near san diego airport]

    jacaranda tree project

    [Jacaranda trees facts]

    Jacarandas facts

    [Best Places To See Jacarandas In Bloom In San Diego] Search Tools Past Month

    [San Diego jacarandas lined up] searched photos taken on May 2016

    area around Front and Beech submitted may 2016

    Some photos


    Downtown San Diego

    Answers


    2. What kind of tree is this? They bloom so beautifully, are they native here?
    Jacaranda. Jacarandas are native to Central and South America as well as some of the islands in that region, and can now be found in many tropical areas around the world.

    3. As I was landing at the San Diego airport, I could see a couple of neighborhoods that seemed completely blanketed in these trees. Where should I go (nearby!) to see a bunch of these trees all lined up?

    Don't know what you mean with nearby. Tried Nearby in Google maps searching for Jacaranda but not results. Front and Beech and Downtown sounds good.

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  4. The tree is jacaranda from South America.
    Pretoria in South Africa is called the City of Jacarandas.
    (As the floral emblem of Los Angeles is our Strelitzia)

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  5. at least it wasn't this pot…
    Noi Volkov

    tried an image search and ran across an Iranian/Persian tag… went from there… it's an interesting tea service - hope you will say where you were staying…
    Nāser al-Dīn Schah, Shah from Persia
    even a possible hookah base
    even on YT
    & in the Eiffel tower
    keywords - had an image here
    Shah Abbas

    [purple trees san diego] yielded: (right time of year)
    this has a number of locations… the Little Italy area & 11th Ave - just SE of SAN (aka, Lindbergh Field) - a little further away, but very purple — Barrio Logan
    Jacaranda mimosifolia
    TEHO…"Profuse flowering is regarded as magnificent by some and quite messy by others. "
    wiki… if you are ever in Pretoria
    other coast… FL

    …did the UCSD stint include Mr. Norman and/or Ms. Irani? could/would you expand a bit on "ethnographic methods" & applications?
    Don Norman
    jnd
    Lilly Irani
    LI
    mech turk
    our overlords… Artificial Artificial Intelligence
    somehow went to this
    Exquisite corpse
    &
    Photoshop tennis
    the flickr pool

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    Replies
    1. Quick answers: Don and I used to work together at Apple (back in the 90s). He was my manager there when we were in Apple Research. Typically, yes, I get together with Don when visiting. Lilly Irani and I worked together at Google in User Experience Research (before she went off to get her PhD). I don't think she's here at the moment either!

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    2. Oh... and "ethnographic methods" are basically doing "field studies" where we spend time to understand what people are doing with their tools (esp. Google)... how do people think about and use search engines, and more generally, how do they find information to help them get information tasks done.. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography

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  6. thanks for the responses… the ethnography thing leaves me feeling a little cavy-like…

    Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
    Mintaken Tapestry
    Mintaka III
    "Captain, do you think they understand the GreatGoogley or do they believe it is some sort of fickle divine manifestation that will make their existences more tolerable until their usefulness is…"
    paleo-turk
    tea with the mechanical Shah

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  7. Recognized the tea guy right away. The Persian restaurant I used to frequent in London had a similar set. A few searches for first Persian tea sets and then Iranian tea sets since Iran is the modern name and I found someone (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/299770918921061314/) describe this, very popular style as a "Shah abbasi persian tea set" Good enough to get started. Another search on that tells me it should be Shah Abbas, referring to one of three rules of Persia, including Shah Abbas I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbas_I_of_Persia who was known as "the great" and has a fascinating history. Abbasi seems to also be the name of a hotel once called Shah Abass so I'm guessing the difference between the two is probably a conjugation or something similar. All their photos show him on their tea sets. I can find a few other references to Shah Abbas "ware" but nothing definitive after that.

    So either Shah Abbas is popular to put on tea sets, or he's on all the tea sets at the Hotel that bore his name and they are popular to steal or counterfeit?

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  8. Tree is a Jacaranda mimosifolia. We have them in Palo Alto as well. Stanford has a large one in the Old Quad blooming now. Next month the ones in the new Science and Engineering Quad should be blooming. The Cortez Hill neighborhood of San Diego had a Jacaranda Spring Thing Festival last month, so I suspect they have plenty of trees. Popular for their drought resistance and beautiful flowers. Credit for importing the Jacaranda is generally given to Kate Sessions, who was a San Diego horticulturist in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Often referred to as the "Mother of Balboa Park", Kate Sessions imported many species including Jacaranda into the county, propagated them from 1892 onward in her nursery in what is now Balboa Park, and then distributed plants and seedlings throughout the city. - local newspapers

    There is a map of "Jacaranda Walks" in the Banker's Hill area at: http://www.hillquest.com/recreation/bankers-hill-jacaranda-walk-2/

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  9. {turkish tea set]

    The Teapot has "hand-painted gilt embellishment and framed portraits of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk."
    IS found a different tea set but with this same portrait.
    www.onekingslane.com/p/4388430-atat-rk-turkish-tea-service-12-pcs

    Now, with you not staying in an hotel by rather in a flat/condo/apartment at La Jolla Village Park, corner of Mahaila and Crystal Dawn Lane, this really cut into my idea that there was a Turkish restaurant in the building. But your residential area seems not to have such a facilty. I seached again and again for tea house, tea garden, turkish, mediterranean, middle east. And got nowhere.

    Your Jacaranda is marvellous. Haven't doojne the street search yet.

    I needed a cup of Turkish Tea after all this

    jon

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  10. As others have said, the tree is a Jacaranda. I found out about it by entering the following into Google:

    +san+diego+purple+flowering+trees

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  11. I used the same method for each of these questions, and started with a Google reverse image search. For those who don't know how to do this, take note. It's great for anytime you have a camera/cameraphone and see something you want to know more about but might have trouble describing in a search. I right clicked the image and selected copy image address. I went to images.google.com and clicked the camera icon on the right end of the search bar, then pasted the url I had copied for the image.

    I started with the tree since it seems a little more straightforward. The first image I clicked on told me the tree was a Jacaranda (although I admit I did a little more poking to make sure this was correct). Next up: for some simple questions, sometimes the obvious way to answer the question is to Google it (in this case, "are Jacaranda native to California?"). They are not. They were imported by horticulturalist Kate Sessions. They are native to "tropical and subtropical regions of Central America, South America, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas."

    Next up, the teapot. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I simply got huge list of teapot pictures with similar coloring but not the man with the fancy hat. I did a quick crop of the picture to only include the man and not the shape of the teapot, and when I reverse image searched again (altering the text matching the picture to say “teapot”, I didn’t get much more information, other than the results seemed to indicate there was a connection between this teapot and Iran. I ran the same image search again with the text “Iranian teapot” and got the name Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, a.k.a. the Shah of Iran. I couldn’t find anything in further searching that told me why his face is on so many teapots, but his position of power and love of photography probably have something to do with it. The face that this face is on so many other types of dishes as well seems to back this up.

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  12. I used the same method for each of these questions, and started with a Google reverse image search. For those who don't know how to do this, take note. It's great for anytime you have a camera/cameraphone and see something you want to know more about but might have trouble describing in a search. I right clicked the image and selected copy image address. I went to images.google.com and clicked the camera icon on the right end of the search bar, then pasted the url I had copied for the image.

    I started with the tree since it seems a little more straightforward. The first image I clicked on told me the tree was a Jacaranda (although I admit I did a little more poking to make sure this was correct). Next up: for some simple questions, sometimes the obvious way to answer the question is to Google it (in this case, "are Jacaranda native to California?"). They are not. They were imported by horticulturalist Kate Sessions. They are native to "tropical and subtropical regions of Central America, South America, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas."

    Next up, the teapot. This time I wasn’t so lucky. I simply got huge list of teapot pictures with similar coloring but not the man with the fancy hat. I did a quick crop of the picture to only include the man and not the shape of the teapot, and when I reverse image searched again (altering the text matching the picture to say “teapot”, I didn’t get much more information, other than the results seemed to indicate there was a connection between this teapot and Iran. I ran the same image search again with the text “iranian teapot” and got the name Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, a.k.a. the Shah of Iran. I couldn’t find anything in further searching that told me why his face is on so many teapots, but his position of power and love of photography probably have something to do with it. The face that this face is on so many other types of dishes as well seems to back this up.

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  13. I don't have a clue as to how JtU came across his La Jolla Village Park info (impressive find - but the Persians are going to be upset with the Turkish theory),
    but it led me to this… hopefully Dan has some independent images…? there is much 'splainin' to do…
    Bear
    …worthy of a search challenge by itself…
    Tim Hawkinson
    The Stuart Collection
    RealtorPeg
    overhead, at the Computer Science & Engineering building
    bear image SERP

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  14. I think somebody in your place is of Turkish descent. Ataturk was a great reformer. His name title of Ataturk was bestowed on him meaning Father of Turkey.

    j

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  15. a ? about comments

    had posted a comment on the 19th about the courtyard occupant at the Irwin (Qualcomm) and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering… but may be churning in the aether… meanwhile…
    clone keys
    CSE complex
    engineering whimsy
    blog
    another Stuart Collection piece… Fallen Star
    Jacobs Hall, 2012
    18th installment
    Do-ho Suh
    Google visits CSEUCSD… keeping it raw real…
    google bear UCSD

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  16. schriatp detector… quote/mis-quote? SERP
    38:50 … interesting presentation
    "Fiction-writing, Hemingway felt, was to invent out of knowledge. "To invent out of knowledge means to produce inventions that are true. Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him. It also should have a manual drill and a crank handle in case the machine breaks down. If you're going to write, you have to find out what's bad for you. Part of that you learn fast, and then you learn what's good for you.""
    from:
    ⌘f crap/shit
    Paris Review:
    Ernest Hemingway, The Art of Fiction No. 21
    Interviewed by George Plimpton

    May Gray/June Gloom
    dadesignlab
    Don Russell ;)

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  17. How did you people make GI produce the Shah ? I ran that identical chopped image many times but Never found anything other than the Ataturk one ?

    jon

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    Replies
    1. See my answer: Do an image search on the cropped image (filename test2.jpg). http://searchresearch1.blogspot.com/2016/05/answer-questions-that-come-up-fair-bit.html

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    2. jon, how did you come up with the La Jolla Village Park, corner of Mahaila and Crystal Dawn Lane location?
      regarding your GI question… for me - added search terms to the clipped image query after figuring out there was a Persian tie-in…

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