I live in Palo Alto, the home of Stanford, the previous home of Google, and the heart of Silicon Valley. Yes, some might think SiValley is in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale or Cupertino--but for many of us, it's Palo Alto.
I've worked in several different buildings in Palo Alto, but probably none quite as well known as PARC (aka Xerox Palo Alto Research Center). Wikipedia has a nice, balanced article about PARC, or you could go check out PARC's current web site.
That's all history. But suppose you're interested in something about the physical nature of PARC. It has distinctive architecture (a bit like the hanging gardens of Babylon)...
But overall, it's not that big of a place. At it's peak, about 300 researchers worked there. That's a lot of ideas per person.
However, this is a post about a search challenge... and here's the challenge:
How many acres is the PARC site? Your answer should be precise down to the tenth of an acre.
(To be precise.... I'm only interested in the parcel at 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA.)
Can you figure it out?
14.2 acres (more accurately, 14.174 acres).
ReplyDeletePath to answer:
Google for "Santa Clara Assessor", pick the link for looking up properties, agree, enter the street address and city (slowest part -- breaking up strings into fields should be done by computers, not people), discover that the data I wanted isn't displayed, click the link for "Assessor's Map", rotate and zoom map, read the acreage from the map, type it here.
David -- Very good! That's exactly the path I took as well. See my post for details.
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