Wednesday, February 27, 2019

SearchResearch Challenge (2/27/19): Where does your recycling go... really??


Where does your recycling go... really??  

A recent spate of stories about how lots of supposedly recycled stuff actually ends up in the trash (NPR storyNERC storyWired story) made me start wondering about where my trash and recycling really REALLY goes.  

In my city (Palo Alto, CA), all of my neighbors and I religiously separate our compost from our recyclables and trash.  On Thursday morning, we set out the big plastic containers for the trucks to come by... 


.... and pick up the contents--green is compost, black is trash, blue is recycling (single-stream)  ....  




.... and.... then... what happens? 

Our SearchResearch Challenge for this week is simple, but possibly tricky:  

Where does YOUR recycling go?  How much of the stuff you carefully put into the recycling bins actually makes it into a recycled product vs. into a landfill? 


From an SRS point of view, the question is how can you find out??  It's very possible that the trash/recycling organization has a page about what their practices are, but how do you fact-check what they say?  How do you really know??   

I'm curious about what happens where you live.  How much of our "recycling" actually ends up being recycled (as opposed to being put into a landfill or being burned)?  

Can you do the research for your town / city / village and let us know?  (And, as always, be sure to tell us HOW to figured this out!  Where you able to do it all via online research methods??)  

Search on!  





Wednesday, February 20, 2019

Answer: What's the story... of these ruined buildings?


Hope you enjoyed the drone video... 

.
.. as I said, it was a bit of a surprise to discover those old buildings suddenly appearing in my camera's view!  



round building lost in Napa






















As you can see from the image of the round building just above and the video below (link to the YouTube video), there are quite a few buildings up this remote Napa canyon.  They're just past the stone gates--out of sight from the road, and out of mind of the good people of Napa.  



As you watch the video you see what looks like a long, rectangular building that seems a little like a castle, complete with crenelation.  Near to that is a rather large circular building that seems like it was once several stories tall.  


This drone flight posed a mystery for me:  What's going on here?  Or maybe, what was going on here?  



What's the story with these buildings?

In particular, what's the story of that large, round building?  



I was impressed with how quickly the SRS Regulars were able to figure this out.  


Judith used Image Search, which I admit I didn't try because I didn't think anyone else would have photographed this place.  (How wrong was that?!)  

As Kate (and others found), a search for [ Napa valley castle] isn't very productive.  Turns out there are multiple castles (or castle-like objects) in Napa!  So we need something a bit more discriminating.  

What worked best for me was a simple descriptive search with a place name, like this: 

     [ Napa circular ruined building ]  

(Other simple descriptive queries work just as well.  One Regular Reader used  [ Napa valley ruins historical ] and got the same results.)  

Looking at Images with this query fairly quickly led me to Napa Soda Springs as a place name.  Then, a search on Google Maps for [ Napa Soda Springs ] gave me this image of the grounds... complete with circular building.  


You can see the circular building in the satellite view of the springs, along with the crenellated buildings.  Note also the Wikipedia link to Napa Soda Springs, which tells us that this was ALSO called "Jacksons Napa Soda Springs."

Now that we've located it, what's the story of this place?   In a case like this, where I don't know much, I start with a very open query:  

     [ Napa Soda Springs ruins ]     or    [ Napa Soda Springs history ] 

In these queries, the terms ruins and history are context terms.  That is, extra terms that describe the kind of result you're looking for in the search.  

Here's that SERP:  



These results are fascinating:  The first hit "Napa Soda Springs" takes you to ExploreNapa.org (a local history and Napa Valley promotion site), with a fairly extensive history.  The whole page about Napa Soda Springs is worth a read, but here's my distillation of what they say: 

1855,  27 springs of mineral rich cold water were found about seven miles north of Napa City by Amos Buckman.   
July 1856, the first resort hotel had opened at the springs, owned by San Francisco lawyer Eugene Sullivan and run by W. Allen
1860, the earliest known ad promoting the water at the spa appeared in the Napa Reporter. The newspaper gave regular updates about the legal battle during 1861. 
1861, the newspaper reported that while Buckman was away discussing his case with regional legal authorities, J.H. Wood and companions attacked Mrs. Buckman and workers at the springs, beat them, and destroyed the bottling works. Wood and his associates were each sentenced to a $75 fine or 35 days in jail.
1862, arsonists struck the bottling works operated by Whitney and Wood. Restored to working within a few months.  
1872,  Dr. J. Henry Wood sold the Soda Springs property to Colonel J.P. Jackson for $120,000.  
1874, Jackson had built the place into a health and pleasure resort. Visitors could bowl, play tennis or billiards. They could hunt, fish, ride horses, or stroll among the olive and almond, citrus and apple trees. The grounds were over one hundred acres, with twelve miles of “pleasant walks through the hills and canyons.”
April 21, 1877, the resort introduced the Rotunda, a 75 foot high circular building topped by a glass cupola. There were two stories of outside rooms and a large interior drawing and reading room, lighted from the dome shaped roof by a sixteen foot chandelier. 
1881, the resort opened to overnight guests.
1884, many changes and improvements at the springs, including the Tower House, Ivy House, Music Hall, Garden House, clubhouse and pagoda.  
1889, The Register reported that Colonel Jackson’s new residence, Bellevue, was almost done, as was the new swimming pool, 150 by 50 feet, situated just below the lawn tennis courts. 
September 26, 1900 Colonel Jackson suddenly died, leaving the property to his wife, marking the start of a long, slow decline.  

In 1914 the First World War, following shortly by Prohibition in 1919 led to the closing of its doors to guests. Napa Soda (aka “Jackson’s Napa Soda” after John Jackson bought the place) continued to be sold through the Second World War, mostly through its outlet in San Francisco.  The site itself was burned in an arson fire (again!) in the early 1960s.  

Looking for a bit more context, I searched for "Napa Soda Springs" in both the Library of Congress Chronicling America (archival newspapers collection) and in Google's Newspaper Archive (available under Google Books--click on the "Newspapers" tab under Tools).  In both cases I found LOTS of articles from the 1860s onward.  

In 1888, Napa Soda Springs was still mentioned among the "leading resorts of California" in the Boston Evening Transcript (Oct 8, 1888).   

I noticed that doing a search for "Napa Soda Springs" gives lots of results up to about 1890.  After that search for "Jackson's Napa Soda" gives more results.  

Doing this kind of search in Google Books leads to all kinds of interesting results, including books like Mines and mineral resources of the counties of Colusa, Glenn, Lake, Marin, Napa, Solano, Sonoma, Yolo.  (Bradley, W. W., and California State Mining Bureau,
1915.  California State Printing Office.) 

Including this excellent photo of the Rotunda: 

From: Mines and Mineral Resources... (1915) 

While we're at it, what other resources can we find?  

Checking Google Images for [ Napa Soda Springs ruins ] leads to a great assortment of images, both ruined, and when it was in full flower... 


From this SERP, you can see the interior of the Rotunda as it was: 

Courtesy of the Napa County Historical Society

Including a nice exterior shot that was captured as a colorized postcard: 


And, interestingly enough, a YouTube video that shows a hoop dancer moving around through the ruins as they are today.  (I really hadn't expected that.)  


From that video we can grab a frame that shows the Rotunda as it is now, albeit with a hoop dancer in front. 



Perhaps the most surprising find (for me) was when I was glancing through the collected Napa Soda Springs images and finding Napa Soda Springs bottles for sale!  That made me think of searching on eBay for "Napa Soda."  I was really somewhat flabbergasted by what I found... page after page of artifacts from the glory era of Napa Soda Springs--photos, postcards, bottles, crates, and ice picks!  

A few of the items for sale on eBay from the Napa Soda Springs


I could go on and on with the fascinating story of Napa Soda Springs.  There are lots of images and stories out there, but here's the one I like best, showing an overview of the resort in its prime.  

Courtesy Napa County Historical Society showing the music hall and cottages.  
And there are stories, such as the time President Benjamin Harrison stayed at the resort which was then owned / operated by John Jackson.  Sure, Napa Soda Springs was famous, but enough to attract a sitting president?  

You have to know that John Jackson worked in the law offices of former Congressman Bellamy Storer.. along with the future President Benjamin Harrison.  Forty years later, Harrison would come to visit his longtime friend Jackson at his stylish resort in the hills above the Napa Valley, luxuriating the spring waters.  

So...what's the story?   

The Napa springs were discovered in 1855, then developed into a fairly famous resort that had extensive grounds and buildings. There were music rooms, a dance floor, a pagoda, spring houses, and buildings including the fabulous Rotunda, 75 feet high with a glass cupola at the top. It was the quintessence of a Victorian-era resort.  

In the early 1900s it fell into decline, and is now mostly just moody and remote abandoned buildings.  The magic isn't gone, but very different than what it once was. 

It all ended when Napa Soda Company gave up in Napa and moved to San Francisco.  (This notice is from the 1920 edition of The Stirring Rod, Volume 7, 1920.)  





Search Lessons 


1.  Even simple descriptions can work well. Much to my surprise, the obvious queries describing what you could see in the drone video actually led to useful results!  Simple is good.    

2.  Start with an open-ended query and see what you can learn.  You should dive into the topic ONLY after you've done a broad survey.  (I spent a lot of time looking at articles about the place before zeroing in on specific topics.) 

3.  Use multiple resources.  In this case, both a Map of the area was useful (for the place name "Soda Springs") and the Newspaper archives to give a historical context to the site.  

4.  When searching for history, consider using Books as a resource.  I didn't go into much detail here, but there are a LOT of mentions of Napa Soda Springs in various books, including a great report from the California Mining Department that talk about the water from the springs as “… series of chalybeate [i.e., containing iron salts] springs…with “Lemon” at 66F (flow, 1 gallon in 5 minutes); “Old Bottling House” spring, 67F (1 flow gallon in 2 minutes)… and “Pagoda” spring at 66F.  The last two have considerable excess gas (CO2).”   

5. Consider other sources than plain Google when dealing with a manufacturer.  I was surprised to find Napa Soda bottles for sale on eBay.  I spotted them first on the Images SERP, but when I started searching, I found hundreds of artifacts and articles (and endless postcards), some with intriguing notes from family members visiting Napa Soda Springs in its heyday.  



Hope you enjoyed this romp into history.  

Search on!  




Wednesday, February 13, 2019

SearchResearch Challenge (2/13/19): What's the story... of these ruined buildings?


Last week I was visiting Napa Valley... 


... and since it was a beautiful spring day, I went out for a bit of drone flying.  


I drove around for a bit, knowing full well that there are lots of rural roads that are dead ends, going part way up into the hills and then abruptly stopping.   I figured that I could pause for a few minutes of flying and get some nice aerial shots of the valley.  



Napa Valley in the spring.  Vineyards on the left and right, pasture in the middle.  


I was a bit surprised when the dead end road turned out to have two large stone gate posts.  That looked interesting, but I didn't think much of it until I started to fly my drone up the small canyon and discovered a fairly large cluster of buildings that had been long abandoned and fallen into ruin.  That was a surprise.  I was in a very rural part of Napa--what was this doing here?  




round building lost in Napa






















As you can see from the image of the round building just above and the video below (link to the YouTube video), there are quite a set of buildings up this remote Napa canyon.  They're just past the stone gates--out of sight from the road, and out of mind of the good people of Napa.  


As you watch the video you see what looks like a long, rectangular building that seems a little like a castle, complete with crenelation.  Near to that is a rather large circular building that seems like it was once several stories tall.  


This spontaneous drone flight posed a mystery for me:  What's going on here?  



What's the story with these buildings? 

In particular, what's the story of that large, round building?  



The drone didn't have any EXIF metadata, so there's no map data here to share.  


However, I found that if you work just with what you see, you too can figure out the backstory here.  


What / Why / How did these buildings come to be here?  


The story I found is fascinating and deserves to be better known.  But when I ask around, I find that almost nobody in Napa or in the rest of California knows anything about this.  


Can you uncover the story here?  


Let us know what you find out... and as importantly, HOW you found it out!  


Search on!  



Tuesday, February 12, 2019

A survey about a subtitle...

As you know... 


I have a book coming out in late spring, and I need my crack SRS team-wisdom about the best possible subtitle. 


My book "The Joy of Finding Out," is 20 stories (mostly inspired by this blog!) about how to do smart, effective, accurate research with Google and online resources. 


Of the possible subtitles listed in the poll below, which would lead you to buy the book? Which is most intriguing to you? 



Link to the survey form 





Thursday, February 7, 2019

Answer: What's the story? Steel in the sand (A new series)


Whenever I see something that doesn't make sense to me...

... or when it's something that just kind of sticks out... something that doesn't match the rest of the background... my first reaction is to say "Huh!"  When I hear myself saying that, I find myself growing curious.  

In last week's Challenge I asked:  

What's the story ... behind these two pieces of steel sticking up out of the beach sand?  

Link to the original photo (#1) - About 2.4 meters tall.

Link to the original photo (#2) - About 2m tall and 100m north of #1.

They clearly don't belong there, and from appearances, they've been there for quite a while. So... 

What's the story ...? 

Once I made it back to my hotel room, I first pulled up Google Maps for the area.  (Here I just used the lat/long that I left in the comment.)  




Why that step?  Because you often learn a lot about a location by just looking around on a map of the area.  

And, amazingly enough, my drop pin (the red pin in the map above) is right next to something that's labeled Steel beam.  You've GOT to be kidding me!  I find this strange chunk of steel sticking out of the sand and it's on the map??  

Even more amazingly, there are reviews of the Steel Beam (but as you'll quick figure out, the reviews are for the beach, not the beam, although people do take photos of the beam and paste them in their reviews).  



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Usually when I look at a map like this, I also zoom out a bit and look around, taking note of the local places names.  Often they'll give clues to what's happening here, or you can see some traces of history in the ground.  Here's what I saw: 


I took note of the name of the nearby point ("Coal Oil Point") and the presence of two large oil tanks (the white circles near the center), and the place names "Devereux Lagoon" and  "Ellwood Mesa."  

Fascinating.  There's something going on here.  Given the name of the point and the oil tanks (and knowing that the nearby Santa Barbara channel is a bit oil production site), I started wondering about former oil production facilities .  But while I'm curious, I keep my  my next query pretty generic: 

     [ steel beam beach Goleta ] 

This gives me a bunch of images of the beach, but also a link to a PDF from about the city's efforts to clean up the beach.  As the report notes: 

"Extensive oil and gas operations occurred along the City’s Ellwood coastline during the early and mid-20th century. When these operations ceased, the infrastructure created to support the operations were not properly abandoned. As a result, the Ellwood coastline is littered with remnant oil and gas operations hazards. These hazards include protruding wellheads and well casings, wood and steel piles, pipelines, and wood beams and structures..." 

Three things from this:  (1) this location is historically known as the "Ellwood coastline."  That's useful to know.  (2) there were a lot of oil and gas operations here.   (3) there are probably still steel piles left on the beach.  

As the report also says, "Remnant hazards include protruding wellheads and well casings, wood and steel piles, H piles and H beams..."  So now we know more useful terms: "H beam" and "H pile."  

And if you're careful, and read farther down in that report, you'll find a really familiar photo on page 55: 


So now we know a bit about the what of these beams.  They're clearly leftover structural steel from the piers and oil gear that was here earlier.  The oil companies didn't do a great cleanup job, mostly just abandoning tons of gear in place.  

Another result:  http://goletahistory.com/haskells-beach/ gives an extensive history of this beach (variously called "Steel Beam Beach"  "Haskell's Beach" or "Coal Oil Point Beach," depending on the source.  A key illustration in that website is the USGS map of the area from 1951 showing a LOT of oil industry piers and buildings.  



It's pretty clear what happened.  These beams are leftovers from the extensive oil industry piers and oil wells that once dominated the area.  

That's interesting, but not much of a story.  Is there anything else going on here?  

Often, a great way to get some interesting information about a place is to search for history about a place.  I tried [ history Coal Oil Point ] and found fairly quiet / boring stuff.  I also tried [ history Haskell's beach ] and had another set of nice, but not compelling results. (Reading about the Devereux family moving to the point, planting trees, and the leaving just wasn't that exciting.)  

Finally, I tried: 

     [ history Ellwood beach ] 

and found a remarkable story.  Here's what my SERP looked like:  


Just reading this is astounding.  "Attack on Ellwood"?  "Bombardment of Ellwood"?  What happened here? 

I did a bit of lateral browsing to open several tabs in parallel on the topics.  I was looking for a diverse set of sources (and not the same story told over and over again) on history of Ellwood beach, the oil business, and the attack of a Japanese submarine during WW2.  

A particularly rich source of information came from the Goleta History blog:  
http://goletahistory.com/attack-on-ellwood/ which has the dates, events, and history of the attack (February 23, 1942). This also led to the Bombardment of Ellwood Wikipedia story, with a bit more colorful details.  But the bottom line is this..  

TL;DR version:  Early in World War II, the I-17, a Japanese submarine that was 365 feet long, surfaced outside the oil complex at sunset and lobbed roughly 17 shells at the Ellwood oil complex.  There was only minor damage: one derrick and a pump house were destroyed, but little else happened.  The oil tanks that were the targets escaped without damage.  

Of course, for a story this striking, you want to get a bit of confirmation.  I did a search on Google Books, and switched to the Newspapers mode of Google Books.  

Yes, that's right:  Archival Newspapers are now a part of Google Books!  To search on Newspapers, click on the Tools button on the right, then select Newspapers to search just the archival news.  


Which leads to many contemporary news stories.  Here's one from Saint Petersburg... 



Interestingly, the sub’s captain: “…. as a naval reserve officer, Nishino had commanded a pre-war merchant ship that sailed through the Santa Barbara Channel. His ship had once stopped at the Ellwood Oil Field to take on a cargo of oil.”  So he knew the place. 

This kind of astounding.  I knew there had been a few attacks, but I didn't know one had happened at "Steel Beam Beach."  

But the story continues...  

As I read a bit further about the attack on the Goleta coastline, I read that this fairly minor shelling spread panic along the coast.  This ultimately lead to “The Battle of Los Angeles on the next night.  It was a huge and panicky reaction to a supposed attack.  From the Wiki article:  

“The United States Coast Artillery Association [in LA] identified a meteorological balloon sent up at 1:00 a.m. that "started all the shooting" and concluded that "once the firing started, imagination created all kinds of targets in the sky and everyone joined in". In 1983, the U.S. Office of Air Force History attributed the event to a case of "war nerves" triggered by a lost weather balloon and exacerbated by stray flares and shell bursts from adjoining batteries.” 

While the Ellwood shelling was minor, the panicky LA response caused lots of real damage:  

“Several buildings and vehicles were damaged by shell fragments, and five civilians died as an indirect result of the anti-aircraft fire: three killed in car accidents in the ensuing chaos and two of heart attacks attributed to the stress of the hour-long action.”  
Much more damage was done by an panic reaction to a weather balloon than was ever done by the actual shelling on the beach.  

"Probably much of the confusion came from the fact that anti-aircraft shell bursts, caught by the searchlights, were themselves mistaken for enemy planes. In any case, the next three hours produced some of the most imaginative reporting of the war: "swarms" of planes (or, sometimes, balloons) of all possible sizes, numbering from one to several hundred, traveling at altitudes which ranged from a few thousand feet to more than 20,000 and flying at speeds which were said to have varied from "very slow" to over 200 miles per hour, were observed to parade across the skies. These mysterious forces dropped no bombs and, despite the fact that 1,440 rounds of anti-aircraft ammunition were directed against them, suffered no losses. There were reports, to be sure, that four enemy planes had been shot down, and one was supposed to have landed in flames at a Hollywood intersection."

Here's some of the coverage by the local paper, the L.A. Times: 

Image from Wikipedia.  Page B of the February 26, 1942, Los Angeles Times,

So, what's the story here?  

The steel beams are leftovers from a large oil complex, including multiple piers, oil tanks, pipelines, and production gear.  This complex was shelled during the early part of WW2 by a Japanese submarine, leaving minor damage behind.  But the next day, the shelling caused an enormous panic in a war-jittery Los Angeles, leading to an immense fire fight... with an imaginary opponent, leaving several people dead, and immense amounts of property damage.  



Search Lessons 


I have a few insights from this week's Challenge.  

1.  A story can arise from unexpected connections.  Fairly often when I'm doing these SearchResearches, I come across a connection that I didn't know about and didn't expect.  The best stories come from these connections that lead to something interesting--in this case, the Battle for Los Angeles.  Even though I grew up in L.A., I didn't know about this.  (I can imagine everyone was pretty embarrassed about the whole thing, so it didn't get a lot of play in the local press, and it just faded from collective memory.)  

2.  Checking maps often leads to insights.  Much to my surprise, the steel beam I found on the beach was marked on the map.  I completely didn't expect that!  What's more--I learned a lot of local place names (Ellwood, Coal Oil Point, etc.)  that proved useful in later searches.  

3.  Local governments are a great source of information about a place.  Even though the document was about "beach cleanup," the Goleta city plan for cleanup also gave us a lot of historical information.  It's a great place to find context for things like this.  

4. You can find archival newspapers through Google Books.  In the past, the News Archive was a separate product.  Now it's part of Google Books, and easily searchable once again.  Whenever you do history searches, remember to check this out first.  It's very easy, free, and handy.  


We'll talk more about finding the backstory (and what it means to find these kinds of connections).  I hope you enjoyed this first in the "What's the story?" series.  If you enjoyed this, let me know, and we'll do more like this.