Answer: Why do I hear a trumpet?

The trumpet shall sound! 

This week's Challenge was a fun one, and tests your ability to sleuth out the backstory. 

I was walking down the street when I heard an odd trumpet tune being played.  It was a surprising tune--not quite a melody, but something puzzling and a little odd.  

Here's the picture I snapped as I listened to the trumpet call.  (And the link to the full-resolution image.) 

This mystery melody only took me a few moments to figure out...  Can you determine what it is, and WHY it is? The Challenge was this...   

1.  Challenge:  Why did I hear a trumpet at this place?  Why is the melody so strangely plaintive?  What's the story behind the this tune?  

To be honest, when I took this photo I did not expect that Search-by-Image would work.  It's at a bit of an odd angle, the lighting isn't perfect, and I'm standing on a side-street near the church that's not the usual location for a tourist photo.  

Still, Search-by-Image worked quite well.  This is what I found when I did the Search-by-Image method: 

To tell the truth, I have no idea why "Florian Street" is showing up here.  But part of being a great searcher is learning when to skip over off-topic results and zero in on what's relevant to you. In this case, the "Visually Similar Images" are pretty good, and the next part of the SERP is super relevant: 

When you click through that first result ("Home-Kraków112"), you quickly learn that this is St. Mary's Basilica in Kraków, Poland.  Then, a quick search for: 

     [ St. Mary's Krakow trumpet ] 

leads you to all kinds of results that tell the story of the Trumpeter of Kraków, and the melody that's played every hour (and then broadcast throughout Poland at noon).  

The story from the Krakow Signal website is that: 

The Krakow signal bugle call, or Hejnal Mariacki, dates back to the Middle Ages when it was announcing the opening and the closing of the city gates. The bugler also played it to alarm his fellow citizens whenever he saw a fire or the enemy forces. And the melody abrupt ending is said to commemorate a trumpeter from Krakow who was shot through his throat by a Tatar archer in 1241 when the Mongols besieged the city.

You can find multiple versions of this (probably apocryphal) story by clicking around a bit.  But the "plaintive" quality of the song is pointedly due to the trumpeter's arrow-filled demise on not-quite-the-last-note of the tune.  

The Wikipedia version of the trumpet of St. Mary's correctly points out that this trumpet call is actually spelled hejnał (the last "L" character has a slash through it and is pronounced like a "w," which means that hejnał is pronounced as "hey now").   

That Wiki article goes on with a more plausible story: 

Trumpet calls were used in many European cities to signal the opening and closing of city gates at dawn and dusk. The four directions in which the St. Mary's Trumpet Call is currently sounded correspond roughly to the four main Kraków gates before 3 out of 4 of the gates were demolished in the 19th century. 16th-century sources mention other trumpeters on other towers, and it is possible that the “interrupted” anthem was originally meant to allow a second trumpeter at a gate to signal the completion of the opening or closing of the gate. In historic times, trumpet calls on the St. Mary's Church tower were also used to warn of fires and other dangers.

With this search I also found a great video showing the interior of the trumpeter's tower, along with his performance:  

Oddly, for those people who actually looked up the EXIF metadata, you'll notice that it's pretty off on this image.  The lat/long in the EXIF is given as 50.063975,19.9446389 -- which is definitely in Kraków, but NOT anywhere near.  See the map below.  Here, the purple dot in the upper right corner is that lat/long, but the dot in the lower left is where I was actually standing. 

As you can see, it's an 8 minute walk (630 m) from where the phone thinks it was.  

I'm not 100% sure why it's so wrong, but I was standing on a fairly narrow street with only a limited view of the sky.  I might have just not had a very good set of satellites in the GPS signal range, and I just got unlucky.  Here's my view from Streetview from the place I was standing, at 5 Floriańska Street:

A view of St. Mary's Basilica (Bazylika Mariacka) from 5 Floriańska, Kraków, Poland.

(Yes, that's a street performer on the right side of the street, apparently suspended above the earth.)  

And now we know why we got that strange "Florian Street" result in the Search-By-Image result--"Florian" is "Floriańska" in Polish!   In this case, the Search-By-Image approach worked much better than using the EXIF GPS metadata.  

Search Lessons 

1. Double check your GPS data to make sure it's plausible.  As you can see, it's not always within a few meters of the target.  (In another case I found the image GPS data to be off by several kilometers!)  Using Google Maps it's pretty easy to ground-check the location to be sure it matches what you're seeing in the image.  Be sure to do this EVERY time you use EXIF metadata.  (The other EXIF metadata--time, focus, software version--is probably correct; it's just the GPS you have to really check carefully.)  

2. Search-by-Image can work well, even when you don't think it will.  SBI isn't a panacea, but depending on how many images there are on the web, you just might get lucky and find it!  

3.  Be sure to check other media.  In some ways, the video is the best summary of what we were searching for--it's certainly more contextualized.  You can hear the trumpeter playing, and hear a version of what I heard that day I was strolling down the street (at 11:02AM).  


That's it for this week.  

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (5/22/19): Why do I hear a trumpet?

They say that travel broadens the mind... 

... and sets you up for some pretty remarkable surprises.  

This week's Challenge is a fun one, and will test your ability to sleuth out the backstory.  Can you do it? 

I was walking down the street when I heard an odd trumpet tune being played.  It was a surprising tune--not quite a melody, but something puzzling and a little odd.  

Here's the picture I snapped as I listened to the trumpet call.  (And the link to the full-resolution image.) 

This mystery melody only took me a few moments to figure out...  Can you determine what it is, and WHY it is?  

1.  Challenge:  Why did I hear a trumpet at this place?  Why is the melody so strangely plaintive?  What's the story behind the this tune?  

That's all for this week--this is a good one--not terribly difficult, but a bit of a surprise!  

Once you figure it out, be sure to let us know HOW you did it!  

Search on!  


-- -- -- -- -- 
My new book is now available on Amazon for pre-order: 

The Joy of Search:  A Google Insider's Guide to Going Beyond the Basics 

Answer: What's the story with these things?

Where was I?    

This week's Challenge is another in our series of "What's the story?"  

This week's Challenge wasn't difficult in the ordinary sense. (I figure that you'll be able to search out the place and name of the things.)  But these questions give us a chance to dig into the remarkable stories that are associated with these places.  

Here's what I found, and how I found it.  

1.  I saw this remarkable beast of a device that's labelled as "Clydeport" just across the river from where I'm staying.  I can figure out what it is, but I know nothing of its genesis or why it's there?  Can you search out the story?   (Here I've pasted a small image so the SRS page will load quickly.  But here's a LINK if you'd like to download the whole image.) 

What / Where / Why is this beast?  

I recognize that shape as a crane, used for loading and unloading ships.  So I just did: 

     [ clydeport crane ] 

and quickly found the Wikipedia article on the Finnieston Crane.  That article tells us that:

"...The Finnieston Crane or Stobcross Crane is a disused giant cantilever crane in the centre of Glasgow, Scotland. It is no longer operational, but is retained as a symbol of the city's engineering heritage. The crane was used for loading cargo, in particular steam locomotives, onto ships to be exported around the world. It is one of four such cranes on the River Clyde, a fifth one having been demolished in 2007, and one of only eleven giant cantilever cranes remaining worldwide. The crane can be seen in the background of news broadcasts from BBC Pacific Quay." 

Finnieston Crane in use.  1957

Naturally, I checked a few other sources by doing the query: 

     [ Finnieston crane ] 

finding the port's own website in the process.  Their page about the crane also tells us that: 

"...A noticeable peculiarity of each lateral movement [of the crane] was that it was not continuous, but took place in gentle jerks of a few inches at a time. The object of this is to prevent the load at the end of the cables acquiring a swinging motion, which would soon render the accurate placing of any load a matter of great difficulty and danger...I saw the heavy machinery ... placed in a few minutes into a space where there was hardly an inch to spare on one side or the other, all the directions during this delicate operation being conveyed to the craneman by signs, and blasts on a whistle..."

Having been a swamper to a crane operator (job description) in my youth, I can attest that this is a great property for a big crane to have.  When you're the swamper directing a crane, the operator often can't see where the load is supposed to land (e.g., inside the belly of a ship).  Stability and accuracy are key to getting this job done safely.  A mistake of a couple of inches can make for a very expensive (or deadly) disaster.  To be able to drop a locomotive inside of a ship with an accuracy of a few inches is quite an achievement.  

To check up on this claim, I followed the link in the Wikipedia article references to the book Imperial Cities: Landscape, Display and Identity.  In this book we learn that the locomotives were dragged from their assembly plant to the dock by using Clydesdale horses is particularly remarkable.  (Just to remind you, Clydesdale horses are named for the county of Clydesdale, which is the old name for the current county of Lanarkshire, noted for the River Clyde running through it, which is where Glasgow is.  These aren't just horses, they're very strong local horses.) 

Here's the only photo I could find of a horse pulling a train car (although I can't tell where it is).  Apparently there aren't any of Clydesdales pulling locomotives through the streets of Glasgow, although I wish I could find one.  (Any SRS Readers in Glasgow know of one?) . 

And here's the crane in a shot from BBC Scotland (see arrow).  

2.  About 1/2 mile away from this thing is a slightly mysterious building.  It has a nice Italian restaurant on the bottom floor, but this building was clearly NOT designed to be an Italian restaurant.  This kind of mismatch makes me curious.  What is this building?  And what was it originally designed to do?   LINK to the full image.  

What / Where / Why is this building?  

As many SRS Readers did, I used what I had and searched for: 

     [ la Fiorentina building Glasgow ] 

And much to my surprise, this leads to the restaurant's website that claims: 

"La Fiorentina occupies the ground floor of the landmark Angel building at Paisley Rd Toll. Famous throughout the city as Ogg Brothers Drapery Warehouse... Look up and you’ll see a gilded angel known as “Commerce and Industry” reaching into the sky. The sculpture was commissioned as part of the original building in 1889 and was probably the work of James Alexander Ewing...."  

This is great, but again, I want to triangulate this claim and find a very different source for it.  My next query was for: 

     [ James Alexander Ewing angel ] 

which led to multiple hits.  My favorite was Glasgow Sculptors, which repeats another variation of this story, and tells us that James Alexander Ewing also made a rooftop angel at 520 Sauchiehall Street.  A quick trip to that location using Google Streetview and I have these two angels side-by-side: 

You can see a decided similarity in style (especially in the angle of the angel's wings, the odd notch in the trailing edge of the wings, and the style of the cloth around the legs). 

But there were others, including the Evening Times of Glasgow's article about the Angel.  On the other hand, a book about the sculptures of Glasgow, Look up Glasgow, confirms that this building is at 2-20 Paisley Road but lists the sculptor as unknown.  (It also asks "why is there a star on this angel's head?"--great question.. don't know... another SearchResearch Challenge in the future?)

On the other hand, Regular Reader Jon (the Unknown) found a great drone flyover video of the building.  One frame from that building shows the angel in from an angel's perspective (as it were): 

Frame from drone flyover video. The angel is atop the tower on the left. 

Search Lessons

1.  As usual: Work with what you have.  The big sign saying "Clydeport" and knowing it's in Glasgow is a big tipoff.  From that we can work the story forward, finding its history, current disposition, and some surrounding stories for context. 

2. Working forward.  In the case of the Angel building, once again, working forward from the restaurant name to the history books leads to a more-or-less consensus about the sculpture (1899, by Ewing), and what the building's original purpose (as a draper's shop and storage).  But we need to have some occasional flashes of insight, as when SRS RR Jon suggested looking in the British Newspaper Archive.  (Free, but requires a login.) You can read a lot about the Oggs' shop in Glasgow.  

Published: Saturday 04 September 1909 in the Hamilton Herald and Lanarkshire Weekly News.  

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (5/8/19): What's the story with these things?

I'm in a port city somewhere in the English-speaking world.  

This place is full of remarkable places, and in my walkabout today I saw two things that I didn't know anything about, and for which there was basically no signage.  I suppose if you're a local, these things are obvious--but they're not obvious to me!  

This Challenge is another in our series of "What's the story?"  

As you remember, each "What's the Story?" Challenge will be an open-ended question (or two) that asks you, the SearchResearcher, to figure out what's going on in the image.  I figure that you'll be able to search out the place and name of the things--but can you also dig into the remarkable stories that are associated with these places?  

1.  I saw this remarkable beast of a device that's labelled as "Clydeport" just across the river from where I'm staying.  I can figure out what it is, but I know nothing of its genesis or why it's there?  Can you search out the story?   (Here I've pasted a small image so the SRS page will load quickly.  But here's a LINK if you'd like to download the whole image.) 

What / Where / Why is this beast?  

2.  About 1/2 mile away from this thing is a slightly mysterious building.  It has a nice Italian restaurant on the bottom floor, but this building was clearly NOT designed to be an Italian restaurant.  This kind of mismatch makes me curious.  What is this building?  And what was it originally designed to do?   LINK to the full image.  

What / Where / Why is this building?  

As always, use your best SRS skills--and when you figure out the answers (including the backstories), let us know what you found and HOW you found it.  Leave your pearls of wisdom in the comment!  

Good luck!  (I've figured out the first one but haven't yet tackled the second.  This might be tough to find.) . 

Search on! 

Answer: More questions while traveling...?

So.... 

I'm about to head over to Scotland for a conference all of next week, but SRS will continue unabated!  (Assuming I can get a bit of wifi in a coffee shop somewhere.)  I'm looking forward to a Celtic-inspiration for SRS!    

But last week's travel has brought up a couple of little questions--the kind of questions that happens to me (and I bet to you) every time I travel around.  Here are three from my walkabout in a town that's near some impressive mountains.  

Can you answer them? 

1.  When I look out of my hotel room window, THIS is what I see:  spectacular mountains.  Can you tell what city I'm in?  (Yes, I've removed the EXIF metadata.  You'll have to work with just what you see.)  

As the SRS Regulars quickly figured out, this is in Boulder, Colorado.  

I would have zoomed into the image, looking for something I could identify.  In this case, I downloaded the image and then looked around a bit.  In this case, there's a lovely sign that says "Pearl Street Parking"  (the green sign in the left-of-center foreground).  Then, doing a query like this: 

      [ Pearl street mountain ] 

quickly tells me that it's Boulder, Colorado.  

However, when I tried to do this just now with the image that's in the blog, I realized that the Blogger platform downsampled my image a bit, so it's really hard to read the text on the sign.  (Darn it! Trust me--it's legible in the full res image.)  

So, using our favorite subimaging trick on this image, I looked for the most picturesque  part of the pic and made a quick image of just that.  For this, I chose the cliffs over the town on the left.  They're impressive, and I figured that a lot of people have probably taken this picture before.   

Even though it's a bit low-res, when I did a search-by-image, it came up with a great result.  

This is what Regular Reader amjeff did, and it clearly works pretty well.  Note that the picture in the knowledge panel (on the right) is exactly the same as the image I cropped out of the larger photo.  (I didn't know this ahead of time, I just went for "the most likely tourist picture" and got lucky.)  

JonTheUnknown's approach was also pretty interesting.  He looked on my home page to see if I had any connections with Boulder, and discovered that yes, I'm associated with the University of Colorado at Boulder.  From there, it's pretty easy to look around and figure out that those mountains are the Flatirons, really dramatic angular mountaintops.  

Remmij was able to figure out not only was I in the Boulderado Hotel, but also in the northwest corner as that's the only place where I could have taken this photo. (SearchResearchers are scarily good!)  


2.  As I walked to my meeting, I found a large field of these beautiful blue flowers--what are they?  (Species specific name, please.)  

Several readers just knew that these are called Grape Hyacinth.  I'm impressed.  Somehow these flowers have escaped my attention until this week when I saw an entire field of them (this image is only a small part).  

Since I was actually there (in real life!), I used an app on my phone called PlantSnap which told me what it was--Grape Hyacinth, in the genus Muscari, a group of perennial bulbous plants native to Eurasia with intensely blue spikes of dense flowers resembling bunches of grapes.  (This one is most likely Muscari armeniacum, although there are many closely related subspecies.)  

There are a bunch of differing plant identification apps (see, for instance, this list of plant identification apps).  I've tried a bunch, and PlantSnap works well for me.  

But if you weren't there, live in the field (and since I didn't see you, I bet you were somewhere else)... how could you do this on your laptop?  

I tried the same subimaging trick and made a closeup of just one cluster of flowers.  (Why?  To avoid confusing the matching algorithm with too many parts of the image.)   

And did the same search-by-image search.  Look what Google says--Hyacinths. 

And that's kind of right; at least it's close.  But look down just a bit to the "Visually similar images" 

This looks really good.  Clicking through on any of these blue flower clusters also tells you that it's a Grape Hyacinth, in all of their infinite variety.  

Regular SRS Reader Ramón also used his phone (even though he wasn't there, so he had to do a different procedure) to do the same thing.  

First, he viewed the SRS blogpost on his phone: 

And then he downloaded the image to his phone.  

And then opened the image in Google Photos: 

THEN... he clicked on the Google Lens icon (3rd from the right--looks like a square with a dot in the center and a dot on the lower right edge).  This gave him the result: 

Easy peasy.  



3.  Just past the field of blue flowers was this former church building.  As with many church buildings, it has a very distinctive window shape.  As we know, if you know the precise term for this window shape, it's much easier to search for information about these things.  So... what's the precise term for this window shape?  (NOT the round one...)    

By now you know the trick:  Subimage to just one window (crop tightly!) and do a search-by-image.   As amjeff pointed out, this window is one of a pointed arch (aka a Gothic arch, which is lighter than a rounded arch and spreads the load sideways) or lancet window, so-called because of it's resemblance to a lance's point.  This window design is common in Gothic architecture (or its later reincarnation as Collegiate Gothic, the the late 19th century / early 20th century).  

BTW, for extra credit, is there a specific term for a building like this that was a church, but is no longer a church?? 

To answer this I used my favorite reverse dictionary like this to search for the term that captures this concept:

With this, I found that the term is "deconsecrated" (meaning "removed from its consecrated status as an active, holy church place").  

Although, as amjeff pointed out, such churches are termed "redundant" in Britain (where that term is also used for jobs that are no longer useful or duplicated).  

These terms, lancet window and deconsecrated are perfect for digging more deeply into the ideas.  They're very precise.  

Search Lessons 

Even for a short Challenge, we learned a few things... 

1.  Subimaging is a great trick.  Yes, I know you know this.. but the skill of how to pick the cropping is still something worth learning.  In most cases, you crop to the subimage that other people will most likely shoot.  In the case of the mountains, that particular outcropping of the Flatiron Range is very impressive and very visually distinctive.  That's why I cropped to that sub-piece of the large image.  And what do you know, it worked perfectly. Likewise, when you've got a big image with many identical things in it (such as the pic of Grape hyacinths), crop it to just one representative image.  Too many pieces in an image are confusing to the algorithms.  (This may change in the future, but for now, focus in on just one singular element--try to get just the essential.)  

2.  An app is sometimes the right approach.  When I was walking around, I tried using Google Lens on the hyacinth, but it was being really picky.  Luckily, I have the PlantSnap app on my phone, which worked beautifully.  Take note:  There are MANY apps that have special identification capabilities--be aware of what they are and stay on top of your SearchResearch game.  (We'll talk more about recognition apps in the future.)  

3.  Speaking of speciality apps, remember reverse dictionaries.  They're incredibly handy for going from a vague concept ("buildings that are no longer churches") to a specific term ("deconsecrated").  As you know, if you have the specific term, that's MUCH better than casting around for a general topic.  Specific terms rock... but only if you can find them!  (AND.. be sure to double check that the term means what you think it means!) 


Search on!