REMINDER: MOOC on Advanced Power Searching with Google starts tomorrow!

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably enjoy the MOOC that I'll be running beginning tomorrow, Jan 23, 2013.  

It's the "Advanced Power Searching With Google" Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).  This class will cover some of the advanced research methods that we discuss in the blog every week. 

Sign up now and join in the fun.  Note that this is an ADVANCED course, so we're assuming that you've already got a good grasp of the basics covered in our first MOOC.  

It should be a good deal of fun.  Sign up!

As an example, here's a sample challenge... Can you solve this? If  you can, you're probably ready to take the class! 

Search on! 

Answer: What's the story of the yellow guy?

After last week's challenging challenge, I figured everyone would like a fun puzzle, one that shows you an aspect of life that you don't normally see.  I certainly don't try tracking down graffiti artists by internet searches... but this message from Robert M was just too good to resist.  

As most people did, my first search was straight-forward: 

 [ graffiti crosswalk yellow man ] 

Why didn't I try image search first?  Because I had no hope that I could find a match out there.  The image that Robert sent me was at an odd angle, rotated, etc etc.  Maybe it would have worked, but I figured that I'd just try regular web search first... and it worked out pretty well.  

After looking around a bit, I found that this figure is called "Stickman" or "Stikman" -- and once you've got THAT bit of information, it's possible to find LOTS of collections of images of the yellow man, usually in crosswalks... but sometimes in other places.  

So.. while the evidence seems to point to an artist tagged as "Bob," given the distribution and variation in styles of Stikman, it's more likely that there are a number of Bobs out there, making the world a bit more playful and light.  

Stephan Lowman from the Washington Post wrote up a story about "Bob" that seems genuine and plausible.  But you know how guerrilla art movements go... this is probably just the tip of the iceberg, the shape of which is probably unknowable.  

Long live Stikman!  

Search on... for more Stikmen.... 

Wednesday search challenge (1/16/13): What's the story of the yellow guy?

Every so often someone will write in with a fun search challenge.  And a while ago, regular reader Dave M., send in this question:

Enclosed is a picture I took in downtown Chicago while crossing the street.  The YELLOW blotch on the crosswalk looks like a little man to me.  I didn't think it very significant until I was on a trip to Washington D.C. where I saw the YELLOW blotch again in the crosswalk.  Now I am on a mission to get an explanation. 

I was able to figure this one out in about 3 minutes.  

How long will it take you?  What's the story with the yellow blotch?  


Also... a quick reminder:  If you're a regular reader of this blog, you'll probably enjoy the MOOC that I'll be running beginning next Wednesday, Jan 23, 2013.  It's the "Advanced Power Searching With Google" Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).  This class will cover some of the advanced research methods that we discuss in the blog every week. 


Sign up now and join in the fun.  


Search on! 

Answer: When will the sun hit the beach?

The solution isn’t as simple as you might think…  As is always the case with a question like this, you’ve got to be sure to check the ground truth of the place.  In this case, if you go to Wailea beach on Google Maps or Google Earth, you’ll quickly find out that there’s a BIG mountain to the east of the beach.  That’s Haleakala, and at 10,023 ft (3,055 m), it could cast an early morning shadow on the western side of Maui.

Guess what?  It does. 

So solving the challenge isn’t as easy as just doing a query for:

[ sunrise Wailea Beach ]

or using one of the sunrise calculators that are out there.  In this case, what I did was the following.

(Note to the reader:  Even if you don’t care for the math part, follow along.  I’ll show you how make even the math really simple.) 

1.  First, check to see if we need to take the mountains into account.  

Haleakalā is big, it’s REALLY big.  Here, I used Google Earth to fly down to Wailea Beach and look due east to quickly check and see if I need to worry about this.

... and a real-life shot (with buildings and trees) to give a sense of perspective.  

That massif means the sun won’t actually hit the beach until it comes up over the mountain ridgetop!  So, to solve this question really means figuring out when the sun will clear the top of the mountain.  And to figure THAT out, we need to figure out the angle from the horizon to the ridge of the mountain.  (Because once we know THAT angle, we can figure out how long it will take the sun to climb above the ridgeline.) 

Here’s a diagram of what I mean.  To figure out the angle Θ we need to know the height of the mountain if you look due east from the beach and the distance from the beach to there.  In other words, we need to know the elevation and distance of the mountaintop to the beach.

2.  How do we get the elevation and distance information? 

There are at least three ways.  

   (A) Use Google Maps and Terrain View

   (B) Use Google Earth and "Elevation Profile"

   (C) Use Google Earth's "Show Sunlight" Tool.  

Here's how they work.  

A.  Use Google Maps and Terrain View.  One way to get the data we need is to draw a line due east from Wailea Beach and then look on Google Maps in Terrain view to find the tallest point on that line by reading the contour elevations. 

Here, I’ve gone to Wailea Beach in Google Maps, then used My Maps (and then “Create a Map”) to draw a single line from Wailea Beach eastward. 

I then switched into Terrain view on Maps to see what the contour lines would say. 

If you zoom in enough, you can see that the highest contours on this line are around 7700 feet—it’s a little hard to read on the map, but I was able to use my classical map-reading skills to read it off.

 The Maps “Create a Map” told me that the distance from Wailea Beach to the ridgeline is 8.5 miles.  So I could calculate the angle now. 

But I want to show you ANOTHER way to get this elevation + distance information as well by using Google Earth. 

B.  Use Google Maps, Create a Path, then use "Show Elevation Profile."   If you fly to Wailea Beach in Google Earth, you can then create a path in Earth and ask for the elevation profile along that path. 

Here’s how to get this information this way... 

First, on your Google Earth view of Wailea Beach, use the path tool to define a path from the beach to the top of the ridge.  (It's just a straight line with two points.)  I’m going to call that path “East from Wailea.”  The Path tool is under the "Add" menu in Google Earth.  

 (Note that this is very similar to what I did in Maps.) 

Now, once you’ve created the line, you can right-click (or Control-Click on a Mac) and selection “Show Elevation Profile.”  

That will then create the elevation profile along the path you’ve defined.  Since your path “East from Wailea” is the line that the sun will shine, you can get the elevation and distance easily—by looking at the chart, you can see the top of the ridge is 7692 feet and 8.78 miles away.  

NOW we know almost everything we need.  Let’s make a simple chart with our information:

We just need to figure out what Θ is.  This just takes a little trig.  To need to figure out  the angle we need the trig relationship for that angle.  YOU might remember what that identity is off the top of your head, but I wanted to be sure, so I did a quick search for:

[ trig identities ]

and found a number of nice pages that explained to me that what I needed was something like the tangent function.  The tangent of an angle, I was reminded, is:

        opposite / adjacent = tan ( Θ )

So, in this diagram, the side "opposite" our desired angle is just the elevation (or the height) of the mountain. To change the elevation (which I know in feet) into miles,  I just convert the elevation from feet into miles using Google Convert, that is, do the query like this:  

[ 7692 feet  in miles ]

… or 1.45 miles.  NOW I can do compute the tangent.  More Google Calculator

      1.45 / 8.78 = tan ( Θ )

     1.45 / 8.78 = 0.1651

But remember that what I really  want is the ANGLE with 0.1651 as the tangent.  So back to Google Calculator, and plug in the numbers:

[ arctan (0.1651) ]

…. and  we get  0.16362  -- but remember THAT’S in RADIANS! 

One more Google Conversion: 

[ 0.16362 radians in degrees ]

and we find that the angle we've been trying to compute all along is  9.3749 degrees. 

SO NOW… to figure out when the sun will hit the beach, we have to find the sunrise time with a simple:

[ sunrise Wailea ]

and find that it rises at 7:04AM. 

Okay.  Now by doing a small computation, you can figure out that the sun moves about 0.27 degrees / minute in Hawai’i these days (given that the sunrise is at 7:04 and sunset is at 6:00PM). 

Last step—how many minutes will it take the sun to climb 9.3749 degrees? 

9.3749 / 0.27 =  34.7 minutes

So… now we have our answer.  

If then sun rises at 7:04, then sun should hit the beach 34.7 minutes later,  at 7:39AM, Hawai'i time.  

Finale:  Since I’m actually *here* in Maui, I went out to the beach this morning and took the following picture of the sun coming over the ridge at…. 7:42.

Three minutes off.   I'll take that as success.  I attribute it to inexactness in my drawing the line from Wailea.  At that point on the ridge, the line is dropping quickly.  If I measured just a bit too off the actual place (rather than due east), that would account for the 3 minute discrepancy. 

C.  Use Google Earth "Sunlight Tool"   A third option is to use the "Sunlight Tool" that's built-into Google Earth.  

To use the tool, you fly to the place of interest (Wailea), and then move the slider along until you see the sunlight hit your point of interest.  

The big problem with this method is that it's not very exact.  You can see that the sunlight hits Wailea beach well after sunrise, but it's hard to tell precisely when the sun comes over the ridge.  It's a great general tool, but not really precise enough for our purposes.  

BIG KAHUNA LESSON FOR THE DAY:  As I've said before, when you start doing your research, search for tools to help out with your task.  In this case, it's not hard to search for the elevation profile tool in Google Earth.  All you need to do is to conceive of the idea that there just might be a tool for your task.  Then search for it.  In this case, I searched for: 

[ Google Earth elevation tool ] 

and I found several blog posts about it.  I honestly didn't know it was there when I initially asked this question.  Now I'm a little bit smarter, and have a power tool for future projects.

Search on! 

Wednesday Search Challenge (1/9/13): When will the sun hit the beach?

Ah.. the life of a research scientist!  I’m attending a conference on Maui this week.  (And no, I really haven’t been to the beach… yet.  So far, I’ve been indoors for 3 days straight.) 

I DO hope to get to the beach tomorrow morning.  However, I also don’t want to get a sunburn (or miss any of the great talks that start early in the morning).  

Since I’m an early riser, I’m planning on going to the beach at the crack of dawn and hang out there until the sun hits the beach.  Then, the moment the sunlight strikes those golden sands, I'll head back inside and get to work, giving me a few idyllic moments of walking along the beach.  

I think this is a non-trivial problem to figure out.  But I worked it, and was surprised by the answer.  I suspect you will be too.  

Hint:  Where is Wailea Beach?  Why is that location important? 

And it leads to today’s sensemaking problem to work out..

     Question:  If I’m at the beach at 20.68183, -156.44322 (Wailea Beach Park), 

           what time will the sunlight hit the beach sand there tomorrow morning,
           January 10th, 2013? 

Be sure to tell us how long it took you to figure this out, and HOW you worked it out!! 

Search on!

1MM #6: Finding Maps

Sometimes you want to find a business or a particular thing in the real world.  That's what Google Maps is for... go to Maps.Google.com and run your query in the Map.

But SOMETIMES you want to find a Map.... that is, a collection of things of a particular kind.  

By using site: you can search for just Maps.

Here's a quick 1MM (1-Minute-Morceau) for you to illustrate the reason why you sometimes want to search on regular Google and sometimes you want to search on Maps.Google.com 

Search on! 

Answer: What's the connection between these two places?

The short answer is that the building on the left is the Vedanta building (the “Old Temple”) on Webster Street in San Francisco.  It’s owned by the Vedanta Hindu organization, which also owns an ashram site in the San Antonio Valley very near Lick Observatory (that building on the right).

Let me tell you why I asked this question…

First, what I said is true—I really was walking down the street and found this amazing place, then wondered what it was.  That was pretty simple.  A quick search by image found it (or, as I was walking down the street, a quick shot with my Android phone and the use of Google Goggles to identify it). 

But the general idea here is that there are often connections between things—in this case, between two buildings—and a sophisticated searcher often wants to figure out what those connections are. 

It’s a bit like being an investigative reporter running down a story.  They’ve got multiple people, places and things they’re trying to link together.  How do they find the common elements, the threads and links that tie everything together into a story?

In this case, you knew there was a connection because I told you there was.  The question for you is to figure out what that connection was.  Here’s what I did to find the connection… First, using your favorite image editing tool, take my composed picture and break it into two parts—the left and the right side.  Then…

 1. Use Search-by-Image to find that the picture on the left is the Vedanta building on Webster Street in San Francisco.  That’s not hard.  I poked around a little bit to read the history of the place, learning that it was built in 1904 by Swami Vivekananda, who founded the Vedanta society in California in 1900.  This place (now called the “Old Temple”) on Webster Street was purchased for $1,800 at a time when the neighborhood was still marked by empty sandlots, market gardens, and nursery operations.  Because it was on the western edge of the growing city, it was spared in the massive firestorm following the 1906 earthquake that destroyed much of the rest of the city.  

Joseph A. Leonard was the architect and worked with the second leader of Vedanta, Swami Trigunathiandaji, on the design. The first two floors were completed in 1905. Leonard a large Edwardian structure with many Queen Anne-style touches.

Then, in 1907-08, Swami Trigunathiandaji directed the design of an exuberant third floor.  This is what caught my eye…  There are five hollow domes and graceful, lobed arches of the gallery on the upper floor. 

2.  Then to figure out the second picture, you can once again use Search-by-Image to find out that this is the Lick Observatory on Mount Hamilton.  Built in a Classical Revival style, was constructed between 1876 and 1887, with money from James Lick, a piano-maker and real-estate magnate in San Francisco. In 1887 Lick's body was buried under the future site of the main telescope as his memorial (better than the alternative he’d planned: a pyramid larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza in downtown SF).

But now, what possible connections are there between the two? 

To find out, I started looking for combinations of ideas linking the two together.  I started with a few obvious combinations of key terms from each location (now that I know what they're called):  

   [ Vedanta San Francisco Mount Hamilton ]

   [ Vedanta Lick Observatory ]

And quickly found that they built an Ashram (also spelled “Ashrama”) out in the San Antonio Valley, “Shanti Ashram,” just below Mt. Hamilton.    

Here’s where I found out: the Ashram was built on 160 acres of land that was given to them by a devotee.  The land was around eighteen miles southeast of Mt. Hamilton, California, the site of Lick Observatory. 

While that’s good information, I wanted something a bit more precise for a location, so I did the obvious query: 

   [ shanti ashram ]

and found that the Santa Clara Valley Water district raingauge recorder has a web page with a rain gauge at the Ashram!  That page gave me the lat/long:   37.310, -121.470  

On Google Maps, I just dropped that lat/long in and then did a search for Mount Hamilton.  Plugging in the lat/long drops a green arrow in the map, while searching for the observatory shows up as a Google Map red drop pin.  In addition, you’ll see an purple address balloon for 42210 Upper San Antonio Valley Rd, Mt Hamilton, CA, which is the address of the Ashram.  You can zoom in a bit and actually find their “Meditation Shack,” which still stands (and is apparently the only permanent structure on the site). 

This might be enough of a connection, but the reporter in me was curious about other possible connections.  So I checked in Google Books, hoping to find out something more.  Sure enough, the query:

   [ Vedanta Lick Observatory ]

in Google Books leads to all kinds of discoveries, including a book called “Vedanta in the West: The Ramakrishan Movement in the UnitedStates” which points out (on pg. 58) that the swami assigned a student the “specific task of synchronizing all of the clocks [ in the Webster Street building ]with the Lick Observatory.” 

And, since it’s really the only road into the San Antonio Valley, people travelling to the Ashram must have certainly travelled past the Lick Observatory. 

Search Lesson:  When looking for the connection between two places / people / sites, you sometimes need to look for the points of contact between them, exploring the fringes of each concept, looking for the places where they intersect.  In this case, combining the two key terms (Vedanta and “Lick Observatory”) led pretty quickly to the Ashram, which is the link I was looking for. 

Search on!