SearchResearch Challenge (7/13/16): Tools!

The world is full of fascinating tools... 

... and I love to find out what they are and what they're used for.  So, for this week, here are a few Challenges about some really odd, interesting, and unusual tools.  

1.  A tool that's been used by stained glass workers since medieval times is a  fid.  What IS a fid?  And how would you use it? 


2.  What's this tool?  What would you use it for?  For scale, it's about 2.5 cm (1 inch) wide.

3.  What is a languid depressor, and how do you use it?  (And why is does it have such a strange name?)  


4.  When, why, and where would you use a kelp iron?  Can you find a picture of one? 


These searches aren't hard (except for one of them...), but it's a lot of fun.

Next week we'll have something a bit more challenging, so this week is just to have a good time.  Enjoy.

Search on!

Answer: Where's the ship in the pic?

A photo can have lots of information in (and around) it, if only you seek beyond the surface... 

In last week's Challenge I asked "where's the ship in this pic?" and for some information about it.  

A mystery at a beach in an undisclosed location.  If you want the original photo, here's a link to it.

In particular the questions were: 

1. In the above photo, where's the ship?  More specifically, what's the name of the ship? 

2. Were other ships made of concrete by the same outfit that made this ship?  If so, what are their names and where are they now? 

3.  I DO know that this area is popular with sharks.  What kind of sharks would be here?  Any recent sightings?  (I ask because I was thinking about going for a quick dive here.  Should I?)  

4.  (Extra credit)  Not only are sharks somewhere nearby now, but apparently they've been in this area for a loong time.  What evidence can you find that sharks have been near here for a long time? 

To start with, I did the obvious thing and clicked on the original photo link, then zoomed in a bit just to do a bit of visual hunting in the image.  That quickly showed me where the ship is in the above image:  

It's not just any ship, it's a shipwreck.  (A bit like an earlier SRS Challenge to identify a wreck in the Carquinez Straits.)  

It's not hard to pull out the EXIF metadata and figure out that this shipwreck is at (36.969169, -121.905956).  A quick peek in Google Maps shows us this: 

   

The red map pin is the location where I stood to take the photo.  If you go to StreetView at this place, and then rotate until you've closely aligned the image, you see: 

Note that the compass needle is pointing directly to the right.  That means north is to the right, and that this photo is looking due west. 

If you refer back to the map image above, you can see that the SS Palo Alto seems to be moored at the end of that long pier, directly west of where the photo was taken. 

If you now click on the blue link "S.S. Palo Alto" you'll get more information about that ship: 

Including a link on the bottom of the panel to "95 Photos."  Clicking on that gives you a wealth of information, including the observation that this is clearly (another) ship wreck.  

Closeup of the SS Palo Alto.  Note the photo credit to Joe G in the upper left corner, in the attribution panel.  

As we've learned before, other resources can be useful in these searches, including the ever-popular Wikimapia.  When you enter the lat/long to Wikimapia, this is what you see: 

Well.. THIS is fascinating.  But how reliable is the information given in the left panel?  

It's odd because the reference for this information is given as the Wikipedia article about the SS Palo Alto, but most of this information doesn't appear in the Wiki article.  The Wikipedia entry is nice, but it's not nearly as detailed as that info given here. What's going on? 

Since the Wiki article wasn't giving me this information, where did it come from? 

To find out, I selected a phrase from the Wikimapia text that I thought would be pretty rare (also called "low frequency").  I chose the phrase "The S.S. Palo Alto's concrete recipe" and did a search like this: 

     [ "The S.S. Palo Alto's concrete recipe" ] 

and found that it comes from Sandy Lyman's "Central Coast Secrets" web site.  Okay, so who is Sandy Lyman?  

if you read to the bottom of that web page, you'll learn that the information on this page comes from the book Forever Facing South: The Story of the S.S. Palo Alto, (published in 1991 by David W. Heron).  That sounds like a great resource... and then I noticed that the forward to that book was written by Sandy Lyman!  (Searching for Sandy's bio page tells me that he's been a news weatherman, a high school teacher, and on the faculty at Cabrillo College, not far from the S.S. Palo Alto. He's a local historian of the Central Coast of California.)  

Unfortunately, I can't find an online version of this book.  (It's not in Google Books, and it's not searchable in Amazon or Hathi Trust.)  

On the other hand, by searching for the book title, I DID find an article in a local newspaper that drew upon this book as a resource.  

"The ship was towed to Seacliff State Beach in 1930, 11 years after it was built. And for two short glorious years, it was a party boat, complete with swimming pool, dance floor and café. In 1932, in the teeth of the Great Depression, winter storms did their damage to the ship, rupturing the hull, and the company operating it went belly up.

Eventually, the front half of the ship was again made accessible, after the state of California purchased it for $1, according to David W. Heron's book on the Cement Ship, "Forever Facing South." But conditions deteriorated enough to close the ship entirely to the public in the late 1950s.

In the 1980s, said John Hibble, the director of the Aptos History Museum, a local effort spearheaded by local resident Rose Costa resulted in a refurbishing on the ship, with asphalt structural reinforcement and hand rails, allowing people to again venture out onto the front half of the boat. Several years later, after more damage, the ship was closed for good." 

In the process of reading the background on the S.S. Palo Alto, I learned that the ship was made by the San Francisco Shipbuilding Company in Alameda, CA (part of the larger Oakland port area).  In looking for information about this company, I found that there were several ships made of concrete by this company--including the S.S. Peralta, also made by the SF Shipbuilding Company. 

My query was: 

     [ San Francisco Shipbuilding Company concrete ship ] 

which led me to ConcreteShips.org, which has a great compilation of the concrete ships built.  Twelve were built for WW1, and another 24 for WW2.  Most surprising, concrete ships were made all around the world--it wasn't just a Californian thing.  

S. S. Palo Alto shortly after it arrived at the dock where it now resides.

What about the sharks? 

This isn't hard.  The query:  

     [ sharks near S.S. Palo Alto ] 

told me that a better search would be to include the local place name, Aptos, or the name of the beach, Seacliff.  A search like this: 

     [ sharks Seacliff ] 

-- with a time restriction to "Past year" -- returns all kinds of news stories about sharks near the concrete ship.  Group of great white sharks spotted at Seacliff Beach (May 17, 2016... with a photo of the concrete ship in the article.)  Or Great white sharks return to Aptos cement ship (May 16, 2016).  And so on... including Dozens of great white sharks spotted at Seacliff beach  (July 3, 2016, just a couple of days before I wrote the Challenge, again with pictures of the concrete ship in the background).  

Okay... I won't go diving there this weekend! 

And to figure out the history of sharks in the area, I did a search for: 

     [ shark history Seacliff ]  and I did another one with the other local city name... 

     [ shark history Aptos ] 

only to discover that both of them tell me that there were shark teeth fossils embedded in the cliffs along the shore! 

Okay, I modified my query to be: 

     [ shark fossil teeth Aptos ] 

and discovered that there are many fossil teeth in the area, including ones found in the nearby cliffs, just around the corner from the concrete ship.  

Search Lessons

As I said at the start, a photo often has lots more information in it than you'd expect, especially if you did a bit.  What did we do to answer this Challege? 

1.  Zoom in on photos.  When I took the picture, I really didn't see the concrete ship in the distance.  Only by zooming in could I actually notice that there was something odd in the image.  

2.  Look at Google Maps and Wikimapia.  Both have lots of geo-located information, and seems to work especially well for wrecks!  

3.  Check on information that seems misattributed. Sometimes you'll find mistakes, but in this case, we found the information is correct... but from another source.  THAT source turned out to be incredibly useful, once we'd run down the proper reference (and in this case, found the book).  

4.  Keep growing the information sources you seek.  In our case, we're looking for multiple sources of information that mutually confirm what the other has said... and NOT by re-using the same old sources over again.  

Hope you found this interesting.  Look for a new Challenge this coming Wednesday! 

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (7/6/16): Where's the ship in the pic?

Sometimes a photo doesn't just give up its secrets. 

In this week's Challenge, I heard a great story about a nearby place, and went to visit it.  Somehow, I missed the thing I was sent to find.  As you know, sometimes you have to search a bit to learn what all is going on. 

Here's a photo I took on June 30th.  I took it because I'd heard there was a concrete ship somewhere near here... and that surprised me.  A ship made out of concrete?  How would that ever work?  

But I drove to the designated place, and didn't understand.  Where's the ship in this image? 

A mystery at a beach in an undisclosed location.  If you want the original photo, here's a link to it.

The story I heard about this ship was (A) it's somewhere near here, (B) it's made of concrete, and (C) it wasn't the only ship made out of concrete!  Really? Let's turn these questions into this week's SearchResearch Challenge! 

1. In the above photo, where's the ship?  More specifically, what's the name of the ship? 

2. Were other ships made of concrete by the same outfit that made this ship?  If so, what are their names and where are they now? 

3.  I DO know that this area is popular with sharks.  What kind of sharks would be here?  Any recent sightings?  (I ask because I was thinking about going for a quick dive here.  Should I?)  

(and... an extra credit Challenge) 

4.  Not only are sharks somewhere nearby now, but apparently they've been in this area for a loong time.  What evidence can you find that sharks have been near here for a long time? 

This is a fun Search Challenge.  (Let's put it this way, I had way too much fun answering these Challenge questions.  I suspect you will too.)  

Search on! 

Answer: Finding out what hats, badges, and patterns mean...

Hats, Badges, Cloth... 

... are all signifiers -- that is, they all connote much more than you'd think, with meaning and symbolism dripping all over.  

Knowing the backstory is crucial for these kinds of things.  As in my story about the appearance of the   Regimental Band and Pipes from the Citadel their Confederate gray dress uniforms--the hats, the badges, the cloth--all carry a great deal of meaning.    In the Citadel's plaid pattern, the official registry of tartan patterns says that it's "... A variation of the Earl of St. Andrew's ... with an alternate gold and red over check to suggest bravery and excellence..."   

The search for this bit of information was straightforward: 

     [ Citadel Regimental Band and Pipes tartan ]

... note that you need to know that tartan is the name of that particular cloth pattern.  

Once you know that items of clothing are signifiers, what else can you learn from them?  Let's dive in.  

1.  Once upon a time, everyone wore hats.  But in this famous movie, what kind of hat is being worn by the man on the far left?  What's the name of that hat?  And what kind of person would wear such a thing?  

In this case, I know this scene is from the movie Casablanca, I even know that the actor is Claude Rains.  (This is FMOK.  But a simple search-by-image would have told you this much.)  So my quick initial search was for: 

     [ hats worn in casablanca claude rains ] 

but that proved to be too broad.  Lots of great results, lots of great images, but it wasn't precise enough.  So I changed it to: 

     [ Casablanca police hats ] 

and found some good results.. including ones that (when you click through to the landing page) tell you that this hat is called a kepi, a kind of circular hat with a flat brim, sometimes decorated with various kinds of insignia denoting rank.  The word is a loanword from the French term, képi.  

In the US, the kepi is most often associated with the American Civil War. Union Officers were generally issued kepis for fatigue use. A close copy of the contemporary French kepi, it had a sunken top and squared visor. It was often called a "McClellan cap," after the Union (northern) commander of the Army of the Potomac, G.B. McClellan.

2.  Hats vary a LOT from place to place.  Can you figure out the name of this hat?  Where would this hat wearer be from?  

Closeup of this kind of hat... 

Trust me, there's no lat/long information here, and the pineapple is just a distraction.

Well... drat.  I thought I'd cropped the top photo enough that Search-By-Image wouldn't work.  But the good news is that it does work.  It takes you to the complete image and the web page, which tells us that the hats they're wearing are called "lemon squeezers" (so named after the indented shape, which looks a good deal like a traditional lemon juicer device):  

an actual lemon squeezer

Digging a bit deeper, one learns that this distinctive hat shape was worn by the New Zealand’s soldiers and was designed by William George Malone. Originally created for his Taranaki Rifles Regiment, the hat was designed to mirror the outline of Mount Taranaki (giving the men some needed connection with home)... and also to allow water to easily run off in the rain. The hat went on to be adopted first by Malone’s Wellington Regiment and later by the rest of the New Zealand Infantry Division in January, 1916.
3.  What's the name for the kind of badge shown below?  What kind of job does a person wearing these shoulder badges have?  (Hint:  Even though this is an archival photo, people with this job STILL wear these badges today.)  

Once again, Seach-By-Image works for this (although, once again, I tried to alter enough so that it wouldn't!)....  If you search-by-image, you land on a German Colonial Uniforms page, which has this image, and the explanation that his shoulder badges are "musician's swallows' nests," which is a common badge designating a musician in many European military bands.  (As contrasted with epaulettes, which are a shoulder board worn as an insignia of rank on many military uniforms.)  

A search for images with that search term: 

     [ musician swallow's nest ] 

shows all kinds of variations on that theme. 

And, if you search for: 

     [ military musicians ] 

you'll find all kinds of Scottish pipe bands, many of them with uniforms that look like this (though I will note that these are musicians from trumpet section): 

(If you're interested, the hats these guys are wearing are pretty specialized and meaningful as well.  Can you figure out what they're made of?  And.. for extra credit, what country are these musicians from?) 



4.  The pattern of plaid tells you a lot about the place where the wearer (or his military outfit) is from, and with it comes a whole lot of history.  What region of the world is THIS kind of cloth from?

This is a little bit of a trick question.  All along, I've been talking about Scottish tartans and plaids.  But if you spend your time looking through books of plaid patterns, you'll be disappointed.  This is a pretty tropical color scheme.  

ONCE AGAIN... search-by-image is your friend.  You'll quickly learn that these mango, red, and greens might look like a tropical tartan, but in fact it's madras cloth from Madras, India.  Yes, it's a plaid pattern, but note that a tartan is a pattern consisting of criss-crossed horizontal and vertical bands in multiple colors. Tartan is often called plaid in North America, but in Scotland, a plaid is a tartan cloth slung over the shoulder as a kilt accessory, or a plain ordinary blanket such as one would have on a bed.  In the military band context, A full plaid is a long piece of tartan fabric (about 12 yards), traditionally worn as part of a full Highland dress uniform.  A full plaid is pleated the whole way, with half of its length sewn shut (so that the pleats cannot open). Its length is almost twice the height of the wearer. As a military garment the plaid served a practical purpose as a kind of blanket and overcoat in the 18th century. It also provided protection from the constant rains for the soldier's musket and powder.

Search Lessons 

Although I hadn't intended it this way, one of the big lessons for this week is: 

1.  Search-by-image works more often that you'd think.  As you can see from the above examples, it even works when the image is cropped or edited!  

2. As usual, knowing a couple of specific terms really helps focus your search.  In this week's Challenge, the key word was tartan.  


Another Search Challenge tomorrow!  

Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (6/29/16): Finding out what hats, badges, and patterns mean

Several years ago... 

... I went with a friend to the Edinburgh Tattoo. It's a wonderful, gigantic mass of Scottish pipes and drummers, with bands from around the world marching back and forth in formation, skirling the pipes and percussing the drums.  As a former drum major and a Scot-ophile, I thought it was just wonderful!  

(Your opinion about bagpipes might vary from mine, but it was fantastic.
I highly recommend attending if you're in Scotland in the summertime.) 

Massed pipes and drums at the Edinburgh Tattoo.

I sat through the performance with a knowledgeable friend from Edinburgh who was telling me about all of the units and brigades as they marched past.  "That's the Black Watch...and this group is wearing the tartan of Clan Campbell..."  He could tell me huge amounts of the history of each band just from the appearance of the plaid pattern of their kilts, the shape of their hats, and the particular badges they were wearing.  

It made me feel very much an outsider, I just didn't recognize anything.  That is, until the Regimental Band and Pipes from the Citadel (a military college in South Carolina) came onto the field, dressed in Confederate gray uniforms (although I don't think the Confederacy had an official plaid pattern, nonetheless...).  

Suddenly, I knew a GREAT deal about the band that was parading before us--and our mentorship roles were reversed.  When those uniforms marched past, I could tell my friend a lot about the history of the uniform, what the stripes on the arms meant, and what battles were fought--the entire history of Confederate military garb.

That evening I realized how much history and knowledge is carried along in the dress, the badges, the hats, and the patterns that we wear.  

This motivates today's Challenges.  

Hats are a very common sign of place and station in society.  Here are three hats to identify.  Can you figure them out? 

1.  Once upon a time, everyone wore hats.  But in this famous movie, what kind of hat is being worn by the man on the far left?  What's the name of that hat?  And what kind of person would wear such a thing?  

2.  Hats vary a LOT from place to place.  Can you figure out the name of this hat?  Where would this hat wearer be from?  

Closeup of this kind of hat... 

Trust me, there's no lat/long information here, and the pineapple is just a distraction.

3.  What's the name for the kind of badge shown below?  What kind of job does a person wearing these shoulder badges have?  (Hint:  Even though this is an archival photo, people with this job STILL wear these badges today.)  

4.  The pattern of plaid tells you a lot about the place where the wearer (or his military outfit) is from, and with it comes a whole lot of history.  What region of the world is THIS kind of cloth from?

As always, let us know HOW you found out the answers.  

It's okay to say FMOK--"From My Own Knowledge"--if you know, say so!  But if you had to search for it (like I did!), tell us how you did it.  

Answer: The intriguing way a lake can be dangerous

This turned out to be simpler than I expected... 
 

The Challenge this week was to find a lake somewhere in the world that had turned deadly.  How deadly?  And how was it deadly?   

We were looking for a non-poisonous, non-boiling lake... That is, NOT like this one in Yellowstone National Park. 

A boiling lake WILL kill you either with temperature or poisons.
But this isn't what we're searching for this week. 

That's not what we're searching for this week.  Instead, we want to find...  


1.  Can you find a lake somewhere in the world that caused the death of nearly 2000 people?  How could such a thing happen?  (Hint: This happened within the past 100 years, so it's relatively recently.)  

2. Was a large wave of water associated with this bizarre lake event?  If so, how high did the wave go, and what kind of damage did it cause?  (If any.)  

3. Given this kind of watery disaster, how high would the water go up into the sky from the event? 

I thought this would be a bit more of a Challenge than it was.  The talented team of SearchResearchers simply took the clues I gave, and did a search for: 

     [ killer lake ] 

Or.. 

     [ lake kills 2000 people ] 

Everyone discovered that Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, suddenly released a huge quantity of carbon dioxide on August 21, 1986, killing nearly 2000 people who lived nearby by asphyxiation when the bubble of CO2 flowed over their villages.  Tragically, this happened at night, when many people were sleeping, and killed everyone and everything within a roughly 15 mile (24 km) radius.  (Article in Slate.  Article in the NYTimes.)  

Dead cattle near Nyos, August 1986. (P/C USGS)

Lake Nyos (Google Maps link) is roughly circular maar in the Oku Volcanic Field.  A maar is a crater formed when a lava flow interacts violently with groundwater, blowing a giant hole in the ground. The lake is thought to have formed in about 400 years ago and is pretty deep, (682 feet; 208 meters) sitting on a porous layer of rubble, full of leftovers from earlier volcanic eruptions. Carbon dioxide seeps up into the water from below transporting the gas upward and into the deep lake-bottom water. There, under pressure from the water above, the CO2 accumulates, with water pressure preventing the gas from bubbling up.  Instead, it just dissolves into the water. In essence, this unusual configuration is creating very pressurized soda water.  

If the lake were in a different place, seasonal temperature swings would mix the waters, preventing carbon dioxide buildup. Cold weather causes surface waters to become dense and sink, displacing lower layers upward; in spring, the process reverses. But for equatorial lakes such as Nyos and nearby Lake Monoun, these deep layers seldom mix with top layers.  These waters might be unmixed for hundreds of years.

But on that night in 1986, something happened to suddenly cause the waters to mix, bringing the carbonated water from the bottom to the top. One theory is that boulders crashing into the lake set it off.  (There were signs of a recent rockslide nearby.)  Or it could have been a wind-generated wave that hit the surface just wrong, causing a mixing of the layers. As the bottom layers of water saturated with carbon dioxide started coming to the top, dissolved carbon dioxide bubbled out of solution, and the bubbles drew larger and larger until the lake exploded like a huge shaken seltzer bottle. This explosion also brought up iron-rich water, which oxidized at the surface and turned the lake red.

In the process of reading about this, I realized that the USGS (United States Geological Service) probably had a report or two on this, so I did a search for: 

    [ site:USGS.gov Lake Nyos ] 

which shows a number of great results.  

This leads to several very technical reports on the lake's CO2 eruption.  There's a USGS final report with as much detail about the eruption as a geologist might want to read.  (If you're interested in this, I highly recommend this.)   

After reading about this event for a bit, I learned that the technical term for this kind of sudden bubbling up of CO2 from a lake is termed a "limnic eruption"  A quick search for this specialized term teaches us a good deal:  

     [ limnic eruption ] 

What about that wave?  

This search takes us to several more research reports, including ones that tell us about the wave.  The Washington Post reported it as being 82 feet, but a report from the USGS claims that the resulting wave "washed over a promontory that is 80-meters in height..."  

Here are the images that accompany that report:  

Lake Nyos shoreline that's been washed away by a large wave(s). 

If that barren promontory is the same one that was denuded by the post-limnic eruption wave, then it very likely was an 80 meter wave.  (It's difficult to actually know without a better image or a topographic map to tell us the exact elevation, but if those are trees in the foreground, it very well could be 80 meters.)  

And how high did the eruption blow water into the sky?  

To solve this Challenge, I turned to Google Scholar (as a place to find peer-reviewed scientific papers) for a few reports written on the Lake Nyos eruption using the query: 

     [ limnic eruption ] 

... and quickly found this paper by Zhang (U. Michigan department of geology).  In this paper he creates a mathematical model of what happened in August of 1986.  And although he doesn't have a picture of the event on that fatal day, his reasoning is pretty compelling, and leads to this diagram:  

Figure A from Zhang, Youxue. "Dynamics of C02-driven lake eruptions." Nature 379 (1996): 57-59.

... showing that the limnic eruption caused a shower of lake water roughly 300 meters into the air.  (Note also that he's indicated a promontory height of 80 meters.)  The water would have shot up from the surface at a top speed of around 199 mph (320 kph), which is incredibly violent.  

So what's going on with Lake Nyos today?  It's still dangerously full of high-pressure CO2, but there has been an effort to depressurize the lower levels of the lake by dropping a 200 meter tube from the surface to the lower part of the lake.  As you might expect, when you make a connection between the surface and the pressurized bottom of the lake, you get a fountain, which they hope is removing the pressurized CO2 fast enough to prevent a similar disaster from happening in the future... 

The degassing fountain that runs continuously, powered only by force of
expanding gases as the water flows from 200 meters below to the surface of Lake Nyos.
(P/C USGS) 

But of course, where there's one maar waiting to turn over, there might be others. Nearby,  Lake Kivu could be another such lake with a huge CO2 reservoir just waiting for the right trigger to overturn and release its CO2 contents into the atmosphere (USGS report on this hazard). If this happens, it easily kill many more people, as there are around 2M people living nearby... 

Search Lessons 

There are a couple here: 

1.  The obvious searches often work well.  Much to my surprise, a query like [ killer lake ] actually led instantly to Lake Nyos.  Sigh.  The biggest lesson I pick up from this is that obvious queries work... but only if you have some kind of target in mind.  ( [ killer lake ] isn't a query any normal person would do unless they were looking for something like the story behind Lake Nyos.)  

2.  Checking a known expert site (e.g., USGS.gov) is a great strategy for getting in-depth articles.  While it's easy to find lots of articles on Lake Nyos, scholarly articles are best when they come from a known source that does a lot of work in this area. 

3.  Specialized terms, when you learn them, are great!  This is a lesson we've seen a bunch--when you see these special terms (or phrases, such as limnic eruption), use them!  

4.  Triangulating multiple sources is a requirement.  As you see, there are reports of the tsunami being 80 feet... or 80 meters.  That's a huge difference.  When you're doing research like this, keep looking around--you might find very different data (or points-of-view) around a topic, even things that should be easy to verify.  


Take care, if you find yourself next to a temperate, carbonated lake that hasn't turned over recently!  
    

Search on!