Answer: What's the connection?

The short answer is that garum (a kind of fish sauce) was famously made in Pompeii, the city buried by the eruption in 69 AD by the volcano Vesuvius.  The liquid garum sauce was and packaged in amphora for shipment around the Mediterranean.  The major flavor of garum is called umami, a taste discovered and labeled by Japanese professor Kikunae Ikeda (池田 菊苗) in 1908. 

The backstory…

As I mentioned, I was in Barcelona a while back and while touring the Roman ruins there I learned about the method of producing garum, a very smelly process by which fish offal (all the blood, guts, scales, fins, etc.) were all dumped into a vat with plenty of salt and left to ferment in the warmth of the sun for many, many weeks. The liquid that was left after the fermentation was then drawn off the vats and placed into amphorae for distribution. 

This is a mosaic of a garum-filled amphora from the villa of Aulus Umbricius Scaurus, Pompeii.  The inscription reads: G(ari) F(los) SCAM(bri) SCAURI.  (Or, “Garum from Scambri Scaurus.” 

Photo by: Claus Ableiter, on Wikipedia

This sounded fairly disgusting to me until someone pointed out that this kind of fish sauce is actually a major component of things I know and love—Worchestershire sauce or Vietnamese fish sauce (aka nước chấm), both of which I have in my fridge.  Nothing changes your opinion so quickly as finding out that you actually LIKE it and have been eating it for years! 

Still, garum production facilities, such as those at Pompeii or the ones I visited in Barcelona, were kept outside the city walls and usually pretty close to the port (which was usually pretty smelly as-is). 

To solve the challenge:  As several readers pointed out, you COULD clip apart the composite image I made and do a search-by-image for each of the parts.  But you already know how to do that… so let's talk about a different approach. 

Another way to approach this would be to start with the one of the concepts that seems well-defined and work outward from there.  In this challenge, the idea of the “Mediterranean volcanic explosion” seems pretty well-defined, so lets start with:

[ volcanic explosion Mediterranean ]

and do a straightforward visual scan of the results from Image search.  That gave me a lot of dramatic images of red and orange explosions, so I limited the results to black and white to match the image in the banner above.  Once I did that, I quickly spotted that image in the results. That told me it was Vesuvius, and that made me suspect that Pompeii was involved.

My next search was to follow my hunch connect the volcano with Pompeii and with processed food:

[ Pompeii processed food ]

Which led me to a few articles on food processing, including "Food technology in the ancient urban context"  (by Robert Curtis, Department of Classics, U. Georgia).  This was my aha! moment.  Curtis describes the production of fish sauces in vats much like the ones in the photo above.  

So know I want to read about fish sauce in Pompeii. 

[ fish sauce Pompeii ]

then leads to lots of information about garum and other fish sauces: liquamen, allec, and muria.  Check out the Silk Road Gourmet for recipes on how to make your own garum and liquamen.  Careful:  do this far away from your house.

Reading around on this SERP jars very similar to those in the header, and indicated that the process was done outside of the city due to its smell.

Finally, I had to figure out the connection to the professor. I searched for:

 [garum professor ]

and spotted only one name that would be plausibly Japanese in the list.  Clicking through led me to learn about Professor Kikunae Ikeda.  He's the man who first scientifically identified umami as a distinct flavor in 1908.  (And, incidentally, got the world to think about MSG as a flavor enhancer.)  Umami is a loanword from Japanese (うま味) and can be translated "pleasant savory taste". The term is derived from umai (うまい) "delicious" and mi (味) "taste.”  It turns out that our tongue has receptors for L-glutamate, which is the reason you can taste the umami flavor.

And now, for the piece de resistance… Just on a lark I went looking for a modern recipe that uses garum (or the modern version) and found several.  But my favorite has to be spaghetti with grape tomatoes,garlic and garum.    

I have to try this tonight! 

For those of you interested in all of this, it’s worth knowing that there is still an on-going debate about whether or not some garum produced in Pompeii was kosher or not.  (See: http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/biblical-archaeology-topics/the-garum-debate/ )

I have no opinion about this, and I’m not even going to try and dredge up Roman web-sites from 79AD to confirm or deny the rumor. 

Search lesson:  Start with what you can figure out (in this case, the volcano was easiest for me), and work outwards looking for the connections between the ideas.  You’ll often spot them as you scan the SERP looking for interlocks (as I did when I spotted the Japanese professor’s name and was able to track him back to umami and the flavor of garum). 

Search search challenge (12/12/12): What's the connection?

We think of highly processed foods as being a relatively recent phenomenon.  But you might be surprised.   Here’s a photo I took on a recent trip.  

This is a view of an ancient food production site somewhere in the Mediterranean, a place where byproducts were heavily processed into something that was pure yummy goodness.  This pic shows several vats side-by-side.  They're pretty big--maybe 6 feet across and 4 feet deep.  

When I first learned about this, I couldn’t believe it was real, the processing they used seemed to be unsanitary at best, and just weird at worst—but then I actually tasted some and… well, I now have some of this stuff in my fridge (although mine was made more recently).  

On the far left of the top picture is a container that this substance would have been shipped in.  Some places (especially one of those connected with the volcano shown above) were famous for making this stuff.  

Making this stuff was a pretty aromatic process.  Most of the production facilities would have been kept outside the city walls.  But it was such an unexpected and strange production process that I KNEW it had to become a Search Challenge. 

Today’s question (especially for you history buffs):

Q:  What is the connection between a huge & dramatic volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean,  this food-production facility, and the professor shown in the picture above? 

It’s a tasty question, sure to get you salivating! 

Search on!

Answer: Why is that blank spot so special?

ANSWER:  That blank spot (at 450 N. Whisman St in Mountain View) is special because it's the right of way for two pipelines (Bay Division Pipelines 3 & 4) that carry water from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Sierra down to the Pulgas Water Temple (at lat/long 37.48309, -122.31522), and subsequently to the people of the San Francisco peninsula.  

Here’s what I did to answer the question. 

First, I zoomed in a bit on the image to read that sign on the left side of the photo.  It says “Hetch Hetchy Trail”  pretty clearly.  If you squint, you can also see “City of Mountain View,” but you probably already figured that out since I said “I was riding my bike between two Google buildings.” 

My first search was to start with what I knew:

[ Hetch Hetchy trail Mountain View ]

My very first result was a Google Map.  So I clicked through on that to see where it was.  A couple of seconds of exploring with Streetview showed me that the picture is from roughly 450 N. Whisman St., Mountain View.

Given the presence of all the small white boxes and concrete utility sheds, I thought that something odd was going on here.  Look at the other side of the street. 

This wasn’t JUST an empty field—and a look at the larger map suggested something even bigger was going on..  I sketched in the red line to follow those long, narrow property parcels.  

Now I’m suspicious that this might be part of some kind of infrastructure—maybe buried power lines, a gas pipeline right of way, or something similar.  That sequence of long-skinny property lines is just too odd.  And if you zoom out ever farther, you can trace this corridor even farther.  It seems to go to the east and to the north.

At this point I start to get curious about the other piece of data in the challenge.  What’s with that lat/long that was specified?

Another map search shows this at the specified lat/long:

This shows up on the map as the Pulgas Water temple.  And what, pray tell is that?  Search to the rescue:  

[ Pulgas water temple ]

Reveals that this is stone temple-shaped building that commemorates the completion (in 1934) of the Hetch Hetchy  aqueduct. 

Photo from Wikipedia. [ Pulgas Water Temple ]

A ha!  Here’s a connection between the Pulgas Water Temple and the trail in Mountain View. 

I then did a search for:

[ Hetch Hetchy aqueduct Mountain View ]

and discovered a whole raft of stories from the local newspaper about the trail, the possibility of houses being built on this otherwise unused parcel of land, etc etc. See: http://www.mv-voice.com/news/show_story.php?id=542

But it pretty clearly shows that this empty plot is, indeed, the right-of-way for the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. 

Despite all of that, the easement for the pipeline doesn’t really encourage housing built on top of it.  As was noted in the Mountain view Voice in 2007,   -- “The Hetch Hetchy right-of-way is owned by the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission and runs east-west through the city for 3.57 miles, along the path of the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct. To make servicing the massive underground aqueduct possible, no buildings may be built on top of it.” So the development might have been doomed from the very start.  (This is why you do research BEFORE investing a lot of effort in planning buildings that can’t be built!) 

Interestingly, in reading about the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct I looked at the Wikipedia article and found a nice map of the aqueduct   But it doesn’t go through Mountain View!  What’s up with that?  That’s when I noted that the Wikipedia map is WAY out of date.  (Note the pub date of 1922)  Moral:  Check your sources. 

Curious, I poked around a little bit more and found that the aqueduct is actually several different pipes that start at Hetch Hetchy reservoir in the Sierras—including the pipeline that runs through Mountain View—the “Bay Division Pipeline.”  I discovered that this pipes, BDPL, in particular, pipes 3 & 4 go on the southern route through the cities of Fremont, Milpitas, Mountain View, Palo Alto and Woodside. 

[ bay division pipeline "mountain view" ]

(NOTE:  need quotes here, otherwise won’t find the city of MV... too many other "mountains" and "views" in these hits as well.) 

Looking at the 4th result led me to the San Francisco Planning Department, which is the home agency for all things Hetch Hetchy and aqueducty.   A little poking around led to me a fairly long planning document with a reasonably high-res map that confirms that the trail parallels the pipeline of BDPL 3 & 4. 

Here's a piece of their map (from: http://www.sf-planning.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=7946 )

This map, from the owners of the pipelines, clearly shows the connection running from the Sierras, through Mountain View (next to Los Altos) and to the Pulpas Pump Station. 

And, to find more maps, I did an Image search with the query: 

 [  BDPL pipeline map ]

I know now that the technical term “BDPL” was pretty likely to find me planning documents… and in planning documents are often the fascinating details, like this map from SF Water & Sewer, which shows the streets and the BDPLs in detail... 

There are even more detailed maps in the “Crossovers Construction project”

More generally, if you’re interested in this kind of backstory, check out the Aquafornia site, and their article about the aqueduct, "Where does California's water come from?"  

One of our regular readers used Google Maps to track the parcel lines to the east, and found that you can actually see the point where the pipe goes into the east bay hills at 37.54798,-121.931914

The round thing is the connector for the pipeline as it enters the hill, and you can see the easement coming up from the bottom of the picture. 

Search Lessons:  This might be a bit much about pipelines, so let’s take a step back.  What did we learn about search?

1.  Start with what you’ve got.  In this case, we had both the name of the trail (“Hetch Hetchy Trail”) and the lat/long.  Looking at both gave us useful information. 

2.  Look for connections.  Since both trail and water-temple refered to the Hetch Hetchy Aqueduct, it was pretty easy to figure out that we needed to find the track of the aqueduct.  Then, after noticing that some of the maps we looked at were out-of-date, we went on to... 

 3.  Find technical documents using the technical terms you discover.  Words like “aqueduct” seem pretty technical, but nothing bets a good acronym for searchability.  In this case, we discovered that DBPL was the name that the water department planning organization used—so using THAT term in a search is almost guaranteed to work out. 

And lastly.. the John Muir connection?  A search for:

[ John Muir Hetch Hetchy ]

... shows quickly that he worked tirelessly for years to prevent the damming of Hetchy Hetchy (which *was* a beautiful valley in the Sierra, just north of Yosemite).  In the end, he lost the effort… and now water from the Hetch Hetchy valley flows through BDPL 3 and 4 through Mountain View, under a vacant lot. 

Search on. 

Wednesday Search Challenge (12/5/12): Why is this blank spot so special?

The other day I was out riding my bike from one Google building to another and came across this rather odd looking, empty field.  It’s not a park, it’s not a business, it’s not an as-yet-undeveloped tract…it’s just… blank! 

Given that land prices in Silicon Valley are sky high (this is a place where rental costs are figured in dollars/square foot!), it struck me as strange that this place would be so unused. 

Question for today:  Where is this blank spot and why is it blank?  (I'm looking for the street address.)    

For extra credit, can you say what physical connection this place has with the Sierras and 37.48309, -122.31522 ?? 

And… for the gold:  What on earth does John Muir have to do with this blank spot in Silicon Valley?
 

As usual, please let us know HOW you figured this one out (what was your process—let us know so we can all learn from your brilliant search skillz).  AND… HOW LONG did it take you to figure this out? 

Search on! 

1MM #3: Search-by-Image Fu

While Google's Search-by-Image function is great for finding pictures on the web, when you use pictures that you took, it sometimes needs some help in figuring out what to look for.  

Did you know that you can give it a search keyword or two to focus the search?

Here's a quick demonstration of how that works.  

True story:  I found this caterpillar on a park bench in San Francisco one day and took a quick snapshot of it.  What kind of caterpillar is it?  

The 1-Minute-Morceau shows you how I found out.  

Search on.