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.  

1MM #2 - Redlined Spelling

I didn't mean to make this a series, but I pointed this out to someone last week, and they had NO idea this was true.  So here's 1MM #2, why you get those red underlines on your text?  It's not just randomness, but actually something really useful!  

If you CONTROL- on those redlines, your computer will pop-up a set of options... including some possible re-spellings.  Handy, eh? 

NOTE:  Control-Click on a Mac is the moral equivalent of RIGHT-Click on a Windows machine.  (Many thanks to Ramon for pointing this out!)  

Answer: Will the Plex be underwater?

Fast Answer:  This one is too close to call! 

This challenge is quite typical of real-world search tasks--you often can’t just plug in the search terms and hope to get an answer.  A little search chaining and data validation is required to answer a series of questions and link them together to find the answer.  

Let's start at the top.  I assume you know that “the Plex” refers to “the Googleplex,” the name of the main complex on Google’s campus in Mountain View.  

BUT... if didn’t already know that, you'd have to figure out what I meant first.  This would be step 1:

 [ the plex ] 

And from a quick scan of the SERP, you'll learn that "the Plex" is shorthand for "the Googleplex" (which is where I took the picture above).

It's also just one step from searching for either: 

[ the plex ]  

or 

[ Googleplex ] 

...and you can easily find that the Plex is at 37.422°N 122.084°W – plug that into Maps.Google.com and you’ll see our campus with that lat-long marker just outside the window from my office.  As you can see by the location of the Googleplex, you’ll see it’s pretty close to the waters of San Francisco bay.  So this possibility of flooding after a 10' rise is a real worry! 

Now you know WHERE to look.  

Next step—determine the elevation of our location in the Plex.  

There are a few ways to do this. 

1.  Look at a topographic map.  This is the classic way to look up elevations.  (By which I mean that it's the way I used to look up such information pre-Google.)  To do this these days, I first searched for: 

[ USGS maps ] 

which got me to USGS.gov -- after a click, I found their map locator page.  I plugged in the street address of the Plex and found there were a couple of options open to me--the "Palo Alto" quadrangle map or the "Mountain View" quadrangle.  I chose the 1997 "Mountain View" map and downloaded the 17Mb PDF file from USGS.gov  

Here I clipped out the relevant part of the USGS "Mountain View" quad and dropped a Google-style red pin where the Plex now is.  (This map wasn't updated to show the Googleplex buildings.) 

As you can see, the point of the pin is right between the red "9" (meeting 9 feet elevation) and the 10-foot contour line that I've marked.  

Of course, the data accuracy here LOOKS better than it really is.  While USGS is famous for measuring elevation accurately, the smoothness of the contour line implies a level of precision that's not really there.  It's probably quite close to correct, but let's keep looking for additional data sources.  

Another approach would be... 

2.  Find a tool to get the elevation.  A great general heuristic for these kinds of search questions (that is, when you're looking up data that someone else has a great deal of interest in) be sure to look for a tool (that is, a web-application) that already does what you're trying to do.  

To find another data resource, I did the query:  

[ how to find elevation ]  

This leads me to a number of different elevation tools, but a very nice one is at:    http://www.daftlogic.com/sandbox-google-maps-find-altitude.htm

Plug in the lat-long and find this spot is recorded as 12 feet above the mean sea level. 

What I like about this site is that they also show you the code for how THEY get the elevation.  (If you read the code, they use Google’s Maps API to ask for the elevation at that location, returning values in feet and meters.) 

3.  Use Google Earth.  I then remembered that Google Earth ALSO has a 3D model of the earth, and what's more, it shows you the elevation of the point you've selected at the bottom of the page!  Here you can see the exact location of our lat/long point (in the middle of the umbrellas and tables set out for lunchtime.  (The white lines are big, decorative beams, one of which is shown in the picture at the top of this post.)  And, as you can see, Earth puts the elevation at 13 feet.  

That's encouraging, but don't stop searching just because you found an answer you like!  

4.  Find a tool that models sea elevations.  I then realized that there are lots of people interested in modeling sea rise, so I thought I could find a tool that would give me that data directly.  To find such a tool, I started my search with:  

[ sea rise map ]

Again, several different tools appeared, so I looked at the one from Climate Central ( sealevel.climatecentral.org/ )  I navigated their UI and dropped in my lat/long to find their 

http://sealevel.climatecentral.org/surgingseas/place/cities/CA/San_Francisco#show=cities&center=15/37.4231/-122.0751&surge=10

which suggests that it will be underwater.  (The photoimagery illustrates the part that would be submerged, including the Plex.  The part that's white is still high-and-dry.)  

On the other hand, a similar tool at Geology.com shows that we'd be on a peninsula with a rise of 3 meters (9.8 feet).  

http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/san-francisco.shtml  -- which (at 3m rise) shows that we’d be on a peninsula, just barely out of the water.  

The thing I like about THIS map is that the author explains the limits of the accuracy of his data set (a practice I find deeply encouraging—I wish more places would do this kind of thing).  See:  http://blog.firetree.net/2006/05/18/more-about-flood-maps/

This analysis suggests that ALL of these maps have a margin of error that's pretty big--certainly within the range of watery-ness for the Googleplex.  

And when you consider that "elevation" is defined as "height above the average high-tide and low-tide points in that region." it's pretty clear that this case is too close to call.  We have some measurements that put the Plex out of the water by 1 or 2 feet, while others say it's 1 or 2 feet underwater.  Since the tide will go in and out in this part of the Bay by +/- 3 feet, I'd say we'd better start developing that beachfront!  

(And luckily, FWIW, my house is at 25 feet elevation above the average sea level in the Bay.  I'll be good for a few more years.)  

______________________

Search Lessons:  There are multiple points to make here. 

1.  Data varies a lot.  As you can see from the four different sources we found 4 different elevations.  Sometimes this comes from genuinely different measurements, and sometimes it comes from handling the data in slightly different ways.  I doubt that the lat/long for the Googleplex cafeteria was actually measured carefully (at least in publicly available way--I'm sure some surveyors have done this), and so all measurements we see here are approximations.

2.  Looking for a data set with analysis tool is often a great way to start.  This is an important lesson--I often see people starting to collect the raw data to answer a question, and not realize that other people have already done all of that work... and done it far more extensively and carefully than they will.  I know it seems obvious--but ALWAYS check to see if the data you're trying to collect isn't already out there.  (But on the other hand, I find it's often incredibly valuable to spot check other people's data--if only to understand what the data issues are for yourself.)  

3.  Chaining search steps together.  If you already knew what "the Plex" was, that's one step you didn't have to do.  But if you didn't know that, you' d have to go look up what I meant by that phrase first, then look up the elevation.  This is a simple chain of length 2, but more complex tasks might require chains of 3, 4, or even 9 steps to get to where you want to go.  

______________________

So in the final analysis, the elevation of the Plex is somewhere between 9 and 13 feet.  But given the tides, it's probably right on the edge of a 10 foot sea level rise.  We don't need to pack our bags yet, but it's worth paying attention to the level of the water! 

Search on!