mortiz080

As you probably noticed...  ... I'm slow in answering the last Challenge.  This time, I'm not in Fiji (alas), but I'm flying all around the east coast of the US.  I left the Googleplex last Thursday, and will be in motion for 15 days, giving talks here and there, attending various Information School board meetings, and teaching classes on how to be a better searcher.   You'll be happy to know that most of the material in my "better searcher" classes is almost completely drawn from SearchResearch.  So your comments and thoughts over time have worked their way deep inside the structure of my classes.   Today, I'm here. (Can you figure out where this is?  warning, there's no EXIF metadata here...) I'm heading to Pensacola (Florida) to give a talk about " Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, or Machine Intelligence?  Does it matter to the user? "   It probably won't surprise you to learn that I don't think it matters, but the...

A couple of weeks ago... I posted a few fishy pictures with the cryptic question "Have any ideas where these are, or where I am?"  The SearchResearchers rose to the Challenge and were able to identify my location pretty well!   Regular Reader Chris wrote in that:  Picture 1 looks like some sort of Serranid- I'm guessing an Anthias which are widespread in the South Pacific, but it doesn't look like the endemic species for Fiji, but comparing google image searches for [anthias fiji] and [antihas vanuatu] tends to lean towards Fiji as the location   Picture 2 is a Clown fish- once again could be anywhere in South Pacific- The yellow colour is different to what I normally see in Australia   Picture 3 I don't recognise- maybe a clown fish again - I'm guessing this is the one that identifies the island group   Picture 4 is a yellow tail fusilier - very common in both Vanuatu and Fiji While Remmij and Ramón both identified the fish and the geography those...

I don't mean to be macabre, ..but it's nearly both Halloween and the Día de los muertos . They're coming up fast during this time of the year.  Naturally, that makes me think about those souls that have passed on before us, and being a naturally inquisitive person, I wonder about how it is that people die... in general.  Do you know off-hand?  I don't.   Before you answer that question, give it a thought:  What's your intuition about this?  In the US, what fraction of people die from car accidents?  It is as much as 10% of all deaths in a year?  15%?  Or is it as low as 2%?  How many people die from other kinds of accidents, like falls from a high ladder or slipping on a banana peel?  Is that a significant fraction, or is it less than 1%?   What of different medical conditions?  What fraction of people die from heart attacks vs. cancer vs. infections?  Which is a higher proportion of all deaths--medic...

And now, the exciting conclusion!   4.  There's a story about the lake below that predates its existence.  Before the lake was formed by building a dam, what was here?  And why would they build a lake on top of it? To solve this one, you need to first do a Search-By-Image (a search method we've covered before), and you'll find that this is the Altus reservoir (aka Lake Altus-Lugert near King Mountain, Oklahoma.  A quick search for:       [  underwater town lake Altus ]  tells us that under the water lies the former town of Lugert.  F ounded in 1902, Lugert (named for German immigrant Frank Lugert) was destroyed by a tornado on April 27, 1912.  When the reservoir runs dry, you can can see the old foundations of the houses which used to stand in the area.  In 1926, the nearby city of Altus passed a bond measure to build a dam across the North Fork of the Red River as a source of city water, flooding the town of Lug...

Water sometimes hides many details.  ... and sometimes it hides a story as well.   As you remember from the SRS Challenge of 2 weeks ago:  Why are each of these locations very interesting?  1.  What's going on with all of these blue lines in the image below?  You can find this oddly arranged water/earth combination at  Google Maps link .  There are several stories to discover here, but first--What is this? Why the strange water shapes?  This one's not hard:  Just open Google Maps and zoom out a bit and switch to Satellite view:   You'll see an obvious structure at the northeast corner of the long stripes of water.  If you zoom in a bit on that, you'll get the answer quickly.  It's the Turkey Point Nuclear Power Plant.  Then, when you do the obvious search on Google, you'll see a few likely query completions as you enter your query.  PAY ATTENTION to these as you type--they're often great clues as to wha...