mortiz080

You'd think this is easy.. .  But in fact, answering a simple question like "What are those light patches on the ground?" turns out to open up a huge can of worms.  I spent waaaay too long on this (but had a lot of fun in the process).   As you remember, on a recent flight back to San Francisco, I was traveling northward over Santa Cruz and noticed several distinct light patches on the earth below.  Here's a map of the light patches I saw.  (I actually noticed a bunch, but let's start with just these. Once we figure out how to identify such features, you can go back to the original map and start identifying other features that YOU notice when flying.)    So...  1. What ARE those light patches on the ground?  2.  Is there any reason that they would be in a line like this?  What's special about this particular are that would cause light patches like this?  To get you started, the patch on the far left of the image is at:...

Flying is a curious thing to do.  Not only is it miraculous (humans moving through the air at 10km in an aluminum tube), but it gives one a very different perspective on the land below.  When I fly, I'm constantly looking out the window at the land and sea below, usually wondering what it is that I'm seeing.   On a recent flight back into San Francisco airport, I was traveling northward (from Los Angeles) over Monterey Bay. And just after we crossed the bay and were passing over the coastal town of Santa Cruz, I noticed several distinctly light patches on the earth below us.  Here's what I saw from my seat, with red arrows marking the light patches I could see from the plane and the yellow dotted line marking the flight path:  One of the points of this blog is to teach us the fine art of curiosity--in some ways, I write to figure out what triggers a curious question , and then how to find the answer with clever online research methods.   In this c...

Surprise!  That crazy instrument is a real thing, albeit a bit odd.      From last week, our Challenge was to figure out if this illustration (from a concert program) was a real instrument, or just someone's fancy.    The Challenge was:  1.  Is this a real instrument?  Or is it just a made-up thing?  If it's real, what would you call it?  2.  Can you find the original source of this illustration?  When and where was it first published?   As several SRS regulars pointed out, right-clicking on the image (or doing a Search-By-Image ), quickly finds many instances of the "full image," or at least the rest of the instrument and the person playing it.  This is what I see in my SERP:  Now you can see that the more complete image shows the entire circular horn, with the rest of the body standing in the landscape.   If you click on any of these links, you quickly learn that this instrument is the cornu...