Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 38

Answer: What are these three things?

This was supposed to be simple... 

... but as we know, even simple Research Questions can sometimes be more complicated than you'd think.  

Here's what I did in each case... 


1.  I've got a BIG (4 meters tall!) trellis of green beans growing in my garden.  On Monday, I found this growing on stalks.  Do I need to worry about them?  Will they eat up all my beans?  What should I do?  
So... what IS this creature? 

Here it is on my thumb for scale: 


And a fairly in-focus closeup.  The colors are even more striking in real life! 


I first did what many of you did... Search-by-Image.  Here's what I found.  Looks plausible, yes? 


But as I worked my way through the images, there are lots of SIMILAR bugs, but nothing quite right.  The dots aren't in the right place, and none of them had the orange-colored epaulettes at the shoulder.  
So I modified the query and tried again--but no dice.  
I thought that there MUST be other images of this fairly dramatic bug on the web, so I changed my search tactic and went to Yandex's search-by-image tool. Lo and behold, this is what I found: 

That's impressively good.  My uploaded image matches pictures 1, 2, and 4 really well. The first two organic results (from iNaturalist) look like the perfect match.  
Even better is the next result (just below the screencap) from Wikipedia identifying this bug as a  Nezara viridula .  Specifically, this is the third instar nymph of this bug, known colloquially as a southern green stink bug (in the USA), southern green shield bug (UK) or green vegetable bug (Australia and New Zealand).  It's a plant-feeding stink bug that goes through a number of developmental stages (known as instars).  This developmental sequence from the Nezara viridula article shows the various stages really well.  Take note of the 3rd instar--that's our bug.  Same shape, same yellow dots, same orange dots on the shoulders.  (Click on the image to see it full-size.)  And that explains why I don't see them any more--they've all moved on to the 4th instar and are full adults (by now).  

For those of you who thought it was a kind of ladybug (aka a "ladybird beetle"), you assumed too much.  If you search for a [ ladybug with yellow dots ] you find something that looks a lot like this, but you've led the witness (i.e., the search engine).  Careful! 

2.  This is a diagram of an important part of a 3-hole punch that's currently broken.  It's an aluminum metal pin with a collar-like-thing around the middle.  That's the part that is missing, so the pin keeps slipping out onto the floor when I use it.  I want to buy a new one… but... What do I call this?  How can I find this online?
I tried to get a good picture of this part, but could never get a good enough photo to use.  Here's my sketch.  

 The pin is about 1 inch long (2.5 cm) and the "collar" clearly snaps into a groove around the center.  (It's also a bit more circular than my sketch, but you get the idea.)  
What IS this gizmo?  How do you search for something like this? 
My first inclination was to search for: 
     [ pin and clip ] 
but that ended up showing my lots of  pins that had  a hole in them and a cotter pin.  That's close, but not quite right.  This is what I saw: 

And that's not bad!  In the first row, 4th from the left, it's described as a "pin and E-clip."  Which is a good answer.  But when I looked at the site, it's clear that this is because the clip is shaped like an E.  You can't see it in my drawing, but it's actually shaped more like a "C."  
So... 
I modified my query to be:          [ pin c clip ] 
and got these results... 


Look at the first result in the second row:  That's called a clevis Pin/C clip.  Useful!  This is close, but I'm looking for exactly what I drew.  
Finally, I decided to be specific, adding in terms that described the exactly what was special about my goals... and did a search for  [ clevis pin groove clip ]  and found this! 


See that sketch in the upper left?  THAT's what I was trying to draw!  
And now I know what it is.  

3.  I just got  a new piano.  Hurrah! I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.  But the place where it will sit in the house is fairly sunny.  What should I use to cover it to protect from sun damage? What material should it be made of?  (Keep in mind that this instrument has a new finish.) 

After futzing around for a while reading various help forums and Q/A sites, I FINALLY realized that people must sell piano covers... I can't be the only person with this goal! 

     [ piano covers for sale ] 

and found a number of sites that sell piano covers (including ones that are designed and cut for exactly THIS piano, a Kimball baby grand).  Reading through the descriptions I found they're made of either Mackintosh fabric (a kind of rubberized fabric that's made of multiple layers--read the fascinating backstory of how this fabric was invented) OR a kind of multi-layer fabric with a vinyl layer.   All of the covers come in either flat (i.e., one layer) or quilted (multiple layers of fabric, stitched in a protective quilted style).  

Search Lessons 

1.  Sometimes, just sometimes, using another search engine actually improves your search!   In this case, Yandex' search-by-image gave us exactly the right result.  Big lesson here--if one doesn't work, try another one (Bing, Baidu, and Yandex all have good search-by-image functions).  

2. Often a near-miss can give you clues about how to improve your search.   In this case, I learned the word "clevis" from a SERP that wasn't great.  But when I search for that term, all my results were excellent.  Learn from your near-misses!  

3. Consider the value of searching for a product that covers what you're seeking.  If you're searching for something that someone might sell (like a piano cover), you can search for it and learn a lot by reading the descriptions.  


Search on! 

SearchResearch Challenge (8/27/19): What are these three things?

After the immensity of last week's Challenge... 

... let's do something fun (but challenging in a good way).  

During the past week, three questions came up for me, each of which I needed to do a bit of SRS sleuthing to figure them out.  

Can you do these along with me? 


1.  I've got a BIG (4 meters tall!) trellis of green beans growing in my garden.  On Monday, I found this growing on stalks.  Do I need to worry about them?  Will they eat up all my beans?  What should I do?  
So... what IS this creature? 
Here it is on my thumb for scale: 


And a fairly in-focus closeup.  The colors are even more striking in real life! 



2.  This is a diagram of an important part of a 3-hole punch that's currently broken.  It's an aluminum metal pin with a collar-like-thing around the middle.  That's the part that is missing, so the pin keeps slipping out onto the floor when I use it.  I want to buy a new one… but... What do I call this?  How can I find this online?
I tried to get a good picture of this part, but could never get a good enough photo to use.  Here's my sketch.  

 The pin is about 1 inch long (2.5 cm) and the "collar" clearly snaps into a groove around the center.  (It's also a bit more circular than my sketch, but you get the idea.)  
What IS this gizmo?  How do you search for something like this? 



3.  I just got  a new piano.  Hurrah! I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.  But the place where it will sit in the house is fairly sunny.  What should I use to cover it to protect from sun damage? What material should it be made of?  (Keep in mind that this instrument has a new finish.) 




As always, be sure to tell us HOW you found your answer. We want to learn your SearchResearch methods as well! 

Search on! 

Answer: What's your favorite geo-mapping / geo-information tool? (Part 2/2)

I have to admit…  


… that writing this second part of the answer was WAAY more complicated than I expected.  
It's more like writing about Planet Maps, a world of possibilities.  




I’d thought I would just pull together a few examples of different geo-resources, write a quick and snappy post and call it a day.  
But no. 
The more I dug, the more I found.  (The irony is that I should have known better—when I’ve written about geo-information resources before, it ALWAYS takes longer than I expect. See:  Finding the shortest and flattest route  or Mapping the discovery of the sea cow and the blue jay.)   
So I shouldn’t have been surprised by this outcome.  The bottom line is that there are LOTS of geo-information resources out there.  Here’s my initial cut at the major categories that I found. 

1. Map resources – maps of all kinds, many interactive

2. Geo-data visualization tools – interactive maps that let you see information of various kinds on a map (or in the form of a distorted / colorized / annotated map).  

3. Professional mapping tools and data – there’s a very large number of professional data resources and tools to manipulate them.   

Methinks we're mostly interested in the first 2 (map resources and geo-data viz tools).  I love professional GIS (geographic information systems), but it’s a little outside the scope of what we want to do in SRS.  

Let's look at the first two a bit more... 

1.  Map resources:  The obvious ones are Google Maps, Google Earth (the app), Google Earth Web (the new web version of Google Earth), and associated parts of the geo-resources at Google such as Google Street View and Google Earth Time Lapse.  

There are also the Microsoft versions of these: Bing Maps, Bing Maps Aerial (like Earth), and Bing Streetside (like Street View).  

And there's more!  Note also that Yandex has a map, as does Tencent (the Chinese company) and Baidu (the Chinese search engine).  LOTS of general purpose maps out there.  
They each have their strengths and weaknesses.  Tencent maps is great in China, but has little coverage in the rest of the world.  Yandex maps is also great in Europe (but shows Ukraine as part of Russia).  In general, maps show the political beliefs of the country of origin. (Check out the boundary of China in the South China Sea; other countries don't necessarily agree that this is the extent of China's territory.)  


Not every country agrees that this border is the actual extent of the PRC. 
(Esp. the part that runs down into the South China Sea.)  

Likewise, you can make an interesting comparison with these two maps of downtown Warsaw.  If you look carefully, you'll see some differences in what makes it onto the map. 
Yandex' map of Warsaw, Poland. 

And Google's map of the same area, which has a lot more commercial entities on it.. and fewer bus stops.  



For me as a SearchResearcher, the value of all these different maps is that I can get very different views of a place.  That's particularly useful when you're looking at places that some people want to be un-photographed.  Sometimes one service has it in clear view while another has it obscured, as is the case with Ingolstadt Airport, Germany.  (Note to the reader:  Here it's one way obscured; there are places where it's the other way around.) 




There are a LOT of general purpose map resources out there.  Here are a couple that I like: 
Wikimapia - a geographically indexed kind of Wikipedia.  (Although it's not part of Wikpedia.)  Handy for looking up things you can see on the ground (or in an aerial image) and figuring out what they are.  
Open Street Map - a map that's created by the users.  Lots of different layers (e.g., "Humanitarian" and flexibility in creating different kinds of maps.  
You can find more by doing a search for: 

     [    Open Street Map Wikipedia ] 

and then skipping down to the section called "See Also"  (I've used this trick to find many other fascinating mapping services).  As you can see, this is where I learned about the HERE Map Creator and learned the word neogeography .    




Speciality maps:  In addition, there are LOTS of specialty maps that locate  on a map, sometime in real-time, as with this map that Krossbow suggested showing live lightning strikes at LightningMaps.org (shocking!).  


Often you can find such sites by searching.  Example: 
     [ maps lightning strikes real time ] 
you can find maps of wildfires, road closures, tweets, and so on.  

Jon-The-Unknown pointed out this great Marine Traffic map, here showing the real time marine traffic near Vancouver: 



And we've talked before about various air traffic maps, such as this one from FlightAware.com -- here showing the live air traffic around San Francisco airport.  





And, of course, most spreadsheet systems (certainly Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets) both make it very easy to create simple maps of states or countries showing different kinds of values in spreadsheet cells.  But we'll talk about that another day!  



Search Lessons There's a big lesson here for all of us.. and that is that the world of mapping, geo-information, and geographic tools is gigantic.  It's a major project to pull a complete list of resources, and the moment it would be published, it'd be out of date.  

So, instead, I want to focus our lessons on strategies for finding the resources we need--be in a data set, a tool, or a mapping visualization system.  

As we saw above, there are a couple of quick and easy strategies:  

1. Search broadly for the data (or tools or systems).   Think about it--this field is changing rapidly--things that were around even a couple of years ago no longer are available, or they've been combined with other systems. SO... even if you know of a system, you might have to go looking around for what the system is called now.  (Another argument for keeping those search skills sharp!)  

2. Look for synonyms or other ways of describing the thing you're looking for!  As you read, take note of other systems similar to what you're seeking... and then use those terms to search for MORE resources.  (Neogeography anyone?) 

3.  Try to locate people, projects, or institutions that work in the area and look at what they're doing / what they're interested in.  Follow their tweets, look fo their home pages, and read their work.  You'll probably learn something that will lead to new discoveries!  

My favorite new mapping application?  Using this exploration method, I discovered this interactive map application (DinosaurPictures) that shows the continents at different points over the past few million years.  Here's what our planet looked like this 150M years ago... amazing.  




And keep searching on.. even over the megayears! 

Answer: What's your favorite geo-mapping / geo-information tool? (Part 1/2)

LOTS of comments this week... 

... as Regular SRS Readers chimed in with great suggestions for their favorite geo-resources.  


The new Google Earth on the web (https://www.google.com/earth/) is a fantastic
geo-located information resource. 
We had two parts to this Challenge, but the first part is HUGE... and I'm still working on it, which is why I'm so slow in writing up an answer this week.  I'm going to write up my answer to Challenge #1 tomorrow.    

1.  (knowledge)  What's your favorite geo-information resource?  It could be something we've already talked about (like Earth, Maps, Streetview, or Wikimapia), or you teach us all something about a resource that you use and enjoy.  What is it?  Why do you think it's great?  

When I look at the long list of suggestions, I realize that there are LOTS of possible geo-resources.  See the next post tomorrow....  

2.  (skill)  Can you find a NEW geo-information (or geo-mapping, or geo-indexed anything!) resource?  What process did you follow to find it?  

What I was looking for here were some ideas about how to DISCOVER new geo-information resources.   How do you do that?  Here are the collected strategies of some SRS Regular Readers:  

Jon suggested the query: 

     [NEW geo-information]


... which gives lots of suggestions.  (Especially nice, the lists of resources.)  Worth exploring!  
Arthur Weiss suggested: 

     ["google fusion tables"]


... as a way to find alternatives to the geo-capabilities of Fusion Tables.  
Ramón gave us a link to Simon Kuestenmacher: 
     [ Simon Kuestenmacher ] 
... which leads to a bunch of the resources he's developed (or written about), such as his Twitter Feed.  

Abstracting these ideas 
These are great tactics, but I want to abstract them just slightly and turn them into real strategies.  
1. Searching for new resources:   A great way to find the latest resource (of any type) is to search for: 
     [ new kind-of-resource ] 
Such as: 
      [ new geography data set ] 
      [ new mapping resources ] 
etc.  
But problem with this approach is that many sites will title a page with "new"... and then leave it up on their site for years, constantly advertising that it's "new"!  
A great way to get just the truly new stuff is to use the operator after: -- like this: 
      [ mapping resources after:1-1-2016 ] 
The after: operator is relatively new, and lets you filter out everything before the specified date.  Notice that I removed "new" from the query since it's redundant.  (Anything after 2016 is defined to be new!)  Google also has the before: operator, which does the obvious thing.  
2. Search alternative names:   Jon's use of the search term "geo-information" is great, and suggests a strategy for finding even more resources--look around for terms OTHER than what you'd immediately think of at first blush.   (For instance, geospatial, geographic, mapping, etc.)  When I did the search for synonyms: 
     [ synonyms geo-information ] 
as I looked through the results, I found the term  USGS , which isn't a synonym, but a REALLY useful search term that will lead to productive search results.  Like this: 

Or this... 


And if you want to see the latest, use after: to limit the results to the most recent.  


3. Follow people with aligned interests:   Often people will indulge their interests online in ways that are incredibly useful to others, especially if you're not part of that field.  Ramón found this guy, Simon Kuestenmacher (or his site), who is VERY much a geo-information / geo-tools guy (among other things).  

As a strategy, looking for people who are deeply into a topic (and then looking at their trail of postings on Twitter / Facebook / Web) often leads to fantastic resources.  Just a quick glance at Simon's posting leads to all kinds of marvelous maps, animations... and the tools and resources that he uses in his work.  

One example. Simon posted a marvelous Greenland animated GIF showing the effect of Mercator map projection distortion (see below, credit:@neilrkaye): 




which led me to find the tool used to make this:  TrueSize, which lets you compare the size of any two countries, such as Greenland and Mexico (which are, remarkably enough, almost the same size).  

Once you start working forward from interesting people, you can find all manner of useful connections.  It was this way that I found a link to Exploring the Invisible, which in turn led me to data sets from the World Bank, and handy ways to create your own maps from their data sets, such as this map of worldwide renewable energy resources (below).


    



Search Lessons 
There are ways you can improve your searching by making better queries, but there are ALSO ways to improve your searching by expanding the range of things you consider.  We've covered a few methods... 

1. Search for new resources by explicitly looking for "new" or newly posted content.  You can add "new" or "latest" (or similar) to your query, and that will give you that kind of results. 

2.  Search for another way to express what you're seeking.  In the topic of "interesting geo-information," there are MANY ways to say this. If you search for synonyms or alternative ways of expressing your target, you can enrich what you find.  

3.  Search for a person (or institution) that's aligned with your interests, and follow what they're writing about.  You can learn much from the other things they write about.  In this case we looked for a person with geo- mapping- data- interests, but this same idea works with nearly any topic.  (Give it a try with "medieval music" or "Southwest lizards."  As a friend once said to me, "This is the internet, Dan, there's someone who's deeply interested in anything...").  


Tomorrow, a few of the geo-information resources that we found.  
Search on! 

SearchResearch (8/14/19): What's your favorite geo-mapping / geo-information tool?

You might have noticed... 

... lots of the SearchResearch Challenges involve finding other resources--like mapping sites--and then using them to help answer the Challenge-of-the-Week.  

The new Google Earth on the web (https://www.google.com/earth/) is a fantastic
geo-located information resource. 
An important set of things to know is WHAT resources are available... 

... and ... 

An important skill for any powerful SearchResearcher is the ability to FIND those sources.. and find new resources that you don't know about ahead of time.  

So this week's Challenge comes in two parts.  Both are a little meta, but together, I hope they teach a powerful lesson. 

1.  (knowledge)  What's your favorite geo-information resource?  It could be something we've already talked about (like Earth, Maps, Streetview, or Wikimapia), or you teach us all something about a resource that you use and enjoy.  What is it?  Why do you think it's great?  

2.  (skill)  Can you find a NEW geo-information (or geo-mapping, or geo-indexed anything!) resource?  What process did you follow to find it?  

In both cases, we're looking for Open-Access resources.  (I'll also take something that's really really inexpensive.)  

What do you know about?  What can you find?  

Be sure to let us know what you did to find your NEW favorite geo-resource!!  


Here's one example, an animated GIF I made from Google Earth (web) showing movement in Yosemite Valley.  




Search on!  

Answer: Are there seals in Tahiti?

Okay... by now I'm almost back into
my Californian mindset...  

... but our Challenge from last week still remains.  Remember, I asked:  

While there, I saw lots of wildlife.  Such as this anemonefish I found on Raiatea, 

1.  Is it true there are no seals or sea lions in Tahiti?  If so why not?  (Or did I just miss them?)  

How would you do online research for a question like this?  Remember that doing an obvious query like: 

     [ seals OR "sea lions" in Tahiti ] 

is biasing the results towards ANYTHING that mentions seals or sea lions in Tahiti.  (If you do this query, you'll find a sad story about a little seal who showed up in Raivavae in August, 2016.  (Unfortunately, it was so far from home that it didn't survive.)  

You'll also find lots of off-topic results about yachts that are named "Seal" or "Sea Lion" or yachts that have porthole seals that need maintenance, or hotels in Tahiti named "Seal" + something.  But nothing useful.    

You will find a spurious stock video of seals supposedly swimming in Moorea (an islan near Tahiti).  It you look at that video closely, you'll see seaweed of a kind that clearly is NOT from Polynesia.  (I suspect the video was just mistakenly tagged with that location at some point by a non-diving cataloger.)  

I note that there's also a link to a book about The Quest and Occupation of Tahiti by Emissaries of Spain during the Years 1771 - 1776 .  This text has a few seal sightings in Tahiti and nearby islands, but the text also makes it clear these were pretty rare.  Probably a bit like the unfortunate little seal on Raivavae--it was present, but not really intentionally, and certainly not happily.  

So, what WOULD be a better search strategy?  

Given that "seal" is a pretty generic term, perhaps we could find a synonym that's much more specific. The easiest way I know to do that is to check out the Wikipedia article on seals (or sea lions, or walruses...) where we learn that they're all members of the order Pinnipedia.  

Now, armed with that bit of information, we can do a search for: 

     [ pinnipeds Tahiti ] 

Naturally, this tends to give us books and scholarly articles about pinnipeds/seals, but that's okay, I'd like some authority in my reading on this topic.  

And while I found a few articles, the most interesting one was a book chapter in Pinnipeds and El Niño:  Responses to Environmental Stress.  The entire book is about pinnipeds in the Pacific, and although I read much of the book (and importantly, used "Find in this book" feature), I couldn't find ANY pinnipeds except on the far Eastern Pacific, and the lower latitudes, near New Zealand and Antarctica.  

That's kind a stumper.  Now what? Is there another way to frame this Challenge?  

I remember from other reading about birds and animals that the term "distribution" and/or "range" are often used to describe the locations where animals live.  SO... I tried these searches: 

     [ pinniped range ] 
     [ pinniped distribution ] 

This worked pretty well!  Checking Images.Google.com I found that the second query is much better (higher quality on-topic results) and quickly leads to this map.  


Figure 1 from the article MARINE MAMMAL SCIENCE, 28(2): 414–436 (April 2012)
As you can see, pinnipeds are primarily cold water residents, with high population densities around the poles.  Interestingly, the west coasts of North and South America are notable for their cold currents that skim along the shore.  There are a few other outlier seal populations in the Mediterranean and Caspian sea.  Generally speaking, the tropics are a seal-free zone!  (Note, however, that blue streak in the middle of the Northern Pacific--that's Hawai'i, and a bit of a special case.)  

The article mentions that: 

Pinnipeds do not conform to the generalization that marine mammals are concentrated in tropical and temperate regions (Schipper et al. 2008), although they do occurprincipally within continental shelf regions (Fig. 1). They are for the most part coldwater animals that occur in regions with high marine productivity. Upwelling areas(including those associated with sea-ice edges and coastal shelf inclines) and oceanfrontal areas are focal points for foraging for many pinniped species. Additionally,available data on species distributions of pinniped do not appear to conform to themarine mammal generality that suggests that range sizes are smaller toward the poles(Schipper et al. 2008). Many arctic and antarctic pinnipeds have large, circumpolarranges, while most tropical and midlatitude pinnipeds appear to have more restrictedranges... 

Generally speaking, with the single exception of monk seals in Hawai'i, seals and sea lions just don't live in tropical seas (unless there's a cold water current in the tropical latitudes).  

Fascinating.  

So while there are seals in Hawai'i (the now rare and endangered Monk seal, Neomonachus schauinslandi), they are the rather exceptional exception to the general rule that seals don't live in the tropics.  

Aside from the occasional strays who wander into Tahitian waters, there just aren't seals in the area!  


2.  (Extra credit)  On board our ship I found this device.  I'm not a big ship sailor, so I don't know what it is.  Can you figure out what this is, and what it's used for on board?  


To start this search, I did a search-by-image, but that didn't work well, even after I tried using Bing's interactive cropping tool.  I tried Google, I tried Bing, I tried Yandex... all to no avail.  Nothing worked.  It's just not a great Search-By-Image target image.  (Too round, too generic...)  

BUT.. remember that you can add search terms to the image AFTER you do the initial Search-By-Image.  So, I modified the image search on Google by adding in the terms


     [ ship line rope ]

To my delight, buried in the middle of this images I found something that looked a lot like what I was searching for... 


And when I opened up the image, I learned it was a winch.  

Then, by looking up what a winch was, learned there are two kinds of devices like this... it's  either a winch, or a capstan--both of which look very similar.  (The difference is that a winch is only used to tighten or loosen a line, while a capstan can lock the line in place.  You use a winch to raise/lower sails, but you can use a capstan to tie your boat to a mooring point.)   


===== 
Postscript (Added after Regular Reader Arthur Weiss commented that he found it using Bing Image Search):  

At Arthur Weiss wrote in the comments to the blog, you CAN find the winch by using Bing's impressive search-by-image tool.  (I've written about this before:  see "What's that logo?")  

When I tried it, I didn't have any luck, but with Arthur's find, I re-tried the Bing search, and voila, there it was.  

Here's what I did on Bing.  You can see how much I cropped it down, "just to the relevant bits."  Note the winch in the middle of the results on the right.  


By contrast, if I do the same search using Google's Search-By-Image (using exactly the same cropped image), Google strikes out!  Lesson learned:  Try multiple search engines!  

Using the same cropped image, Google's Search-By-Image returns largely irrelevant things.
The suggestion ("rotor") is odd. Almost none of these things pictured are rotors.  
Thanks, Arthur!  




Search Lessons 1. If you're getting junk results, try reformulating with a less-common term.  We used "pinniped" which means "seals and related creatures, and that shift to a technical term eliminated all kinds of off-topic results.  

2.  Knowing domain specific terminology.   Once again, using the right search term--in this case, "distribution" and "range" to find specific kinds of results--was an important change to our search.  Sometimes you just have to know the language of the topic.  I picked up these specific terms from my earlier reading about birds and animals.  Turns out these terms work for seals as well.  

3. Modify a Search-By-Image by adding in additional terms that will provide context.  This is an incredibly useful thing to remember when you're searching for an ambiguous target.  In today's search, we added "ship" and "line" and "rope" and found what we were looking for.  (I added "ship" to find only things associated with ships, then I added "line" because that's a common nautical term for a kind of rope, and then finally "rope" to find images that might not use the word "line.")  That series of modifications (3 searches) made all the difference!  

Hope you found this Challenge interesting and fun!  I learned a few new things about pinnipeds while reading for this topic... and was once again reminded that there's a great value in knowing the specific terminology for an area.  Part of this is just the habit of reading widely, increasing your personal vocabulary.  

Note that having a rich vocabulary is more than just knowing the definition of a term, but also knowing what domain (that is, a topic area) it's used in.  Everyone knows the word "distribution," but you might not have thought about it as a way to describe the concept where-an-animal-lives.  Luckily, I've read enough of those bird identification books to have seen "distribution" used in that way.  

Keep reading!  

Search on! 

Rethinking Langmuir Circulation lanes

A couple of weeks ago...
... I asked what I thought was a simple question about "lanes" of quiet water that one can see on bodies of water.  Here's that Challenge:  

2.  As we're sailing from place to place, it's not uncommon to see large patches of water without any ripples on the surface.  It's something you see nearly everywhere--it's a common effect on lakes, ponds, and oceans.  But what causes these ripple-free regions on the water?   (See below for an image that has a large Y-shaped blank area in the middle. What causes this?)  

I offered this image as an example of what I meant.  See those blank spots? 
And I found this other picture (see this Y-shaped quiet area in the left-center).
I tentatively identified them as lanes caused by Langmuir Circulation.  
BUT THEN, as I was driving past the mouth of the Gualala River (in Northern California;  it opens onto the Pacific) I saw THIS:  
Here's a closeup below.  Notice how the lines are VERY parallel, and run through the tree stump, and right onto the grassy shoreline at left.  This is pretty clearly caused by Langmuir Circulation cells in the water. And yes, the wind was blowing (fairly hard) exactly along the lines.  If you notice, there are lots of small waves on top of the cells.  That's NOT quite what I was looking for: I wanted to find the cause of those glassy patches.  

  But as I stood there looking at them, they were NOT the same as the quiet / ripple-free regions I'd seen (as in the first two pictures above).  These are clearly Langmuir cells, but there are LOTS of tiny wavelets on top of the water.  Looks to me as though we're searching for another process than wind-induced long, linear cells.  So... what's going on?  I don't know.  The search continues!  Let me know if you run across anything that's relevant to the "quiet water" effect.  
Still searching!  

SearchResearch Challenge (7/31/19): Are there seals in Tahiti?

I'm still in a Polynesian frame of mind... 

... and so I've been thinking about what I saw in Tahiti and French Polynesia quite a bit over the past couple of weeks.  

While there, I saw lots of wildlife.  Such as this anemonefish I found on Raiatea, 



and black-tipped reef sharks...  



... and while there's a fair bit of large fauna (I can't resist showing you this group of eagle rays that flew past us one afternoon), 




I noticed that there were few mammals in the sea.  Sure, I saw a few dolphins, and the islands are famous for their humpback whales.  But no otters (which I didn't really expect), and very oddly, no seals or sea lions!  I've seen seals in Hawai'i, but why nothing south of the Equator?   

This leads to today's Challenge: 

1.  Is it true there are no seals or sea lions in Tahiti?  If so why not?  (Or did I just miss them?)  

I'm used to seeing seals / sea lions just about everywhere.  This is what I see locally in Northern California,   


Harbor seals hauled out on a beach near Gulala, CA
So why are none of these (apparently) in Tahiti?  

2.  (Extra credit)  On board our ship I found this device.  I'm not a big ship sailor, so I don't know what it is.  Can you figure out what this is, and what it's used for on board?  




As always, the real Challenge not just to find the answer, but to let us know HOW you did it.  What searches did you do?  Did you actually just ask someone?  (That's a legitimate way to do SearchResearch Challenges!)  Or did you just happen to know?  (That's okay too--just let us know.)  

Just tell us HOW... in the comments below. 


Search on! 

Answer: A couple of questions about Polynesia! (Why so long? What are those clear patches?)

I'm back in Silicon Valley... but missing Polynesia.. 

If you get the chance to visit, you should.  If the predicted sea level rise happens, many of these islands are going to be submerged.  That's tragic, but what's worse is that the memory of these special places will vanish from the common culture.  
But before solving the climate change problem, let's focus in on our Challenges.  

1.  In researching the dates of initial colonization of Polynesian islands, I noticed a VERY strange incongruity.  Look at the map below.  The blue pins are all island nations that were first colonized around 1000AD.  The red pins (to the left of the long green line) were all colonized around 1000BCE or before.  What happened here between 1000BCE and 1000AD?  Why are the all of the blue pins MUCH later than the red pinned locations?  It's not that far from Samoa to Niue, why didn't anyone colonize that island until 900AD or so?  Generally--why didn't the Polynesians go beyond the green line for a very long time?  


This sounds simple enough... but it turns out to be a bit of a contentious issue.  As I discovered, there's a bit of debate about the dates I show above.  Getting a definitive answer to this is probably a PhD's thesis worth of work (and there are people doing exactly that!), but let's see what we can do with our SRS skills.  I started my research with this query:      [ Polynesia colonization dates ] which gave me this SERP: 

As you can tell, I opened up several tabs in parallel to get a quick sense of the breadth of opinion on this: 


The first tab is from Hokulea.com (a Hawaiian cultural education site), the second is from Wikipedia, 3rd is from Phys.org (a science news site).  Others I opened were from other science journalism sites.  By reading about 10 such sites, I quickly learned that there's some disagreement about the exact dates for Polynesian island colonization.  The root of the discussion is about the accuracy of the methods used in previous research.  (There's a big discussion about the accuracy of the reported 14C measurements.)  But after reading through many of these reports, the overall pattern still holds.  The dates might be off by anywhere from 75 - 150 years, but the overall story remains the same.  The precusors of the Polynesians moved from somewhere in southeast Asia to colonize the islands around Melanesia, stopping sometime around 1000BCE.  (This model of expansion is supported by genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data. See: Wikipedia article on Polynesia; Proc. National Academy article about Polynesia colonization;  Stanford summary of dates)Here's a visual map of this (modified from the PNAS article):  Expansion migration out of West Polynesia (blue area),  There was a first expansion to the Society Islands between A.D. ∼1025 and 1121 (orange), and a second expansion to the farther islands between A.D. ∼1200 and 1290 (yellow area).While this is confirmation (and consistent with what I'd found already), as I was reading, I kept finding the phrases "Polynesian pause" and "Polynesian expansion."  Both seemed to describe what I was looking for.  As we know, finding a common phrase that describes what you're searching for is an incredibly valuable thing.  Armed with this, I did two searches.  One on Scholar and one on Books, both with the same search query.  NOTE that this isn't a search for a synonym (such as "Polynesian OR Tahitian"), but a search for two very different phrases.  I'd be happy with either phrase being in the document. 
     [ "polynesian pause" OR "polynesian expansion" ] 
A search on Google Scholar has pretty good results for this search combined search. 
Likewise... 

After reading through a bunch of these hits--both books and scholarly articles--I had a newfound appreciation for the difficulty of tracking the movement of people across thousands of years and thousands of miles.  (The biggest surprise was the relevance of the book "Microbial Pathogenomics," which turns out to suggest a way of tracking expansion by tracking the movement of a distinctive gut bacteria, hpEastAsia, across the islands of Polynesia by looking at the bacterial populations of their current residents!)But the original Challenge was "WHY was there a thousand-year-long pause in the migration?"  What did I find?  Lots of speculation--wild guesses and hypotheses.  Nobody, it seems, knows WHY this happened.  But one paper on this topic stands out as the current dominant hypothesis.  "From west to east: Environmental influences on the rate and pathways of Polynesian colonization"  (by Alvaro Montenegro, Richard T. Callaghan, and Scott M. Fitzpatrick; The Holocene 24.2 (2014): 242-256) uses a combination of weather models (including common Pacific winds and currents) and departures from different points in central Polynesia show that ...

".. the eastern boundary of West Polynesia, the limit of the initial colonization pulse, is marked by a discontinuity in land distribution, where the distances travelers would have to cross in order to reach islands further to the east become significantly larger. At the same time, in West Polynesia, the frequency and intensity of winds favorable to eastward displacement decrease continuously from west to east.... Voyaging simulations show that intentional eastward voyages departing from Tonga and Samoa, when undertaken with vessels capable of sailing efficiently against the wind, afford a viable route toward several island groups in East Polynesia, with trips starting in Samoa having a higher probability of success." 

Hidden in that complex language are a couple of ideas.  (1) The winds and currents at the West/Central boundary form a kind of natural barrier to eastward expansion.  (2)  It's hard to cross that barrier until you have watercraft that can sail into the wind. Did it take a millennium to develop ships that can sail into the wind?  Maybe.  And maybe it took that long to both develop the ship technology AND grow a set of people who were willing to make those blind voyages into the unknown in search of other lands.  It's possible that the upwind sailing tech was developed not long after arriving at the eastern edge, but that there wasn't a tradition of making those voyages. At this point in history, it's hard to know.  As I can do is point to sources that make these speculative suggestions.

2.  As we're sailing from place to place, it's not uncommon to see large patches of water without any ripples on the surface.  It's something you see nearly everywhere--it's a common effect on lakes, ponds, and oceans.  But what causes these ripple-free regions on the water?   (See below for an image that has a large Y-shaped blank area in the middle. What causes this?)  

To answer this Challenge, I tried a lot of variations on what I thought would be a reasonable query:      [ lines of flat water ]      [ areas of calm water on ocean ]      [ regions no waves ] 
And so forth.  I found that some search terms (e.g., "wavelets") added an entirely new (and off-topic for me) dimension, so I learned to avoid those terms. After a few tried like this (mostly with unhelpful results), I switched to Image search, hoping to recognize an image that looked like what I wanted and learn from that page what this might be called.  When I did this search:      [ lines of calm water on ocean ] I finally found a picture that looked like what I'd been searching for... 
This article called them Langmuir Circulation lines.  Searching a bit for that taught me that they're "a series of shallow, slow, counter-rotating vortices at the ocean's surface aligned with the wind. [These form] .. when wind blows steadily over the sea surface."  Where the long, wind-caused vortex hits the surface, that has a calming effect on the texture of the water. And that's possible... but I hadn't thought to measure which way the wind was blowing when I took the photo!  (I will next time.)  As I looked more, I found that Langmuir circulation often also produces long "wind rows" of form on the edges of the circulation cells.  (See below.) 
Is this the same phenomenon?  Quite possibly.  The diagnostic test would be to see if the wind is blowing in the same direction as the lines of foam.. or the quiet area seen in the other images.  As SRS reader Unknown pointed out, there are probably multiple reasons for these quiet lanes in the sea.  But for the moment, I'll go with Langmuir Circulation lanes... and remember to test this hypothesis by noting the wind direction! 
Search Lessons   1.  Take note of special terminology that precisely describes your topic.  As I noted when reading through all of the Polynesian articles, those two phrases "Polynesian Expansion" and "Polynesian Pause" seemed to pop up often.  By searching specifically for those two phrases (in Google Books and Google Scholar), I was able to find a bunch of high quality resources.  Take note of repeated phrases like this--they can be the key!   2.  Realize that some simple-to-ask questions might not have simple, short answers--ESPECIALLY "why" questions.  Getting a definitive answer to "why did the Polynesian pause suddenly stop?" is tough.  It's easy to find ideas, but getting to a high quality proof behind the why is probably not possible.  (Or at least it's really not simple!)   3.  Switching to a different medium can help.  In the "lines of calm water" Challenge, it was faster to look at the image search results rather than read all of the text that might be difficult to understand.  Visual confirmation can often get you to the right resources faster than anything else.  Don't forget about the value of the visual! 4. Use parallel browsing and browsing-in-depth to organize your searching.  It's a handy technique to know... and can simplify your searching!  
Thanks for reading (and playing) along.  This wasn't simple.  Next week I have two more questions from my recent travels.  I'll post those a week from today (next Thursday) instead of Wednesday.  Don't panic!  All is well (but busy) in SearchResearch Land! 
Search on! 

Answer coming next week!

While travel in French Polynesia is great... 

... the wifi is rather slow and unpredictable.  As a side-effect, I haven't been able to get a good connection for a long enough period of time to actually do the online research needed to get answers to last week's Challenge.  

A drone's eye view of the harbor at Huahine. Note the fringing reef and coral sands all around. 
These waters have many parrotfish! 

SO...  I'm going back to diving in these beautiful waters and hiking on the mountains.  I should be back in the land of fast connectivity by Saturday. So I'll post my answers in one week.  

Until then,

Search on!