Daniel M. Russell's Blog, page 9

Answer: Curious questions that come up during travel?

  Curiosity is my secret superpower... 

It could be yours too.   

Most of my career has been driven by curiosity of one kind or another.  How does AI work?  How can people understand really complex devices?   

Or, more generally, in my life, I'm one of those people who's always asking why, what, where, and how questions.  

I remember that when search engines first became widely available AND when lots of content started being online, I realized that I could now start to answer my questions about as quickly as I could come up with them. I admit that I'm an information junkie who with a high need for cognition--it's a big part of who I am.  Naturally, questions like the ones that popped up when I visited UC San Diego are intrinsic.  

So, when I see things like this, I have a deep-seated drive to find out.  And that, fundamentally, is why I became a research scientist.   

But what about everyday living?  Turns out that the research science skills transfer to every day life as well.  Let's start with the first Curious Question... 

1. What building is this?  But why is it that particular dramatic shape?  It's a striking, powerful building--what's the architect trying to communicate?  What's the story here?  

A quick search-by-image tells us that this is the Geisel Library at UCSD, an extraordinary example of a brutalist building that is fairly elegant and memorable.  See the library's own description of their building, or read their "Building Guide."  

The library was designed by renowned architect William Pereira in 1970, and was named for local La Jolla legends Audrey and Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss) in 1995.  

You can read the architect's thoughts about what he was trying to communicate with the building by reading the original report.  He writes that the design needed to "convey to future generations the idea of the power and permanency of the knowledge contained inside it." 

In particular, the scale and placement of the library in the center of campus needed a particularly impressive scale in order to communicate that message.  A visitor to the building approaches it and knows that it is an important building simply by its columns and grand entrance. By default, the building becomes a landmark throughout the university, and makes it with a centralized meeting space. Its scale creates a sense of permanence, a sense of hands holding a world's worth of knowledge. 

(Personal footnote: I've always loved the Geisel Library ever since I first visited back in the early 1990s, and was pleased to give a talk about my book, The Joy of Search, there in November, 2019.  That talk wasn't recorded, but it was 99% the same as this talk I gave a week later in Spain.) 

 

2. As I walked past the building, I found a truly extraordinary path on one side of the building.  Without me telling you any more... can you find the "extraordinary path" and find out why it's there?  What's the story here? 

Without much to go on, a look-see is in order.  Let's go to the satellite image.  

A quick search on Google Maps of the library shows an intriguing path on the east side of the library with what looks like a snake's head at the top (see the label "Snake Path"):  

Google Maps image of the Geisel Library
And a close up: 

That's a good image, but that Snake Path is a bit in the shadow.  Luckily, Bing Maps has a somewhat better image: 

Same location: Bing Maps
You can see from the shadows that Bing's image was taken much later in the day.  

Now--how to get the background info? 

The obvious search for:  [ snake path UCSD ] tells me that it's a piece of artwork by conceptual artist Alexis Smith (who unfortunately just passed away a few months ago--obit). In the library's article about the work we find: "Smith's work for the Stuart Collection, Snake Path, consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath in the form of a serpent, whose individual scales are hexagonal pieces of colored slate, and whose head is inlaid in the approach to the Geisel Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly crowned body circles around a small 'garden of Eden' with several fruit trees including an apple, a fig and a pomegranate."  

Oddly, I had noticed the apple tree on a visit, and assumed it was a student's bit of whimsy--I didn't realize that it's part of the art installation.  

3. I chatted with a student who told me that about there's a "fantastic piece of art" that's about 500 feet (152 meters) away from the path.  "Just keep going," he said, "you'll find it."  With just that direction I DID find it, but the artwork was a bit of a surprise... and it took some funny search skills to locate it.  Can you find this artwork? What is it and where is it? 

Here's what a roughly 500 foot radius is from the top of the Snake Path: 

I added the red circle for you to see, but the black measuring line is made by control-clicking on the start point, then pulling out the control point to the distance you want to measure. 

I tried various searches on Maps (like [ artworks near Geisel library ]), but I couldn't find anything that would work.  

Clearly, I want a map, but how to get it.  

Insight:  just as there are different satellite views on different maps providers, maybe there are other maps that show just artwork.  That makes sense--people often want to tour an area (such as a university campus) just to see the artwork.  So, let's search for a map of such things.  

The query that worked was: 

     [ art work on UCSD campus map ] 

which led me to discover this map Concept3d Map of UCSD campus:

As you can see, this is an interactive map of the campus around the library with options to show both the Stuart Collection (of artworks) and just plain "Art" (i.e., things not in the Stuart Collection).  If you click on each of the icons, at roughly 500 foot diameter from the top of the Snake Path, you quickly find this art installation in the Jacobs school of engineering buildings, "Fallen Star" from 2011.  

You can quickly find the Wikipedia page for Fallen Star, which tells us that this artwork by South Korean artist Do Ho Suh us a cottage perched at an precarious angle on the top floor of the building.  

P/C Wikimedia - "Fallen Star" is the light blue cottage stuck atop the engineering building.

4.  Lastly, on the night flight home (I flew from San Diego to San Jose, CA),  I was looking out the windows on the right hand side and noticed the street lights extending northward from San Diego towards LA.  About 12 mins into the flight, I saw a HUGE gap in the lights.  It was dark, so I wasn't sure of exactly where I was, and I couldn't figure out why that place was so devoid of lighting.  Can you figure it out?  Where is that blank spot on the map?  Why is it blank?  

To answer this, you have to first figure out the flight path from San Diego to San Jose.  Using one of the flight tracking services (e.g., FlightAware) you can search for evening flights from San Diego (SAN) to San Jose (SJC).  Turns out that Southwest Airlines flies the most routes and it won't take long to find a flight path map.  They look like this (zoomed in to show the region between San Diego and Los Angeles).  

A typical flight from San Diego to San Jose (CA). P/C screenshot from FlightAware
You can then look for the same section of the California coast with a regular map: 

If you look at the FlightAware progress chart, you can see the climb out of San Diego, reaching the cruising altitude, and estimate the average speed for the first 12 minutes of the flight (remember that I saw the blank spot around 12 minutes into the flight).  

It's difficult to get an exact speed, but let's estimate it at 250 mph (that includes the takeoff, etc.).  Flying for 12 minutes at 250 mph takes one about 50 miles up the coast along the flight path.  If you use the distance measuring tool again, you'll get this figure: 

So, I was somewhere off the coast between San Clemente and Oceanside.  Just looking at the map like this suggests that there's a big gap, an empty space, just east of the 5 freeway, between those two cities.  

Zooming in and taking a satellite image view, we see: 

That looks suspiciously empty.  But I'd REALLY like to see what this region looks like at night.  How can we do that? 

I did a search for:   

     [ night time view of US ]

 And quickly discovered NASA's Earth Observatory which has a truly great collection of images, including some of the US taken at night.    (High res image of the US at night.)   

You can zoom in on that image to find this overview of Southern California at night. 

Spend a couple of minutes aligning the image with the map from above: 

You can see the dark region just to the right of the flightline.  Zooming in on the map, you'll see that this area is home to Camp Pendelton, the San Mateo Wilderness, and Ronald W. Caspers  Wilderness Park.  A quick search to find map of parklands in CA:

     [ map of california parks ]  

leads to a nice interactive map by Databayou that lets you zoom into this region and find out all the details.  

Even though Southern California has a LOT of cities and built-up areas, there are still substantial parts of the state that are basically blanks.  For someone like me, looking for parts of the world that I don't know about or understand, this is just wonderful.  

SearchResearch Lessons

1. Remember there are multiple mapping systems out there.  We certainly know about Google and Bing maps--they're super easy to use and are relatively up-to-date. Remember that they have DIFFERENT images--sometimes one is better than the other, so check both.  Also remember that there are other places to get satellite images--remember NASA has great collections, mostly searchable.   

2. Use the tools that are in the maps systems.  Google and Bing maps both let you measure distances easily, they have ways to see the 3D nature of places, and can give you different views as well (e.g., topographic maps or Streetview).  

3. Combining data sources is often the key to solving Challenges.  As you see, we had to use maps + distance measures + FlightAware + NASA nighttime images to figure out what I was seeing out the window.  Combining data is often the way to go! 

Extra Commentary:  Thanks to all of our regular SRSers who continually amaze me.  Special thanks to Remmij who reminded me that there is a carillon at the Geisel Library.  It's a common sound in the central campus that's absolutely charming. (Well worth the read.)  Thanks also to Krossbow, who wrote his response in Seussian Rhyme!  With AI support, admittedly. Still very clever. 

In doing this, I also learned that Pereria was the architect for MY undergraduate library at UC Irvine, which is also, oddly enough, where Alexis Smith went to school, although we did not overlap.  

Keep searching!  

SearchResearch Challenge (5/31/24): Curious questions that come up during travel?

 I'm constantly wondering... 

... what is that building?  Or... Why is this like that? Or.. What else is nearby?  

You know, the kind of questions kids ask when they're traveling--the really good ones that parents usually decline to answer.  

This week I had a great time traveling to the University of California San Diego campus.  (Which, for interesting / odd historical reasons is actually in La Jolla.  Yeah, go figure. But you could look it up!)  

I was on campus to give an invited lecture at the Design Studio.  Here's the link to my talk--the video is here, should you be interested. It was great fun, especially as a visitor walking around the campus which has some extraordinary architecture.  (To be honest, it also has some eminently forgettable buildings, the epitome of unmemorable.)  

But THIS building (show above) is pretty remarkable.  Once you see it, you don't forget it.  

Naturally, I'm curious... and I have SearchResearch Challenges for you that grow out of my visit to UCSD and San Diego--the kinds of questions that kids have, and that we adults tend to forget to ask.  Be curious! And let's see what we can learn! 

1. What building is this?  But why is it that particular dramatic shape?  It's a striking, powerful building--what's the architect trying to communicate?  What's the story here?  

2. As I walked past the building, I found a truly extraordinary path on one side of the building.  Without me telling you any more... can you find the "extraordinary path" and find out why it's there?  What's the story here? 

3. I chatted with a student who told me that about there's a "fantastic piece of art" that's about 500 feet (152 meters) away from the path.  "Just keep going," he said, "you'll find it."  With just that direction I DID find it, but the artwork was a bit of a surprise... and it took some funny search skills to locate it.  Can you find this artwork? What is it and where is it? 

4.  Lastly, on the night flight home (I flew from San Diego to San Jose, CA),  I was looking out the windows on the right hand side and noticed the street lights extending northward from San Diego towards LA.  About 12 mins into the flight, I saw a HUGE gap in the lights.  It was dark, so I wasn't sure of exactly where I was, and I couldn't figure out why that place was so devoid of lighting.  Can you figure it out?  Where is that blank spot on the map?  Why is it blank?  

Let us know what you find, and HOW you found it!  (I'm especially curious how you figure out the blank space in particular.  It took me a few minutes.)  

Keep searching!  

(And I'll post more about the Venetian cappuccino this weekend.  Ciao!)  

Answer: How much is a cappuccino at the cafe near here?

You might recognize the place... 

Most of this week's Challenge wasn't too hard--but the last Challenge question is tough.  Let's jump into it.  

This pic from last year brought forth a couple of Challenges for you:  

1. Where am I standing in this photo?  

For some reason, I thought the partially obscured view would make image identification difficult--but I was totally wrong.  If you just do a simple Search by Image, you'll find that this are the results you see: 

 I did this by saving the image to a file, then uploading that file into Images.Google.com, which produced several lovely images (including my own).  A quick scan of the results tells you that this was taken at St. Mark's Basilica (Basilica di Marco).  With just a bit more poking around, you'll find that the brick tower in the background is St Mark's Campanile (Italian: Campanile di San Marco, Venetian: Canpanièl de San Marco), and the statue of the horses is the Quadriga di San Marco--although the one behind me is a copy of the original, which is housed in the museum.  Here's a pic with an arrow pointing to where I'm standing.  Yes, I'm on the roof (but that's okay!).  

2. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino costs at that famous nearby cafe at the moment?  (Extra credit: Why is this particular cafe so famous?)  

What's the famous cafe?  The obvious query works well: 
     [ famous cafe piazza san marco ] 

 How much is a cappuccino there?  
Initially, my query was [ menu Caffe Florian ] -- but that proved to be ambiguous.  (You know how many cafes are called "Caffe Florian"?)  So I added in the location: 
     [ menu caffee florian venice ] 
Which led me to the Caffè Florian website.  If you download the PDF, you'll see on page 27: 

For the "why is this cafe famous?" Challenge, I tried the obvious Google query:  
     [ why is the Caffe Florian famous? ] 
which led me back to the Caffè Florian's website.  Of course, you have to take what they write about themselves with a grain of salt--they're heavily motivated to have a large claim to fame.  But in fact, the website is fairly history-free--certainly no exaggerated claims.  The Wikipedia page on Caffè Florian gives a good deal more background.
There are many reasons for the cafe to be famous, but in its early days, the Caffè was patronised by many celebrities of the time, including the playwright Carlo Goldoni, Lord Byron, Marcel Proust, Charles Dickens, Goethe and Casanova... who was no doubt attracted by the fact that Caffè Florian was the only coffee house that allowed women. 
The cafe is also famous for Casanova's late night stop on Oct 31, 1756... the night that Giacomo Casanova broke out of prison, but before fleeing into the dark, he stopped for a quick cup of coffee.  Of course.   

3. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino would have cost at that cafe in 1955?  (For extra credit, can you determine why I'm asking about 1955?)  

It turns out that THIS is a difficult Challenge.  I've tried all kinds of things--looking for old menus, searching the Internet Archive, looking in old books for mentions of buying a cappuccino in 1955 Venice--but no dice.  At least not so far!  I'm widening the Challenge just a bit to see if we can't figure out the cost of a coffee in Venice in the 1950s--but even that is proving difficult.  Apparently, the price of a coffee / espresso / cappuccino was so obvious that it didn't need writing down!  

But take heart--I have some leads.  This little tidbit of info is just harder to find than most.  I'll be back in a few days with an update on this Challenge.  

Meanwhile... the extra credit question is pretty straightforward.  The query:  

     [ Caffe Florian 1955 ] 

leads to several hits, but perhaps the most interesting is the discovery that the book The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is set in Venice and has scenes in Caffe Florian, was published in 1955.  What's more, the movie Summertime, starring Katherine Hepburn, also came out in 1955--again, with scenes set in Caffe Florian.  Here's the trailer for that movie--see if you can spot the Piazza San Marco and a coffee shop there... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TRHz...  

I'll summarize our lessons next time.  But until then... Keep searching! 

SearchResearch Challenge (5/8/24): How much is a cappuccino at the cafe near here?

 This is me, somewhere in the world... 

If you've been here, it's easy to recognize where I'm standing--but if you haven't been in this slightly unusual spot, it'll take a bit of SRS magic to figure it out. 

In the next photo taken on the camera, I'm drinking a cappuccino with my daughter at the most famous cafe near where this image was taken. 

This fun memory from last year brings forth a couple of Challenges for you:  

1. Where am I standing in this photo?  

2. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino costs at that famous nearby cafe at the moment?  (Extra credit: Why is this particular cafe so famous?)  

3. Can you tell me how much a cappuccino would have cost at that cafe in 1955?  (For extra credit, can you determine why I'm asking about 1955?)  

I suspect there are new ways to find out the answers to these Challenges, which is why I'm posting them here.  Tune in next week for my solution to these questions. 

But when YOU find the answer, let us know how you did it!  

Keep searching.  

SearchResearch is taking a week off!

 Every so often... 

... one needs a break.  So this week, I'm off in Hawai'i enjoying a dive trip with a few friends.  Here are a couple of photos of my piscine friends... 

Back next week.  

Keep searching.  (I will leave it to you to identify the kinds of fish shown in the photos.) 

Not a fish, but roll with it.  What makes those electric blue pentagonal patterns?

Answer: Consider the alternative?

 Most animals have a left- and a right-side...  

P/C. OpenAI [create a grid of diverse animal noses including human, dog, cat, gorilla, etc. ]

... nose... that is, we're (mostly) bilaterally symmetric, even to the level of the nasal passages.  I have two kidneys, two eyes, two nostrils, etc.  (Yes, I know--one heart, one stomach, one intestine... those are special cases.  But even your brain comes in two halves.)    

But when I noticed that I seem to switch from my left to my right nostrils, it caused me to wonder a bit about this bilaterality.  If I really DO switch nostrils during the day, what else might I switch from left to right?  Do my kidneys work differently at different times of the day?    

Let's turn this into a SearchResearch Challenge for this week: 

1. Is my nose just weird, or do people really have a slow change in breathing from side-to-side over the course of the day?  

I was really unsure about where to start, so I did the first search I thought of: 
     [ switch nostrils breathing during the day ] 
which led me to an article in Live Science ("Why don't we breathe equally out of both nostrils?")  that told me "..The dominant nostril switches throughout the day. This is called the nasal cycle.." 
That's an interesting phrase, nasal cycle.  Live Science tells us that people tend to breathe out of one side, then switch to the other.  That article points to a paper in PLOS One (a respected journal), "Measuring and Characterizing the Human Nasal Cycle."  That paper in turn tells us that "Nasal airflow is greater in one nostril than in the other because of transient asymmetric nasal passage obstruction by erectile tissue. The extent of obstruction alternates across nostrils with periodicity referred to as the nasal cycle."  
Fascinating.  Who knew that we have small patches of erectile tissue in our noses that alternate the side of breathing.  
A quick search in Google Scholar for [ nasal cycling ] leads to a bunch of papers, including this one in the journal Rhinology ("The nasal cycle: a comprehensive review") In that paper, we read "... It is based on the dilation/constriction of the venous cavernous tissue in the submucosa of the turbinates and septum, but also of the ethmoid sinuses. It is accepted that almost 70-80% of adults experience a regularnasal cycle, but a true periodicity/reciprocity exists only in 21-39% of the population."  
Even more details--most people have nasal cycling, but a strong nasal cycling seems to be present in around a quarter of all people, although it's a little unclear why this happens.  It's a complicated mechanism--what's the evolutionary advantage?  My friend Rehan Khan sent me an article that he co-authored in Nature (1999).  That paper, "The world smells different to each nostril" suggests that the reason for switching the sides of your nose is that each nostril has a somewhat different set of receptors--so switching gives a better, higher-quality perception of what's going on in the environment. "..we show that this difference in airflow between the nostrils causes each nostril to be optimally sensitized to different odorants, so that each nostril conveys a slightly different olfactory image to the brain."  
In any case, this look like a real effect.  And now we picked up some terminology for the alternation--this should help us with the next Challenge.    

2. What other kinds of behaviors might happen for a while on one side of the body, and then switch to the other side of the body?  (Think outside the body: What about non-humans?  Do they have these odd behaviors?) 

I started with this query: 

     [ alternating cycles in humans  ] 

I didn't know if I'd find anything or if I'd just get some ideas to pursue.  

The results mostly did the latter, and suggested a couple of bilaterally symmetric systems to check--e.g., ovaries, kidneys, brain hemispheres, eyes, ears, etc.  But the results weren't incredibly specific.  So, I had to try each system in turn: 

     [ ovaries alternating cycles ] [ kidney alternating cycles ] etc... 

The first query (about ovaries) led me into a rabbit hole where search led to some results that indicated that humans DO ovulate alternatively on the left one month, and then on the right the next month.  This was apparently believed for quite a while (largely because it seems like common sense, and detecting the side of ovulation takes some pretty high resolution ultrasounds.  But once that visualization technology became available, it wasn't long until a decent sample size was reached, and it was discovered that NO.. in fact women ovulate or more less randomly (wrt left vs. right)!  I found this paper through my searches: "Side of ovulation and cycle characteristics in normally fertile women" published in the journal, Human Reproduction in April, 2000.  

On the other hand, searching for alternating phases of kidneys, testes, eyes, and ears all led nowhere.  I wasn't able to find ANYTHING to suggest that there are interesting alternations of perception or production.  

BUT, when I searched for :

     [ brain hemisphere alternating cycles ] 

I found (way down on page 2) a mention of hemispheres alternating in sleep patterns for marine mammals and certain birds!  

The paper "Unihemispheric sleep and asymmetrical sleep: behavioral, neurophysiological, and functional perspectives"  (in the journal, Nature and Science of Sleep) tells us that "... certain marine mammals and species of birds show a different sleep behavior, in which one cerebral hemisphere sleeps while the other is awake. In dolphins, eared seals, and manatees, unihemispheric sleep allows them to have the benefits of sleep, breathing, thermoregulation, and vigilance. In birds, antipredation vigilance is the main function of unihemispheric sleep.."  

Even more details:  ".... In some aquatic mammals, sleep and wakefulness periods alternate between the hemispheres, and it is the only way of sleeping. In other animals (seals and birds), unihemispheric sleep is a transitory sleep event intermingled with bilateral sleep." 

I checked multiple sources (naturally), and found lots of corroboration--those marine mammals listed DO sleep just one side at a time.  Remarkable.  I hope to see a semi-sleeping dolphin one day while out diving in the sea.  

SearchResearch Lessons 

1. Count on your friends.  Shortly after I wrote my SRS Challenge, Rehan wrote to say that he just happened to have published a paper on this topic.  It's a wonderful paper, well worth the read.  And it both confirmed that smelling alternates sides AND that there's a reason for the effect.  

2. Search for leads, not just answers.  It's often the case that when searching you'll learn something along the way that's useful in your later searching.  That's what happened when I did a search for [ alternating cycles in humans ] and found some suggestions that I was able to follow up and find gold.  Sometimes the path to an answer is another step away... and you need to find the terminological bridge to get there.  

3. Sometimes you just have to check each category.  When I did my search for alternating cycles of ovaries, kidneys, etc., I did so because I couldn't come up with a single search term what would capture the idea of "bilateral pairs of organs in human bodies."  It would have simplified my search if I had, but I couldn't find one.  So... I had to check each by hand, hoping that would work.  And it did!  

Hope you had as much fun as I did in searching for the answers.

Keep searching! 

 

SearchResearch Challenge (4/17/24): Consider the alternative?

"Strange."  I thought... 

P/C. OpenAI [create a grid of diverse animal noses including human, dog, cat, gorilla, etc. ]

... early this morning, I noticed that my left nostril was slightly congested.  Now, a couple of hours later, I noticed that my right nostril is slightly congested.  

Is this just a peculiarity of people who do SearchResearch?  Or is it a real phenomenon?  Is this all just in my head?  

Let's turn this into a SearchResearch Challenge for this week: 

1. Is my nose just weird, or do people really have a slow change in breathing from side-to-side over the course of the day?  

2. What other kinds of behaviors might happen for a while on one side of the body, and then switch to the other side of the body?  (Think outside the body: What about non-humans?  Do they have these odd behaviors?) 

Of course, the real question is how on Earth do you search for something like this?    Any good ideas?  Of course, you'll fact-check what you find... 

Let us know what you find out.. and how you discovered it! 

Keep searching! 

 

Gemini has serious hallucinations (at least when you ask about composers!)

 Asking an LLM for facts isn't great... 

P/C Midjourney. Prompt: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin sitting at a
coffee table with a musical score in the background.
Remember our Challenge from March 28...when we looked for names of composers that had associated movements, societies, or foundations?  

The easy example is Richard Wagner.  Immensely famous in his lifetime, his legacy gave rise to the adjective Wagnerian, to describe fans who are enthralled with his work.  Gustav Mahler, for instance, has been called a Wagnerian for the kind of music he composed.  

There are also many Wagner societies and clubs.  There's a Wagner society in Northern California, another in London, etc etc.  

In that Challenge, I was curious how we might use Google search AND the power of LLMs to help answer this question.  

After I wrote up the SRS Answer for that Challenge, I had a sudden brainwave.  Why not make a big spreadsheet of all the composers I could find, and then ask an LLM to tell me, for each of these composers, is there a society, club, or foundation associated with their name?  

After an easy search on Wikipedia,   It was simple to pull that into a spreadsheet.  Here are the first few rows... 

And then, I looked for a Google Sheets extension that would connect me to ChatGPT.  (That's an obvious search, and was straightforward to install the extension. I used GPT for Sheets and Docs.) Just for completeness, I did the same thing to find a sheets extension for Gemini (AI Assist for Gemini).

Then, for both sheets, I wrote a prompt in Column B like this: 

=GPT("does this " & A26 & " have a society or foundation to promote their music? Please give a short answer that includes the name of the society or foundation and give a URL to the website if possible")

 That's a pretty straightforward way to ask ChatGPT a bunch of similar questions.  Here are the top few rows of results: 

Note that the first ChatGPT reply is a bit odd ("Michel van der Aa is not a composer.  He is a Dutch composer..."  -- so which is it?)  

Column B is ChatGPT's reply to the prompt.  

Of the 4962 composers/musicians, ChatGPT responded affirmatively for 1214 of them.  I wrote a little function to extract the URL from each of the responses that had a link to the composers website, and I found that about half of them were actually valid sites--632 of them worked.  That's not great, but it was a lot better than what I could do by hand.  

HOWEVER... 

I did exactly the same thing with Gemini (using the Gemini Sheets extension), but got a VERY different answer.  Here's the top of that spreadsheet.  Notice anything different? 

Gemini's replies

Yeah.  Gemini thinks everyone has a foundation and a website. 

What's strange is that it's like that for most of the rest of the spreadsheet.  Gemini found that 75% of the composers listed in the sheet had a society or foundation to promote their music.  I checked around 150 of them--they're all bogus.  

After spending a bunch of time checking the results, I decided to try and just vet the URLs that Gemini suggested.  

Instead of testing every one of these URLs by hand, I wrote a function to extract them, and then did a simple WHOIS (to check and see if they were actually valid domains).  No surprise, virtually none of them were valid. 

But look at the very first result:  It turns out that Michel van der Aa DOES have a foundation, but it's called DoubleA Foundation, and its URL is https://doublea.net/  The URL that Gemini gives above (Michelvanderaafoundation.org) is not a valid website.  This is purely hallucinated.   

This is true for the next several thousand URLs that Gemini "found" for us.  The URLs look convincing, but they're just plausible looking junk.  

Ugh. 

Results 

It's interesting that ChatGPT missed the DoubleA Foundation of Michel van der Aa, AND it hallucinated about 50% of the positive hits.  Still... I was able to learn some useful things.  

But ChatGPT is very picky about the prompt.  In an earlier version of the spreadsheet I asked with the prompt 

"Is there a musical society for the music of <musician>?"  

In the case of musician Gamal Abdel-Rahim, ChatGPT said "No, there's no such society."  

But when I asked with a slightly different prompt: 

"does <musician> have a society or foundation to promote their music? Please give a short answer that includes the name of the society or foundation and give a URL to the website if possible"

The answer completely flipped to "Yes, Gamal Abdel-Rahim does have a society dedicated to promoting his music..."  

That's no especially handy but it does show how sensitive these things are.  

On the other hand, Gemini hallucinated thousands of results and just made-up thousands of URLs, nearly all of which have invalid domain names.  (And it ALSO missed the DoubleA Foundation!)  

Looking on the bright side, ChatGPT at least found a few hundred valid composer/musician societies AND legit links to websites describing them.  I actually found the GPT results to be useful, if slightly buried.  

But after wading through a few hundred totally bogus results from Gemini, I got discouraged.  So much nonsense made up so fast.  

Recommendation

Don't trust ANY LLM for accurate answers to prompts that involve actual people. You really can't trust the results.  

And in particular, don't count on Gemini until they really improve their game.  If accuracy counts, think of another way to do this.  

Keep searching.  

Answer: Solar eclipses and shadows?

The eclipse of April 8, 2024... 

... was seen by millions.  And if you were lucky enough to see it, you almost certainly know the answers to this week's Challenge.    

The shadows we see every day are round things.  The Challenge was why, and now we have some clues.    

1. Why ARE the dapples of sunlight round in shape?  Why isn't the shape of the sunlight exactly like the shape of the hole in the tree canopy?  Related: Why are only the small patches of light round while the bigger ones are other shapes?  Super related: Will the round sun patches change shape during the eclipse? 

I started with a statement of the Challenge: 

     [ why are dapples of sunlight round ] 

which led me to a blog post about dappled light effects (Gurney Journey) about the effects of dappling light in artwork, which led me to Edward Tufte's article about visualization, which led me to M. G. J. Minnaert's brilliant book Light and Color in the Outdoors.  In there, we find this page: 

The text goes on to say that at a large enough distance, the gaps in the tree foliage act as pinhole cameras , creating images of the disk of the sun on the ground.  THAT's why most of the dapples we see are round--they're little suns projected onto the surface of the earth.  (Keep reading to learn why some of the dapples are other shapes.)  

To pursue the second question about the changes in shapes of the dapples during the eclipse, SRS Regular Reader Ramón searched for this:   

     [tree canopy eclipse light shape]

which led him to this article about the Mystery of the Crescent Shadows, with a nice explanation of why eclipses will produce crescent-shaped shadows.  

Regular Reader remmij contributed this wonderful YT video about why solar eclipses make those crescent (with some nice animation in the middle). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGeKWOD468k 

This change becomes clear when you see photos of the dapples taken during the eclipse: 
25% covered. Pacman-like.

Very near totality
Note that the "pinhole" (or leafy equivalent) has to be far enough away from the surface to have a focusing effect.  If the non-circular "pinhole" is near enough to the focus plane, it will project the shape of the hole, and not have any focusing effect.  Example:  
Triangle aperture in my "pinhole" projection.
Distance from hole to surface, about 4" (10cm)
But when you move the triangular "pinhole" farther away from the surface, the dapple becomes circular.   The projection throw is about 2 meters.
As it turns out, I was in Austin, TX with some friends to see the eclipse.  The weather was cloudy, but everything worked out, more-or-less, with clouds sometimes parting enough for us to see the eclipse happening.  I did't have any fancy photo gear, but I got  a couple of okay shots with my iPhone 17--here's my best from the day.

Totality, with some cloud cover (and Texas telephone wires)

2. What other solar light phenomena should I be looking for?  Are there any other extraordinary shadow and light things I should be looking for?  

My query was: 

     [ other phenomena associated with eclipse ] 

which easily led to a bunch of other effects, some of which I expected (the temperature drops), and several of which I did NOT expect.  One of the ones I didn't expect was the 360-degree sunset, brighter towards the north and south, which are outside the path of totality. Apparently, darkening happens first to the west and as the eclipse progresses, the darkening moves to the east as the Moon's shadow rushes over you.  

Regular Readers provided some additional ideas:  Almaden Mike pointed out that "There are optical phenomena such as Bailey's Beads, the Diamond Ring and shadow bands, which are described here [on Space.com]."

Shadow bands!  What are those?  I haven't heard about them before either.  

RR Mark said that shadow bands are "are kind of a cherry on the top of the whole eclipse dessert experience" explaining that "When the first tiny bit of sunlight appears at the end of the eclipse, all the photons from the sun are aligned. This provides something of a free 'Schlieren Optics' setup, that makes the pressure of the wind visible. So the bands are letting you see the 'wavelength', of the speed of wind in the air. Very cool to see the invisible, made visible."  

Remmij pointed to an article at Shore & Islands, with a nice pic of the shadow bands.  

My quick search for [ shadow bands ] led to this really nice article on Space.com  (Shadow bands are a solar eclipse mystery), including a great video by Destin ("Smarter Every Day") about how to photograph the bands.    (Update: Here's a excited video of shadow bands from the April 8th eclipse. Worth the 1 minute watch time.)  

What a marvelous physical phenomenon!  Moar eclipses, please!   

SearchResearch Lessons

There was SO MUCH written about the eclipse that this wasn't a difficult Challenge.  (It's good to have them every so often as well.)  But I did want to point out: 

1.  Notice the things you don't know about. Good searching involves reading and understanding... and picking up on the things that are new to you.  In this case, there was SO MUCH written about the eclipse, that there was a hyper-abundance of content.  As I scanned the material, every so often I'd notice something that I didn't know about (like, Shadow Bands, or the 360-degree sunset).  

Keep searching!  

SearchResearch Challenge (4/3/24): Solar eclipses and shadows?

 I'm sure you've noticed... 

... that when you're walking through a group of trees, they cast shadows on the ground, dappling the surface with a lovely pattern of light and shadow.  

When I look up into the trees, I can see where the sunlight is coming from, and I'm struck by something: Why are some of the spots of light round when what I see in the trees is not round?  

Here's another view of light through trees: 

See those gaps?  The patches of light projected onto the forest floor are shaped like the openings in the tree canopy... mostly.  

But when the holes are small, the projected light is always circular.  In the image above, you can see that the large patches of light are soft rectangles, irregular blobs, and triangles with fuzzy edges.  When I look up into the tree, I see those rectangles, triangles, and irregular gaps in the tree cover.  

But when the hole is small, it always creates a small circular pool of light.  

Why? 

That's our Challenge for this week.  Since there's a solar eclipse that's passing over the center of North America on Monday, April 8, I thought I should understand why the shadows are like that. 

Path of eclipse on April 8, 2024. P/C NASA.
I will be standing at the tip of the red arrow on April 8. 
Hope there are clear skies!

To prepare for the eclipse and the avalanche of shadows, I have a couple of Challenges: 

1. Why ARE the dapples of sunlight round in shape?  Why isn't the shape of the sunlight exactly like the shape of the hole in the tree canopy?  Related: Why are only the small patches of light round while the bigger ones are other shapes?  Super related: Will the round sun patches change shape during the eclipse? 

2. What other solar light phenomena should I be looking for?  Are there any other extraordinary shadow and light things I should be looking for?  

Of course, all this will happen next Monday--so I hope you post your answers to the blog before then so I'll know what to look for!  Tell us how you found your answers.  

Keep searching!  

(And wear eye protection if you're going to watch the eclipse.)