beamjockey | Entries tagged with google

Scanning Google News, my eye fell on this headline from Bloomberg News:

Wow, I thought. Tesla Motors has sold a whole bunch of their cool electric sports cars. I've seen pictures of their hardtops, but not their convertibles.

Milliseconds later, the smaller print entered my brain:

Oh. Convertible bonds.

Never mind.

In today's otherwise charming Google Doodle, an animation celebrating Earth Day*, the phase of the Moon is wrong.

*As seen from my location within the U.S. Your Doodle may vary.

My most intimate encounter with Google Street View mapmobile (described here and here) was not my only encounter.

A few weeks later, in late April or early May 2012, while driving eastward on Batavia Road in Warrenville, I observed the bug-eyed Google Maps vehicle headed westward.

Here I come: My red Vibe, center, approaches Google's Mapmobile. Spring 2012.

There I go: Passing the Google CarTography vehicle, I wave to its many-faceted camera system. Spring 2012.
Even though you see no more of me than you do of the truck driver in Spielberg's Duel, this still counts as a Higgins sighting.

This is at the driveway of Immanuel Presbyterian Church, 29W260 Batavia Road in Warrenville. ( Here's a link to a map. )

Remember my April 12th entry?

I discovered that a Google Street View mapping car was visiting my neighborhood, and laid in ambush with my camera.

At long last, I find, the data gathered that day have been added to Google Maps. Go to 2625 Wydown Lane in Aurora, Illinois, USA and zoom into Street View, or drag the little orange cartoon person onto the map just south of the intersection of Wydown with White Barn and start looking around. (I'll try embedding a map here, but I'm not sure this works correctly.)

Click here to see map

Eventually you will see a man standing next to a red Pontiac Vibe. He is aiming a camera.

Elsewhere in the neighborhood, there seem to be a lot of little red cars.

I am too busy taking my own pictures to notice that my roof-rack has been disrupted by an image-mosaic boundary.

One can see traces of my car at the following addresses:

2400 White Barn
2403 White Barn
2405 White Barn
2417 White Barn
2457 Wydown
2465 Wydown
2471 Wydown
2479 Wydown
2487 Wydown
2501 Wydown
2503 Wydown
2625 Wydown
2647 Wydown
2615 Newton
2617 Newton
2623 Newton

All images of me, and of red cars, are copyright 2012 by Google.

There's a tree with reddish leaves that appears in both of these pictures.

It's been pointed out that, since I have a camera in front of my face, Google's "recognize a face and blur it" software may have left me alone. Not that I mind, being vain and all.

I am pleased to say that, after many years living in Aurora, I have now achieved landmark status. At least until the next time Google updates their imagery.

Google's collection of scanned magazines has a few more titles than it did when last I checked.

Some examples of its holdings:

Flying (Earlier title: Popular Aviation until Aug 1940)
Nov 1927 to Dec 2008

Spy, a satirical magazine
October 1986 to March 1998

Mother Jones
May 1976 to Jan-Feb 2000

New Scientist
26 March 1964 to 23-30 Dec 1989

The Crisis from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
April 1911 to Winter 2011

Billboard
24 Nov 1979 to 12 Dec 2009

ABA Journal from the American Bar Association
Jan 1950 to Dec 2003

Spotted the Google Street View car, not for the first time, yesterday on Batavia Road in Warrenville, not far from the Emerald Green complex where I used to live.

There was no time to whip out a camera, but I waved. Only later did it occur to me that I should keep waving well after the Googlemobile had passed; after all, it could see me just as well going as coming.

Anyway, maybe I'll be visible in Warrenville as well as Aurora, once the imagery gets incorporated into Street View. So far, my own street remains viewless.

Edited to add: Indeed, Google did catch my wave.

Someone mentioned an "emotional meltdown" to me this week. I realized that the word "meltdown" has not always been with us-- it was a term used by specialists until a particular historical moment, after which it was on everyone's lips. I used Google Ngram Viewer to investigate this.

Before 1940, the word appears in metallugical literature, and occasionally in discussions of the manufacture of ice cream. Its frequency is approximately 0.0000001000%, as the Ngram Viewer likes to say, or 1 in 1 billion.*

Today we know "meltdown" best as a word for an accident in an overheated nuclear reactor.

"Meltdown" starts to appear in nuclear literature to describe an accident with the EBR-1 breeder reactor at Arco, Idaho, in 1955. For an example, see "How Safe Are Our A-Power Plants?" from Popular Science for November 1956. I presume the nuclear engineers got it from the discourse of metallurgy and materials science, which play a vital role in reactor design. Ice cream-- not so much.

By 1960 there are many appearances of "meltdown" in nuclear engineering literature. It has climbed to around 2 words in 100 million. Between 1962 and 1965, almost half the appearances of "meltdown" in the Google Books English corpus are accompanied by the word "reactor." A search for "meltdown" without the words "nuclear," "reactor," or "atomic" reveals that the metallurgists and dairymen continue to use it.

The event that made "meltdown" a household word was the accident at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979, just a few weeks after the release of the film The China Syndrome. (I have not determined whether the word "meltdown" is spoken in the movie.)

Rapidly "meltdown" shoots up to around 1.5 words in 10 million. At first, the growth is due to the rise of nuclear safety as a topic of wider general discussion. Eventually, writers seize upon it as a metaphor. There are mental meltdowns and financial meltdowns. In the late Nineties, it takes another jump, rising to about 4.5 words in 10 million, where it remains today. (Well, not today today. Until things cool down in Japan, we will be saying "meltdown" to each other a bit more often than we usually do.)

Google searches of the Web (rather than Books) reports 1.3 million hits on "financial meltdown" and 124,000 hits on "emotional meltdown." The Google News Archive suggests that in 2009, journalists reported that the Labour Party, Serena Williams, Wall Street, and the Copenhagen global warming talks all experienced meltdowns.

Google Ngrams chart of the word meltdown from 1900 to 2008

*Dear Google: I would welcome an option to label the axes of Ngram Viewer charts in scientific notation.

I am fascinated by Google NGram Viewer, by the Science paper that accompanied its announcement, and by the 88-page supplemental material that accompanied the paper.

best practice, best practices
big picture
bionic, cyborg
bottom line
brainstorm, brainstorming
critical thinking
cybernetics, cybernetic, cyberspace
deliverables, deliverable
mission statement
network, networking
rocket science, not rocket science, not exactly rocket science
run it up the flagpole
synergy, synergistic, synergism
23 skidoo
year 2000

A feature briefly introduced by Google Books on April Fool's Day has returned: one can request that book pages be displayed in 3-D.

Here's a fine example.

If you are the sort of person who keeps red-cyan anaglyphic glasses around, you will observe that Google gives a gentle curve to the pages, like a real book lying on a table.

I wish Joan Eslinger had lived to see this. As a stereophotography buff, she would have been tickled.

As Google's 29 June announcement explains, to view a book in 3-D, incorporate the parameter "&edge=3d" into your book URL. (If there is an octothorpe (#) in the URL, this parameter must be placed somewhere to the left of the octothorpe.)

You're welcome.

Robert Heinlein's contributions appeared in Boys' Life long before my own time as a Scout, so I know them from books. But once again, it's interesting to see the original illustrations. Reynold Brown did good interior illos for Satellite Scout in 1950, but the cover painting of the first installment is a torchship by none other than Chesley Bonestell.

"Nothing Ever Happens on the Moon" (April through May 1949)
Part 1, Part 2

Satellite Scout, better known as Farmer in the Sky (August through November 1950)
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Tramp Space Ship, better known as The Rolling Stones (September 1952 through December 1952)
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

"Tenderfoot in Space" (May through July 1958)
Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.

Boys' Life was an important market at a time when Heinlein was working to establish himself as an author of childrens' fiction. It put some of his stories in the mailboxes of millions of boys, and into practically every library.

(Part 1 in this series is Donald Keith's Time Machine Stories. Part 2 is Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer.")

Google has now scanned in my all-time favorite issue of Boys' Life, namely March 1964.

We were deep into the Space Age, racing the Russians to the Moon. Mercury was over; Gemini was about to begin.

I read the SCIENCE section faithfully in Time, The Weekly Newsmagazine, along with anything about space in Reader's Digest or National Geographic or any other magazine I could get my hands on.

I had recently discovered that the library had stories about rockets and astronauts and trips to other planets! They were called "science fiction" and there was generally a rocket sticker on the spine. The best of them was Islands in the Sky by Arthur C. Clarke. There were also nonfiction books by him.

So Boys' Life arrives in the mail one day, with a cover filled with fantastic spaceships, and a story by Clarke inside: "The Sunjammer." You can imagine my delight.

The enormous disk of sail strained at its rigging, already filled with the wind that blew between the worlds. In three minutes the race would begin, yet now John Merton felt more relaxed, more at peace, than at any time for the past year. Whatever happened when the commodore gave the starting signal, whether Diana carried him to victory or defeat, he had achieved his ambition. After a lifetime spent in designing ships for others, now he would sail his own.

In a few short pages, Clarke portrays a solitary pilot striving to win a solar-sailing race, and also tells the reader enough about the science of light pressure (hitherto unsuspected by me) to fire the imagination of the sternest hard-science buff. From the moment I read this story, I adored him.

Better yet, there were multiple illustrations by Robert McCall, making the story even more vivid.

About the only complaint I have is that the story was printed in a section of light-blue newsprint paper bound into the magazine's usual slick white paper. But through the magic of image processing, for the first time in my life, I can see what McCall's paintings would have looked like if they had been printed on white paper! A triumph for the Space Colorization Movement.

Eventually, when collected into books, the story was retitled "The Wind from the Sun." But I like "Sunjammer" better.

Clarke became my guide to the future. This story led me to his Dolphin Island, full of hovercraft, dolphins, and diving. Then to more of his books about spaceflight, and about the oceans.

And you can imagine how excited I became when Popular Mechanics (by then I had discovered Popular Mechanics) brought word that Clarke was working on a movie.

I could hardly wait.

(Part 1 in this series was Donald Keith's Time Machine Stories. Part 3 is Robert A. Heinlein's Scouts into Space.)

Long ago, Boys' Life, the monthly magazine of the Boy Scouts of America, ran the Time Machine series.

In these stories, a Boy Scout patrol finds an abandoned Time Machine in the wilderness; the Smart Kid figures out the controls and they roar off to adventure, acquiring new patrol members from ancient Sparta and from 4000 A.D. along the way.

They were published, starting in 1959, under the byline "Donald Keith," a pseudonym for the father-and-son team of Donald Monroe and Keith Monroe. Eventually Keith Monroe published some of the stories under his own name.

I greatly enjoyed these when I was a Scout. I now recall that I read some even before that. My dad was a Scout leader and I remember reading a Time Machine story, maybe the origin story, in one of his issues of Boys' Life before we moved out of The Little Red House, so it must have been 1962 or earlier.

The Time Machine itself-- a luxurious saucer-shaped model-- was quite powerful, if not quite user-friendly. You could set the controls for any point in space and time, it was built to survive even in outer space, and it featured a time-viewer so you could study history or the future.

Boy, I wanted one of these so badly I could taste it.

(Using the time-viewer could be dangerous, though. On some occasions Brains Baynes would be watching some horrible scene from history, then somebody would trip and fall on the gearshift knob and the Polaris Patrol would find themselves in the middle of trouble...)

In the past, I have tried to track down some of the Time Machine stories I haven't read. I've pursued this quest for a long time.

Recently Google has been bringing more magazines down from the attic. In the past week, they have been adding freshly scanned issues of Boys' Life almost daily. One benefit is that we can all enjoy some of the Time Machine stories.

Here are the Time Machine stories I know of. (Tip o' the hat to Jerry Boyajian, who helped me get this list started years ago.)

Month	Year	Title	Author	Comment
DEC	1959	The Day We Explored the Future	DK
FEB	1960	The Time Machine Flies Backwards	DK
JUN	1960	How We Got the Mind-Reading Pills	DK
JUL	1960	Our Time Machine at the Jamboree	DK
OCT	1961	Marco Polo and Our Time Machine	DK
FEB	1962	The Time Machine Slips a Cog	DK
DEC	1962	Mutiny in the Time Machine	DK	Dec 1962 to Mar 1963 (4-part serial)
JUN	1964	The Time Machine Cracks a Safe	DK
OCT	1964	Time Machine to the Rescue	DK
FEB	1965	The Time Machine Gets Stuck	DK	Feb 1965 to Apr 1965 (3-part serial)
APR	1967	The Time Machine Hunts a Treasure	DK	Apr 1967 to Jun 1967 (3-part serial)
DEC	1968	The Dog from the Time Machine	DK
SEP	1970	The Time Machine and the Generation Gap	DK
AUG	1971	The King and the Time Machine	DK
FEB	1973	The Time Machine Cleans Up	DK
AUG	1973	The Time Machine Twins the Jamboree	KM
DEC	1973	Santa Claus and the Time Machine	DK
NOV	1974	The Time Machine Fights Earthquakes	KM
APR	1975	The Time Machine Saves a Patriot	KM
JUL	1976	The Time Machine Kidnaps a Parade	KM
SEP	1988	Target Timbuktu	KM
FEB	1989	Why We Kidnapped Our Scoutmaster	KM
SEP	1989	Pirates Took Our Time Machine	KM

Some of the stories were combined into two fix-up books, Mutiny in the Time Machine (1963) and Time Machine to the Rescue (1967).

Using another pen name, Rice E. Cochran, Keith Monroe also published Be Prepared, a comic memoir about his experiences as a Scout leader, in 1952. It was the basis for a 1953 movie, Mister Scoutmaster.

(Part 2 of this series is Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer." Part 3 is Robert A. Heinlein's Scouts into Space. Part 4 is Dale Colombo's Starship MAGELLAN, more stories for which Keith Monroe was a co-author.)

I have learned that if you ask Google Books to look at issues of Popular Mechanics in search of the string "world's smallest," you get 440 hits.
THE WORLD'S SMALLEST PRECISION CAMERA... $12.95 inc. fed. tax THE MYCRO CAMERA, world's largest selling miniature in a new improved model, so compact you ... G-1 PO Box 1251, Elkhart, Indiana S. WORLD'S SMALLEST RECHARGEABLE CALCULATOR.' World's Smallest Robot? - Jun 2003 - Page 44 PRUITT BLOC., CHICAGO Mid [AL WORLD'S SMALLEST RADIOS handful— Wt. only 2 Ibe. FIND $ $ $ $ NEW U-238 geiger counter— world's smallest, most sensitive uranium Nikon's Lite-Touch Zoom (list price: $240), dubbed by its makers as the "world's smallest auto- focus zoom," is 4.6 in. wide and 1.4 in. deep and weighs in ... World's Smallest Frog MOUNT IBERIA, CUBA— While hiking in the rain forest on the western slope of Mount Iberia in search of new species of birds, ... ( more... )

...and over 300 more.

World's biggest: 450 hits
World's largest: 790 hits
World's tiniest: 41 hits
World's most: 676 hits

I was looking at Google Books when I noticed a new feature.

Google Books now allows you to view books in 3-D. Get out your red-cyan anaglyphic goggles.

And read swiftly. Who knows whether this feature will still be there on April 2nd?

Many items in Google Books have been given a "Common terms and phrases" list, or "word cloud," with links to the text. Roughly speaking they are words whose frequency in the book is much greater than their frequency in general use.

When I discussed The Boy Mechanic recently I called this an "inchoate review."

Here are Inchoate Reviews of five more books. The first is Moby Dick; the others will be trivially easy to guess.

again almost ambergris avast away baleen Bedford Bildad binnacle birth-mark blubber boat book of Jonah bows bowsman bowsprit pointing Bulkington cabin cannibal Cape Horn capstan Captain Ahab Captain Peleg cetacea Cetology CHAPTER chief mate clam come common porpoise crew cried Daggoo darted deck don't doubloon Duodecimo dyspepsia Euroclydon ever eyes feet Fin-Back Whale fish fishery Flask flukes forecastle Greenland whale gunwale hammock hand handspikes harpoon he's head himself humpbacked whale Indian ocean Ishmael it's Jeroboam Jonah Joppa King-Post Leviathan look main-mast Martha's Vineyard mast-head mate might missing murderers Moby Dick monomania Nantucket Nantucket ships Narwhal never night oars Octavo pagan Pequod Perseus Peter Coffin phrenologists Propontis Quaker quarter-deck Queequeg queer Ramadan Right Whale round sail sailors schooner seemed sharks ship ship biscuit ship's shipmates side sloop-of-war sort soul Sperm Whale spermaceti spile spiracle spout stand Starbuck Steelkilt Straits of Sunda strange Stubb Sumatra taffrail Tahiti tambourine Tarshish Tashtego tell thee thing third mate thou though till tobacco smoke tomahawk turned vertebrae Vishnu voyage whaleboat whalebone whalemen White Squall White Whale wigwam windlass

answered asked Scrooge believe bell bless Bob Cratchit bright Camden Town CHARLES DICKENS cheerful child CHRISTMAS CAROL Christmas Day Christmas Present clerk clock cloth cold cried Scrooge curtains dark dead dear Dickens Dilber dinner door eyes face father fire Fred gentleman Ghost of Christmas girl goose Hallo happy head hear heard heart hope Humbug Jacob Marley JOHN LEECH kind laughed light little Bob Marley's Ghost Martha Master Peter merry Christmas never night observed old Fezziwig old Joe parlour past Phantom PHIZ plump sister poor pudding replied the Ghost returned robe Robin Crusoe round Scrooge knew Scrooge looked Scrooge's nephew Scrooge's niece shadows snow spectre Spirit stood stopped streets tell thing thought Tiny told trembled Turkey turned Uncle Scrooge voice walked window woman wonder word young Cratchits

adventures alight Amadis of Gaul answered Don Quixote armor arms asked barber basin battle beard beast beautiful began begged Biscayan blow books of chivalry bray cage called Cardenio carried castle Cervantes CHAPTER coach cried Dapple devil Don Fernando Don Quix Don Quixote saw donkey Dorothea dressed duchess duke Dulcinea del Toboso Durandarte enchanted fair ladies fancied fell friend Sancho galley-slaves gave giant give goatherds governor hand haste head heard heaven helmet Herakles Holy Brotherhood horse innkeeper knew knight knight-errant lady Dulcinea lance landlord look maidens Mancha master Melisendra Montesinos mounted mule mule-drivers niece priest princess Quiteria Quixote and Sancho Quixote's quoth Sancho replied Don Quixote rode Rozinante Rueful Visage saddle sallied Sancho Panza servant shield Sir knight soon Spain squire stood story sword tell thee thing thou told took turned village wonder word worship wounded

abolition absolute alienated antagonism argued association Bauer became become Berlin bourgeois bourgeois society bourgeoisie Bruno Bauer Cabet Cambridge capital century Charles Fourier Chartist Christianity civil society class struggle Communist Manifesto conception criticism Critique of Hegel's Critique of Political division of labour Economic and Philosophical emancipation England English essay estrangement Europe existence feudal Feuerbach Fourier France Frederick Engels freedom French Revolution German Ideology Gospel Hegel Hegel's Philosophy human Icaria idea individual Karl Marx liberal London Man's Manuscripts of 1844 Marx and Engels Marx and F Marx's Marxism means MECW Moses Hess movement natural negative community original Owenites Paris party Philosophical Manuscripts Philosophy of Right political economy position principle private property proletariat Proudhon question radical reason reform relations religion religious republican revolutionary Rheinische eitung Roman Ruge Russian Saint-Simon Saint-Simonian Schapper social socialist species Strauss theory translation Weitling workers Young Hegelians

alfo Angle Angle of Incidence appear arife Axis Bafe becaufe blue Bodies breadth Bubbles caft caufe Circle colour'd compofed compound confequence copioufly Cryftal dark defcribed denfity Diameter diftance equal Experiment fame farther feems feen fenfible feparated feven feveral fhall fide firft Prifm Fits of eafy fmall folid fome fometimes forts of Rays frangible Fringes fuch fuppofe gible Glaffes Glafs Glais greater green hole Image Inch Inci increafed indigo Knives leaft refrangible lefs Lens Lines lours mall meafured Medium Mixture Motion muft Obfervation oblique Oil of Vitriol Opticks orange pafs Paper parallel Particles perpendicular placed Plane Plates PROP Proportion Rays of Light reafon reflected Reflexion refraded refrangible Rays reft reprefent Shadow Sine of Incidence Sine of Refraction Spectrum Speculum Subftances Sun's Light Surface Telefcopes thefe Colours ther thicknefs thofe Rays tranfmitted tranfparent ufual unufual violet Water whitenefs whofe yellow

(The last one has OCR trouble with the "long s" or "ſ." But so do the eyeballs of many of us who learned to read in the Twentieth Century. One recalls Stan Freberg's account of Ben Franklin, teasing Thomas Jefferson about "life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff.")

There's a certain beauty to these. They're unearthed by a blind, unconscious, inarticulate robot, yet they bring resonances to the human reader's mind, and spark the imagination. There ought to be a way to make a game, or a poem-like object, or something, out of them. Any suggestions?

One could, to take a simple example, use them as a source for Moby Dick-themed Mad Libs.

There's some interesting discussion of "Common terms and phrases" on Eric Rumsey's blog. For those technically inclined, Wikipedia has an article on TF/IDF, or term frequency/inverse document frequency, which Google is using to produce its word clouds.

I'll be giving two slide talks and two panels at Capricon this coming weekend. Thirty Capricons, and I've attended every one. Wow.

Capricon (near Chicago) is supposed to have a teleconference hookup with Boskone in Boston. It will be interesting to learn whether this works well. I think it would be cool to be on a transcontinental panel someday-- and there will be lots of people at Boskone I'd like to converse with.

K will also be a panelist on "Mental Health Treatment: How Far Have We Really Come?" Saturday at 10 AM.

Here's my own schedule. See you there.

Searching for Weirdness in the Vaults of Life Magazine

Time: Friday - 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Other
Location: Birch A
Panelists: Bill Higgins

Puppets, Jetpacks, and Ballet on the Moon: Recently Google placed online TWO MILLION images shot by Life magazine photographers. There's something for everyone in this mountain of negatives, from flying cars to behind-the-scenes photos of classic science fiction movies. Bill Higgins conducts a tour of Twentieth Century oddities lurking in the archive.

Assault On The Moon: Chasing Lunar Water

Time: Saturday - 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Science
Location: Ravinia B
Panelists: Brother Guy Consolmagno, Bill Higgins

In a surprising development last fall, observations from several spacecraft found evidence for water molecules distributed widely across the face of the Moon. Then NASA's LCROSS spacecraft, crashing deliberately, uncovered another trove of frozen water near the Moon's south pole. Join Bill Higgins and Brother Guy Consolmagno to review these novel results.

The Golden Age of 2010

Time: Saturday - 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Other
Location: Ravinia A
Panelists: Brother Guy Consolmagno, Phyllis Eisenstein (M), Bill Higgins, Fred Pohl, Bill Thomasson

What would SF pioneers think of the world today?

Cancelled TV Shows You Should Love

Time: Saturday - 8:30 PM to 10:00 PM
Category: Panel-Event
Track: Media
Location: Birch B
Panelists: Michael D'Ambrosio, Bill Higgins, Phoenix, Jim Rittenhouse, delphyne woods (M)

From Firefly to The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. to Wonderfalls, there are many shows that existed for less than a season but are available on DVD. What are some of these flops that you should know about and watch with the sadness of knowing there will never be any more episodes?

The other day I noticed that the Life magazine photo collection at Google now allows users to provide tags or "labels" for the images.

This might help alleviate the helpless feeling I get when I realize that I'm looking at a photo, and I know what's in it, but there is no indication that Life does. For example, Allan Grant's pictures of the bizarre lunar ballet on the Destination Moon set are entitled "Preparation Moon Ballet," because somebody incorrectly deciphered handwriting on an envelope full of negatives.

The Time for Beany pictures are entitled only "Beane TV Act," and the only tag they carry is "1950s," which will not be helpful to someone searching for information about Beany, Cecil, Stan Freberg, Daws Butler, Bob Clampett, puppets, or KTLA.

On the other hand, there is a smug emotion associated with (believing myself to be) the only guy that knows about some cool thing buried among two million images. If I label Fritz Goro's 1947 pictures of a Lichtenberg figure as "Lichtenberg Figure," than it is no longer a delicious secret possessed by me and those I choose to share it with. Any schmo can type "Lichtenberg Figure" and find it.

Another problem: Suppose I get past the smugness, and nobly decide to share my secrets with humanity. I pull up an image and type in a bunch of labels. Okay, the photo is tagged. But the photographer shot several rolls that day long ago. Should I go to the next picture from that shoot, and label it? Some of these collections have over 200 pictures. My altruism will wear thin, somewhere around Photo Three.

Google does have some way of associating pictures from a particular assignment; you can access these through their "Related Images" and "More" links. Maybe if I offer labels for one or two photos, it will help other searchers discover a trove of related images.

Anyway, if users get into the habit of adding extra tags, and if these provide more signal than noise, we may find that this archive becomes even more useful. Though the thrill of finding unidentified treasures will become less frequent...

(Another discovery: they've added more pictures from Goro's shoot; previously there were half a dozen or so, and now there are 159 tagged with "Capacitron." Off to see if there are any fresh Lichtenberg figure shots!)

Remember the mysterious ballet performed on the set of Destination Moon? Here are eightysome of Allan Grant's 1949 photos, assembled from thumbnails into a crude animation.

I was thinking about 3-D movies today. Suddenly I recalled that I had seen a batch of photos in the Google Life archive that included one of the most famous of all Life's pictures: patrons in a movie theatre wearing 3-D glasses.

It was shot by the appropriately-named J. R. Eyerman (1906-1985), at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood on 26 November 1952, during a showing of Bwana Devil.

Since there were multiple pictures from the shoot in the collection, I began to wonder whether one could find two of them, shot from slightly different points of vew, that might permit the construction of a 3-D image of the audience itself. Wouldn't that be cool?

Unfortunately, it turned out that there aren't very many images. Some of them are duplicate images printed at different exposures. And Eyerman apparently used a tripod, so the camera doesn't move much with respect to the audience.

Nevertheless, I found a couple of images that allowed me to animate the audience. Here's a quick-and-dirty GIF. It's copyrighted, as always, by Time, Incorporated.

One could do this trick with many of the Life shoots. If one needed a new hobby for some reason.

As I mentioned Monday, I was searching Google's Life magazine photo archive for photos by Allan Grant taken in 1949 or 1950. I was hoping to find previously-unrevealed photos from the set of Destination Moon, the classic science fiction movie co-written by Robert Heinlein.

Google limits the search result to 200 images from this archive, even if a larger number satisfy the search condition. So I was trying "allan grant 1950" to turn up a somewhat different set of pictures than those revealed by "destination moon."

Jackpot. I found 86 more pictures of the DM set. They are tagged Preparation "Moon Ballet."

Recall that I previously found a couple of strange pictures of ballet dancers cavorting on the set. Turns out Grant shot many more. They are mysterious.

( More photos here )
It is evident that someone staged an elaborate performance, by people wearing dance costume, on the set of Destination Moon. Part of this performance involved suspending the dancers on wires. It incorporated both the full-size version of the rocket ship Luna (one dancer is seen clinging to rungs of the ladder on its hull) and the smaller model seen in the "distance."

We may reasonably infer that this surreal performance was filmed, probably using the same cameras, lighting, and crew. The film may or may not have used the Technicolor process that DM used.

It seems very probable that this shooting would have taken place after DM wrapped, or anyway after it completed shooting on its lunar set. This suggests sometime after the second week of December 1949. According to the shooting schedule I found among Heinlein's papers, the film was scheduled to complete shooting on Friday, 9 December, the 23rd day of filming. This was also the final day using the Moon set.

The Moon Ballet has not been mentioned in anything I have read about Destination Moon. Bill Patterson has reviewed all the drafts of the screenplay, and has discovered no plans to include ballet scenes.

Who are the dancers? Who directed and choreographed this? For what film (short? feature?) was the performance intended? Was the film ever released? Is it available on video now?

How do we find out?

1. Google "lunar ballet" or "moon ballet" or similar keywords. (Hey! Apollo 17 visited a Ballet Crater!)

2. Find someone who knows a lot about dancers working near Los Angeles in 1949. See if they can identify any of the people in the photos.

3. Run down the credits of Destination Moon's production designer, set decorator, camera operators, lighting people, etc. to see if they are credited with any ballet-type films around 1950.

4. Find someone who was involved in shooting DM, and ask.

5. See if Allan Grant's estate, or Life magazine, has any information about this shoot beyond that which made it into Google.

Destination Moon's production company was Eagle Lion Films. According to Wikipedia, their lot was at 7950 Santa Monica Boulevard; according to the George Pal Productions callsheet of 18 November 1949, DM shot on stages #2 and #3.

Are there good online forums that attract people who know a lot about Hollywood dancing?

Do you know anybody who can help learn more about this mystery? Pass this along.

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Page Summary

Touring Top-Down in My Tesla
Astronomical Observation
Warrenville, Illinois: Rematch with the Big G
Eyeball to Eyeball with the Big G
More Magazines from Google Books
Recartographed!
Meltdown: From Metallurgy to Metaphor
Fun with Google NGram Viewer, Which Views N-Grams
This Might Be the Most Useless Thing You Will Learn Today
Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 3: Robert A. Heinlein's Scouts into Space
Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 2: Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer"
Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 1: Donald Keith's Time Machine Stories
World of Superlatives
New from Google: A New Dimension in Reading
The Inchoate Reviews of Google Books
Higgins at Capricon 30
User-Assigned Labels Now Invited for Google LIFE Photos
Dance by the Light of the Earth
Fidgeters from Another Dimension
Mystery of the Moon Ballet

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Eponymously Yours, W. Skeffington Higgins

Entries tagged with google

Touring Top-Down in My Tesla

Astronomical Observation

Warrenville, Illinois: Rematch with the Big G

Eyeball to Eyeball with the Big G

More Magazines from Google Books

Recartographed!

Meltdown: From Metallurgy to Metaphor

Fun with Google NGram Viewer, Which Views N-Grams

This Might Be the Most Useless Thing You Will Learn Today

Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 3: Robert A. Heinlein's Scouts into Space

Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 2: Arthur C. Clarke's "The Sunjammer"

Paging through BOYS' LIFE, Part 1: Donald Keith's Time Machine Stories

World of Superlatives

New from Google: A New Dimension in Reading

The Inchoate Reviews of Google Books

Higgins at Capricon 30

User-Assigned Labels Now Invited for Google LIFE Photos

Dance by the Light of the Earth

Fidgeters from Another Dimension

Mystery of the Moon Ballet