When I was writing my post on Google Labs - Similar Images, I didn't spend a lot of time checking out the competition, idly presuming Google would be ahead of their competitors.
Well, I've since discovered a number of services doing exactly what Google is offering, as well as a bit more - so here's a wee low-down:
TinEye First up is TinEye - An operational beta service that has quite a few followers already. This site can pitches itself as a 'reverse search engine', that lets you find similar images based on giving it a source - any image on the web and (crucially) any image you upload to it.
This lets you find out what something is when you have a picture but no details and therefore performs the one major feature that the Google service was missing.
The Newspeak Blog shows the power of this service, using TinEye to prove campaign leaflet 'voter photos' were in fact stock photography, available to buy on the web:
As you can see, they have good video resources and a blog about the service, so it should all make sense on there - even demonstrating an album cover search using a mobile phone...check out the plugins too:
Gazopa Gazopa is in a registration-only beta (free & quick to sign up though) and offers an image search based on keyword, an uploaded image or a sketch. The sketch feature is a nice touch, but results are mixed. My search for a basic guitar shape brought up a few guitars, but my sketch with a man playing a guitar wasn't so successful (see below):
Gazopa is a sketch-only image search and searches via flickr only. However, it has a nice interface (results update as you sketch) and can be a nice way to see a variety of photos based on a rough colour theme. As they explain:
All-in-all, these services offer some interesting results, and of the three, TinEye certainly has the most polished and reliable service. However, this is a growing field and these services will improve and others will surface and it won't be long until one comes to dominate them all - I'm sure Google is keeping it's eye on the competition!
The code below shows how you can redirect users of Internet Explorer to a different page when they enter your site. Two key points (and pros and cons) to bear in mind:
1. This is a JavaScript solution
2. It works irrespective of your page content (meta-refresh is more buggy in this respect)
If you research this problem, you'll find a lot of forum responses saying 'you don't want to do that' (which REALLY annoys me...they wouldn't ask if they didn't want to!) and a lot of suggestions that simply don't work or are too buggy. And of course you'll also get lots of people suggesting the standard meta-refresh technique.
My problem was as follows: When you load this blog via the blog homepage, it runs a perl script to pull the content out of my database and passes a few variables along the way, making the URL look a bit messy. So a year or so ago I decided to but the blog in a 100% iframe and load it from there. This works fine in Firefox and everything works as normal, but in IE, it won't show anything on the page until the iframe is fully loaded - meaning loading times can be up to a minute.
Diagram showing the redirect system for this blog
This is obviously a major issue, so to get round it, I decided it was best to send IE users to the perl script directly, but leave others with the slightly nicer iframe system. Any permalink / individual story will use its proper url and all page titles are migrated back to the source frame, meaning the system is relatively problem-free on non-IE browsers.
So, here's my foolproof* way of redirecting IE users only - just bung this code within your tag and you're in business:
*I haven't tested it fully, but everything I've thrown at it works fine.
Oh and one more thing - in the second sentence of this post I used the phrase "bear in mind", which I rarely do. I usually refrain from writing it as I can never work out whether it is "bear" or "bare" - but I finally looked it up...let's hope I remember the answer!
I'm proud that this blog (and the entire website, in fact) has remained advertising-free ever since its creation (~October 2006). However, the site's been getting a steady increase of visitors and as the blog is pretty media-rich (and most images are hosted locally), bandwidth has been stretched to the max. I've already increased my bandwidth on 3 occasions and it looks like I'll have to do it again soon.
I really don't want to lose any visitors, but it's got to the point where hosting is rather an expensive burden on the blog's continuing existence! Putting numbers on it, I'm now paying ~£220 a year to keep the blog going.
So I'm now trialling a small amount of advertising on the site with the hope of recouping a little bit of the upkeep costs. It's against my ethos for the site, in the sense that my blog is in no way about the money, but I'm afraid it's come to a point where I either reduce the blog's scope or incorporate some advertising.
The Beats! Design styling options for Google Adsense text-ads
If, by some minor miracle, the advertising revenue is anywhere near by domain fees, then I will remove it straight away - but I imagine it will only bring in a fraction of these costs. I'll see how it goes.
I've made it as unobtrusive as possible (well, within reason, I can't hide it completely!) and made the colour scheme blend in too. You'll see two text-ads on the side panel (right) and a graphic-ad below each individual post. If you're viewing the blog in its entirety, only the first two stories will contain a graphic-ad.
This is the third issue of a series on this blog highlighting earth stories from The Observer newspaper. Each of these stories offers an interesting perspective on Earth Sciences and were so good I felt the need to serialise them!
Alexander von Humboldt was born on the 14th of December, 1769 and died on the 6th May, 1859. Charles Darwin called him 'the greatest scientific traveller who ever lived', and Alexander von Humboldt's work is still commemorated in the names of seven towns, six geographical features, 12 plant and animal species and the field of Humboldtian science - a movement shaped by an understanding of the inter-connectedness of nature through precise measurement.
While studying geology at the Freiburg Mining Academy, the Berlin-born Humboldt befriended George Forester, a scientific illustrator, and caught the travel bug as they hiked around Europe. By 27 he had resolved to explore the unknown geography and wildlife of Latin America.
On 5 June 1799 he set off focused on the flora, fauna and topography of the mysterious continent, mapping more than 1,700 miles of the Orinoco River and breaking altitude records while climbing Mount Chimborazo in the Andes (he reached 18,000ft). He mapped volcanoes in Ecuador, charted ocean currents in Peru and took animal specimens in Cuba. He even found time to visit Thomas Jefferson in Washington DC, who later called Humboldt 'the most important scientist I have met'.
A map of all places called 'Humboldt' with a number of other features thrown in Click the markers to get a Wikipedia link
Humboldt's impact on the region is profound - Venezuelan schoolchildren today are taught about the great Alejandro de Humboldt, who 'named all flowers and stones'.
After he returned to Berlin a hero in 1904, Humboldt dedicated 30 years to writing and publishing reports of his four-year adventure. After a brief trip around Russia, he set about creating his masterpiece: "Cosmos: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe". The first volume was published when he was 76 and sold out within two months - he died before the fifth volume was completed.
Just as an interesting aside...whilst I was looking up the mountain Chimborazo in Ecuador, I saw that its summit is reportedly the furthest point from the center of the Earth:
We all get random emails with 'great' photos in, don't we? And they are very rarely 'great', hey? Well sometimes they are, or at least over time a few of them might be classed in this category. But the one problem with this way of sharing photos is that the source information tends to get lost. Unless it's watermarked, you generally get no credit for your work as it's sent around the world on your behalf.
So I understandably hesitate to publish any of these types of shots on the blog when due credit can't be given. However, when they are emailed all around the world without credit, I'm probably not adding to the problem by much! But either way, I'll do my best to find a source if possible.
So, over the last few months, I've saved the odd photo from these emails in the hope of building up a few nice ones to post, and that's what I'm doing here. I also discovered the original photographer for one of the photos and perhaps for a couple more.
But I'll start with the photos and then see what I can find out about the source! These are just some random photos that I enjoyed (for no particular reason), so I hope you like them too:
So, I found the source of one photo as Detlef Winkelewski and it's plausible that more than one of the other shots is his too, as these emails don't tend to use a massive variety of sources! If I can confirm that or find any other sources, I'll be sure to add them.
[There's a lesson here I think: ALWAYS WATERMARK YOUR PHOTOS!]
Anyway, a quick google search unearthed a few other photos by this photographer (he seems to be quite prolific!) including the portrait photo for a Sicilian villa, Gianferrante, near Paternò:
Whilst visiting this website, I found a few other photos from guests of the villa, and Mr Winkelewski pops up again, with a couple of great shots of Sicily:
So there we are, another weird tour of the internet with quite a few nice photos thrown in for fun. One day I'll write posts that have a slightly more logical fabric to them, but until then, I hope you keep enjoying the madness! :)
I'll start this post by saying I used to be an avid reader of the SciencePunk blog and this post was inspired by a post I saw there. However, it's recently been given a facelift (and is now part of Science Blogs) and even though on paper it's now much better, I don't visit as much now - it's a bit less personal somehow. Maybe I just don't like change! ;)
So how many times have you thought, 'man, I wish I had a paper model of the Pope..'? Well, now you're in luck! And not only one, but two glorious models - as well as a bonus model of the Hoff! Oh yes :)
These 2d cut-out models of the Pope and the Hoff come courtesy of Rob Nance's website, 'Art for Robots' and are by no means the only thing worth looking at on the site, so please take a visit. You get a rough idea of the type of thing we're dealing with in the picture below, but click on the links below to get the PDFs of modelly-goodness!
Finally, if that isn't good enough for you, why not make your very own 3D model of the Pope? With the help of the Spanish blog 'Recortables', you can - I've put a link to the blog post below, but unless you speak Spanish, it's probably easier to juct click the link below it to the 3D model itself:
This post is the result of one of those bizarre internet journeys, made easier by Wikipedia. I was listening to Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on BBC 6Music and he played Golden Brown by The Stranglers. It's a classic song, but it made me look it up to find out more about the unusual song structure.
I then read that one of the lines is a classic 'Mondegreen' or misheard lyric, so I started reading about misheard language in general and ended up with a few good examples and a video to post:
So, starting with the Mondegreen - this is a simple case of mishearing the lyrics of a song with those in your head. It's pretty easy to do, but there are a few famous examples. The term was coined by Sylvia Wright in 1954, where she quoted her own mishearing of a line in the 17th century ballad, "The Bonnie Earl O'Murray".
Where she heard "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And Lady Mondegreen", the real line was "They hae slain the Earl Amurray, And laid him on the green." The example I've heard quoted in the past is from the Jimi Hendrix song, Purple Haze, where the line "Scuse me while I kiss the sky" is misheard as "Scuse me while I kiss this guy".
AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix get the Mondegreen T-shirt treatment.
But what if the original lyrics are in one language and are misinterpreted as being in another? That's what Soramimi is - when foreign lyrics are misheard in your own language. Again, this is quite common - when hearing a song not in your native tongue, you naturally try and hear meaning you are familiar with, so often just replace the words with ones of your own language.
Soramimi is most often applied to English songs when heard in non-English countries and the word comes from Japan - as do a lot of funny examples. But to mix things up, here's an example that started in Spanish: From Filippa Giordano's 'Casta Diva', "A noi volgi, a noi volgi" (English: Turn to us, turn to us) is heard in Japanese as "Ano iboji, ano iboji" which means "Um, I have haemorrhoids; um, I have haemorrhoids" :)
So finally, let's move on to Hatten Är Din. This is the name given to a form of viral video, where the lyrics of a song are 'translated' soramimically. The name comes from the Swedish for "the hat is yours" and is linked to a misheard lyric in a song by Lebanese artist, Azar Habib. A viral video to this end was released in 2000 and became popular around the world.
Recently, there has been a sharp rise in a similar type of video, often appended with "- literal version", where a (normally English) song video is animated with lyrics that describe the video and fit the tune and structure of the original song. So, in order to lighten up this post, I'll leave you with a couple of these videos, as well as the original Hatten Är Din viral:
One thing to keep in mind is that retrievr doesn't do object/face/text recognition of any kind, so if you're drawing an outline sketch of a chair, it almost certainly won't get you one back. It helps to think of it as matching the most pronounced shapes and slabs of colors. 
