Geolocation Exercises

Mendel said:
What about the river neither of you has mentioned? @MapperGuy

Moss and lichen on the tree in the foreground should suggest a compass direction.
Click to expand...

I had missed this thread. I like a good geolocation challenge. I'm working today (or meant to be) so can't devote a lot of time to it at the moment.

The river seems to be quite broad and meandering, so we are not in steep country here although there are some hills around. To me it suggests the lowlands below some higher moorland, either in the West Country or near the Pennines/Peaks. The landscape looks more northern than southern England to me.

And, if @Giddierone uses the same handle elsewhere, then he has recently been around
the Lancashire region.
 
Mendel said:
What about the river neither of you has mentioned? @MapperGuy

Moss and lichen on the tree in the foreground should suggest a compass direction.
Click to expand...
Yup, graveyard without church near a crook of a meandering river (and for double checking, with an embankment opposite).

I'd say the shadows give a more reliable clue than the moss regarding compass direction - the sun seems highish in the sky for the UK (still an unproved assumption), and the shadow is cast towards us, so I think we're facing due south. Plenty of moss on this side of the branches at least, so they could be north-facing which would corroborate that. But it's a noisy signal. Someone with better eyes (having 3-colour vision, say) might extract more from the photo in this regard.

Such as ... EXIF tags!

Oh, shoot, the cheeky blighter removed them.
 
FatPhil said:
Yup, graveyard without church near a crook of a meandering river (and for double checking, with an embankment opposite).

I'd say the shadows give a more reliable clue than the moss regarding compass direction - the sun seems highish in the sky for the UK (still an unproved assumption), and the shadow is cast towards us, so I think we're facing due south. Plenty of moss on this side of the branches at least, so they could be north-facing which would corroborate that. But it's a noisy signal. Someone with better eyes (having 3-colour vision, say) might extract more from the photo in this regard.
Click to expand...

Yes, so assuming the photo was taken roughly in the middle of the day (high sun angle, and it was taken this month) then we are looking at a river aligned east-west, with the cemetery on the north bank.

The question then is, which way is the river flowing. Looking at the V-shaped flow here I think it is left to right, so east to west if the camera is facing south, which would fit with my earlier assumption about the area of the country.

1712657075347.png
 
Trailblazer said:
The question then is, which way is the river flowing. Looking at the V-shaped flow here I think it is left to right, so east to west if the camera is facing south, which would fit with my earlier assumption about the area of the country.
Click to expand...

The silting up of the inside of the curve also suggests that direction of flow.

I'd also note that the more specular highlights on the river on the right of the picture give more clues as to the sun's direction.
 
Tree has moss on the back left, generally moss grows on the north side of trees in the northern hemisphere, so we probably looking southish
 
I wonder if it might be a Quaker burial ground. There are quite a lot of them in the north of England, and they don't have churches attached.

I'm having a look through the Historic England monument list.
 
Could overpass find this one?

graveyard with in 50 metres of a waterway and a road but not within say 100m of a church.
 
jarlrmai said:
Could overpass find this one?

graveyard with in 50 metres of a waterway and a road but not within say 100m of a church.
Click to expand...
I've been trying to work out how to use overpass turbo to do a NOT operation - something like...

Find a graveyard or cemetery that is within 10m of a waterway, but not within 100m of a church.

I dont know how to do that yet. :(
 
I think you have to define areas of 100m around churches and then find graveyards that are not in those zones.
 
Or maybe it's find the ones that are within 100m churches and then exclude those from a search for all graveyards.

I think the rivers thing while it sounds logical is gonna add so much time to the query.
 
might be even better to find cemeteries with no buildings at all near them (not just churches)

this one has farmland directly adjoining
 
Trailblazer said:
The question then is, which way is the river flowing. Looking at the V-shaped flow here I think it is left to right, so east to west if the camera is facing south, which would fit with my earlier assumption about the area of the country.

1712657075347.png
Click to expand...
FatPhil said:
The silting up of the inside of the curve also suggests that direction of flow.
Click to expand...
I thought both clues indicated a "downward" flow in that bend, so right-to-left or eastward. The solution proves this correct.
 
Mendel said:
I thought both clues indicated a "downward" flow in that bend, so right-to-left or eastward. The solution proves this correct.
Click to expand...
My gawd, I misread the prior post - I think I saw the "V" and just thought "aha, yes!" and missed the actual given conclusion.
I, and my view of the silt, fully agree with you.
 
Mendel said:
I thought both clues indicated a "downward" flow in that bend, so right-to-left or eastward. The solution proves this correct.
Click to expand...

Weirdly, when I first looked at the picture I immediately thought the flow was right to left. Then I overanalysed it and ended up getting it backwards. I was trying to find pictures of fast-flowing rivers to see whether the V should point up or downstream. I convinced myself it should point upstream but apparently not!

I couldn't really see how the bend would give an answer one way or the other, as the outside of the bend is the outside of the bend, no matter which way the stream goes.

Anyway having looked at the OS map, that's exactly what I was looking for along the north bank of just about every river in northwest England. I just didn't look far enough north! (The map shows a small island in the river which doesn't seem to exist any more)

1712675287048.jpeg
 
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Trailblazer said:
I couldn't really see how the bend would give an answer one way or the other, as the outside of the bend is the outside of the bend, no matter which way the stream goes.
Click to expand...
20240409_171550.jpg
To be fair, I couldn't be bothered to look for photos, but the silt deposit is asymmetric.
 
jarlrmai said:
What was your technique?
Click to expand...
EDIT: I'll spoiler this too in case somebody else wants to find it.

OSM data, pretty much along the same lines as the discussion in this thread. River near a small road near a cemetery.
I figured it was a rural part of northern England or southern Scotland. Got lucky in that I started looking in Scottish council areas first and hit the correct spot in my second search - Dumfries and Galloway had one result which didn't look right at all, Scottish Borders returned two locations and the second one was the correct place.

sb.jpg

The other possible spot is at https://maps.app.goo.gl/PYyjuqvv4m4qoRQK7 but you can tell immediately it's not what we're looking for.
 
Uh, can I just add that half the time I have no idea what I'm doing with these queries and that they're sketchy at the best of times :p Don't place too much trust in my Overpass-fu please, I'm happy enough if these things produce a somewhat useful answer!
 
flarkey said:
Strangely. whatiswhere.com does not identify that cemetery when you search for it.
Click to expand...
The Bellingcat tool did quite well (without coding) at giving back results that used just three features: road, river, and cemetery within 20m (assuming you had a hunch it was Scotland) - however like Whatiswhere it didn't pick up the correct cemetery but one further along the valley in Roberton. So I guess it's not tagged correctly.

This simple search looking would have given enough hits to then eyeball the shape of the river and cemetary walls and find the right location to bomb...I mean to solve the puzzle...

Screenshot 2024-04-09 at 18.10.21.pngScreenshot 2024-04-09 at 18.10.51.png
 
FYI... Family cemeteries are a reasonably common thing in the rural US, and if the family has had the land for a long time they'll be more folks burried there.

in case the next one has a cemetery in it.
 
flarkey said:
I've been trying to work out how to use overpass turbo to do a NOT operation - something like...

Find a graveyard or cemetery that is within 10m of a waterway, but not within 100m of a church.

I dont know how to do that yet. :(
Click to expand...
Unfortunately there's no simple exclusion operator, at least I didn't find a straightforward solution. It's possible to get a similar result using sets but you have to start from the other end, if that makes sense.
First you create a set that contains all the items you're looking for, then you create a second set that has the items you're NOT looking for, and then you subtract the second set from the first, so that the result only has the items you're NOT NOT looking for, which are by definition the items that you ARE looking for. Not confusing at all!


Maybe this makes it clearer. It's rather quick and dirty but it seems to work. Let's say we want to find all cemeteries in the Scottish Borders area that are NOT within 100 metres of a building.

allcemeteries.jpg
Code: 
area[name="Scottish Borders"]->.searchRegion;
    way[landuse=cemetery](area.searchRegion);
(._;>;);
out;
Only for illustration purposes - this is simply every cemetery in the search area. This would be the starting set as it contains everything we're looking for, only problem is it has both the good cemeteries that are 100+ m from buildings as well as the bad cemeteries that are closer to buildings. So we need to get rid of the latter.


cemeteriesnearbuildings.jpg
Code: 
area[name="Scottish Borders"]->.searchRegion;
    way[building](area.searchRegion);
    way[landuse=cemetery](area.searchRegion)(around:100);
(._;>;);
out;
Again only for illustration - these are the bad results. All the cemeteries that are closer than 100 m to a building.


cemeteriesnotnearbuildings.jpg
Code: 
area[name="Scottish Borders"]->.searchRegion;
    way[landuse=cemetery](area.searchRegion)
      ->.allTheCemeteries;
    way[building](area.searchRegion);
    way[landuse=cemetery](around:100)
      ->.cemeteriesNearBuildings;
(way.allTheCemeteries; - way.cemeteriesNearBuildings;);
(._;>;);
out;
This is the actual query we need.
First it looks for every cemetery and saves them as the set allTheCemeteries.
Then it searches for cemeteries that are within 100 m of a building and saves those as the set cemeteriesNearBuildings.
Finally it subtracts one set from the other, literally with a '-' sign. The result is the map we need, the map with cemeteries that are at least 100 m from a building. It's essentially the first picture minus the second picture.
 
As a javascript user the use of semicolons in the boolean of the JSON syntax for overpass is really confusing.
 
jarlrmai said:
As a javascript user the use of semicolons in the boolean of the JSON syntax for overpass is really confusing.
Click to expand...
As someone who's used BASIC, Forth, LISP, C, Mathcad, Perl, Mathematica, and ML, and who has created several of his own domain-specific languages, I think I'd go one or two steps further - almost every single token in the above makes no logical sense at all, even the non-tokens worry me. Everyone I've known who uses it has said "I took something from somewhere else, and just modified it to my needs", which isn't a great witness to self-explanitoriness. At least it ends with a nice body-horror multi-headed smiley, that's nice; all code should do that.
 
That's the Overpass Turbo auto repair function :)

OSM data at its lowest level is a collection of nodes, discrete points on the map. They can be linked together to form ways. Don't confuse these with roads or streets - a way can be any line or shape created from its constituent nodes. For example a simple rectangular building may consist of four nodes, one at each corner. A typical cemetary will be a way too, created from its collection own nodes.
Thing is when you search for ways you need to tell Overpass to give you their nodes as well or it will complain to you that it didn't find any. That's done via the recurse down query '>'. You also need to tell it what input it should take, by the default it's the aptly named default set '_' (an underscore). That's the set that everything gets collated into unless you explicitly specify a different set.
So ._;>; tells it to take the default set and recurse down to find the nodes. There's also a '( ... )' union block around the two statements because otherwise it would overwrite itself whilst recursing and only return the nodes, not the ways you originally wanted.

Code: 
area[name="Scottish Borders"]->.searchRegion;
    way[landuse=cemetery](area.searchRegion)
      ->.allTheCemeteries;
    way[building](area.searchRegion);
    way[landuse=cemetery](around:100)
      ->.cemeteriesNearBuildings;
(way.allTheCemeteries; - way.cemeteriesNearBuildings;);
(._;>;);
out;
out;
Here it subtracts the set cemeteriesNearBuildings from the set allTheCemeteries and writes the result to the default set, because no other set was specified as the output.
Then it takes that set and recurses down to find its nodes and ways.
You could also write the results into yet another set and work from that, like for example
Code: 
(way.allTheCemeteries; - way.cemeteriesNearBuildings;)->.finalresult;
(.finalresult;>;);

...that's as far as I understand these things anyway. Bring your own healthy dose of salt.
 
Mendel said:
Is this picture a real location?
60LjZfY.jpeg
Click to expand...

If it is, I would think some of the guys could use the Overpass program thingy to find it. The collection of ( ) > { > } : : and such is gibberish to me, but for those that know how to work it this should be doable, right?

It looks like a standard USA style road sign and "Landfill" is often used in the US. It looks rural and I would say economically depressed. Note the sparse trees and the "swamp cooler" (evaporative cooler) held up with a 2x4 to the window of the flat roofed house to the right. There is also a make-shift barb wire fence in the lower right corner.

If real, this is likely in the South West corner of the US. Mid Texas over to the desert area of Southern California. Maybe somewhere here:

1713106840083.png

Swamp coolers don't work well or at all in high humidity and the vegetation and hill in the background rules out most of the North East, the South, the Mid West and the Pacific Northwest. There are some high desert areas in Nevada, Idaho and eastern Oregon, but having just driving back from Baja through the desert parts of So Cal, that's what this place feels like. IF I knew how to use the program, I would start searching here.
 
NorCal Dave said:
If it is, I would think some of the guys could use the Overpass program thingy to find it. The collection of ( ) > { > } : : and such is gibberish to me, but for those that know how to work it this should be doable, right?
Click to expand...

A similar tool is offered by Bellingcat, at https://osm-search.bellingcat.com/ - it allows you to select search terms and a distance between them, without the need to be proficient at coding (..>)() ;P .

1713118071060.png

That results in a map like this, with the circles being points that have a Cemetery and Landfill site within about 340m of each other. (the distance was just an abitrary one in this case).

1713118125899.png

And the page also offers Google Satellite imagery of each location:

1713118205821.png

Clicking on the coordinates will open Google Maps at that location, or you can save as a KML file for viewing in GoogleEarth
 
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I was mulling over this recent quiz question that used a purposfully low quality blurry image so as to make Reverse Image Search hard or impossible to use.

I'd convinced myself that that it showed a small white dog curled up in a basket under a tree.

GKV9Kv_W4AAp4---1.png

But when I eventually found it I was surprised by how different to my unshakable hunch it actually is.

Give it a try before you hit the spoiler button.

wgg_logo copy.png
 
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