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See: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52978880
And: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/nov/12/spike-lee-sued-...
And, of course, reddit and the boston bomber.
Do this for fun, but don't get your pitchforks out
First clue I noticed from the 1st photo was they seem to drive on the left hand side, which is fairly rare. The language on the signs obviously is a great clue.
I think a better approach on his second step would have been to search " skyline", preferably in order from largest population to smallest. South Africa isn't that big. I think it pays to be more methodical and work with the information you know, before speculating. Speculating is great if you're stuck, but I think he mostly just got lucky there.
Doing this quite often as we are currently looking for a new house. Real estate offerings here in Germany often omit the actual address. So some research on the actual location is needed. It’s fun and reduces the list of possible objects easily without communicating with the realtor.
Any idea on why the address is not provided? I just find this practice really annoying and I don't see how it helps sell a property.
Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and newspaper names. There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not somewhere else. The satellite photos don’t have enough resolution to help find the stop lights (which appear not too common looking at street view).
You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the background, and the road arrangement, but it would take days to manually look at every city intersection.
I guess the easiest approach is to post the image on a forum / twitter and get locals to chime in :)
1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background.
2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He Will Not Divide Us," located and vandalized no less than 5 times. The last one used astronavigation principles, and visible contrails from airplane traffic.
3. Identifying muggers in crowds based on nothing more than biking gear and facial hair.
The one thing these had in common, was a sustained call for effort. By keeping the limited original details available and obvious, people in every timezone and demographic could view them. This greatly increases the odds of specialist knowledge or community insiders being able to add information to the detail, which goes back to the general audience, forming an action feedback loop.
Amatuer hour indeed, but when you have 10000 random people you get results pretty quick.
How do you go about completing the challenge? Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and newspaper names. There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not somewhere else. The satellite photos don’t have enough resolution to help find the stop lights (which appear not too common looking at street view). You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the background, and the road arrangement, but i…
And as a South African, I would immediately know it was SA just by the look of the traffic lights and street signs.
I agree that there is no way to know which city it is in the first photo.
In the article there is the line: "Some quick Googling revealed several universities in Pretoria, and I decided to wing it and take a closer look at the Pretoria skyline."
That's glossing over a very important part of figuring it out. Because once you know which city it makes it much easier.
How do you go about completing the challenge? Identifying its SA is extremely easy with the Dutch text and newspaper names. There is no real hint this is Pretoria and not somewhere else. The satellite photos don’t have enough resolution to help find the stop lights (which appear not too common looking at street view). You can kind of see a double roof in the building in the background, and the road arrangement, but i…
This info wasn't enough for me to figure out the location, but it's something. If I was serious about the challenge or there was way to monetize this, I could write OpenStreetMaps / Google Street View scraper that would figure out the location in a matter of minutes.
If you enjoy this kind of thing, you may like the Geoguessr game ( https://www.geoguessr.com/ ), and this guy on youtube who is really good at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xApbqwtnSzs&list=PL_japiE6QK...
I feel like he could benefit from ten minutes to two hours looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_recognition...
because it could greatly improve his speed and accuracy on that part. :-)
Or am I missing something?
4Chan is notorious for doing this successfully, with even less detail to start with. The large anonymous crowd of viewers and poster is highly likely to contain people who can identify even the smallest detail. Within the past few years, a few remarkable ones stand out to me: 1. Locating terrorist training camps by high voltage power lines visible in the background. 2. Shia LeBeouf's IRL Super Capture the Flag, "He W…