• Too much free time? MIT researchers map every single pool in LA backyards, including the dimensions
    18 replies, posted
[img]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/1986r1wnk60k8png/ku-xlarge.png[/img] [img]http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/1986peto7utdtjpg/ku-xlarge.jpg[/img] [quote] German graphic designer Benedikt Gross was flying into Los Angeles for the first time when he gazed out the jetliner's window and was mesmerized by the hundreds of shimmering blue swimming pools tiling the landscape below. The image of all those backyard oases visible only from the sky stuck with him, but he didn't make much of it until a few months later, when he bumped into Joseph Lee at a Massachusetts Institute of Technology research lab that deals with urban dwellers' relationship with technology. "I wonder how many pools there are," said Gross, 33, who was working at the Senseable City Lab as part of his master's degree studies at London's Royal College of Art. Lee, a UCLA graduate who was at MIT as a research assistant, responded quickly: "L.A. is endless from the air. The turquoise pools you see are beautiful." But they knew the number of pools was finite, and on a whim they decided to find out exactly how many there were. "We didn't know where we were going," remembers Lee, 23, an aspiring geographer and cartographer from Vallejo. "Things just built themselves the more we dove deeper." A year later, the result is the "Big Atlas of L.A. Pools," a digital analysis of every swimming pool in the Los Angeles Basin. Using complex computer mapping, they counted 43,123 between the Hollywood Hills and San Pedro, from pools shaded by leaf-covered pergolas in Santa Monica to ones surrounded by chain-link fences in Alhambra. Along the way, they discovered something more than just the real-world versions of the iconic David Hockney pool utopias. Their project also proved that two non-experts were able to take a massive amount of freely available data to peek into other people's lives. "At first, the project was mostly just an experiment to see whether or not we could locate and draw all the pools from aerial imagery we acquired," Lee says. But they became unnerved by the easy access to the data, he says. "It's creepy to know that encoded in the freely available information are very personal details that you may not want others to know." [/quote] [url]http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-swimming-pools-20131202-dto,0,198951.htmlstory#ixzz2mUkoXksv[/url] Well shit. [editline]4th December 2013[/editline] That's a lot of pools
open up one of the books to a random page, slap a finger down, and go for a dive
Why.
None of that water should actually be there.
[QUOTE=IKTM;43065004]None of that water should actually be there.[/QUOTE] set it free
[QUOTE=Uber|nooB;43065009]set it free[/QUOTE] like peta but for water so petw i guess
[QUOTE=Sgt-NiallR;43064988]Why.[/QUOTE] Probably tuning their image recognition algorithms on aerial/satellite pictures and went for a quite simple yet specific task because it's pretty funny. It was probably few guys sitting writing and tweaking code for a week or two, feeding it with massive amounts of data. The pools aren't the point of interest, they are just the subject of examination while the examination method is what really matters in the research.
Money well spent.
[QUOTE=Awesomecaek;43065109]Probably tuning their image recognition algorithms on aerial/satellite pictures and went for a quite simple yet specific task because it's pretty funny. It was probably few guys sitting writing and tweaking code for a week or two, feeding it with massive amounts of data. The pools aren't the point of interest, they are just the subject of examination while the examination method is what really matters in the research.[/QUOTE] Touché
I'm surprised they only spent 3.7k on this, I expected hunderds of thousands dollars gone to waste.
I wonder where my pool is in there...
[QUOTE=Supacasey;43065336]I wonder where my pool is in there...[/QUOTE] There's only one way to find out, get reading!
[QUOTE=Sgt-NiallR;43064988]Why.[/QUOTE] I was going to say that was the first thing that popped into my head when I read this, but actually i'm just blank. This is too weird a thing to be cataloging.
So any ladies tanning at any of these pools?
[QUOTE=V12US;43065121]Money well spent.[/QUOTE] I can see that MIT education really paid off.
[quote]"At first, the project was mostly just an experiment to see whether or not we could locate and draw all the pools from aerial imagery we acquired," Lee says. [URL]http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-c1-swimming-pools-20131202-dto,0,198951.htmlstory#ixzz2mW4LqJ00[/URL][/quote] I feel bad for the poor intern that had to manually look over every google maps image to determine if every pool had been hit.
[QUOTE=Ninja Gnome;43064972]open up one of the books to a random page, slap a finger down, and go for a dive[/QUOTE] Hope you have fun in Compton or long beach :v:
Holy shit they even include evaporation rates and the year the home was built.
The Skate Bowl Atlas
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