[PLUG-TALK] Figuring out when a google street view picture was taken

[Keith Lofstrom]

While waiting for a circuit simulation to finish, I got a little
obsessive today (who, me?) and decided I wanted to figure out
exactly when a Google street view picture was taken.

I plan to stay at a small hotel in Berkeley, CA this weekend, and
the street view picture of it shows it still under construction.
Yikes!  But of course the picture was taken a while ago, so the
building is finished and brand new, or at least newly remodelled.
Good!  OK, so when was the picture taken?

Well, going to Shattuck street a long block away, and scanning
up and down the street, I found a cinema marquee, a tree with
a long shadow, and a garbage truck loading.  The UA cinema was
currently showing "Hannibal Rises" which opened on Feb 9, 2007.
It notes that Ghost Rider will open on Feb 16 .  That gives us
the week.

The trash truck doing the pickup is about 10 blocks south on
Shattuck.  A little social engineering on the Berkeley public
works department reveals that trash pickup in that area is on
Thursday.  So the day is Thursday, February 15, 2007. 

The shadow from the tree in relation to the curb on Shattuck
(which runs slightly east of north) shows it is about 2PM. 
With a good ephemeris and some trig, I could probably narrow
it down to a five minute window.  After that, I imagine I
could estimate the route and travel speed of the Google
camera survey car, using shadows to verify time points, and
work out exactly when it was at the site of my future hotel
at Bancroft and Milvia. 

But I quit at that point.  Even obsession has limits.

It makes me wonder what else you can learn from analyzing those
street view pictures.  There is a lot of information there...

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs