Oh Internet, I think you're pulling my leg

Here I will discuss my journey through discovery, wonder, belief, further research and resultant disillusionment and enlightenment, occurring through the internet image magpie mania that is Pinterest.

Things can really take off through this medium, and I imagine it would be very hard to keep track of where an image or video has spread to. Unknown people across the world can pin an image from a website or upload it themselves, another total stranger will repin it - and you end up with multitudes of spontaneously dividing threads.

This, paired with gradual information loss and distortion along the way.... who knows where an image comes from?

Sometimes it's difficult to tell if an image is for real, however incredible it looks, or if it is just a Photoshop jobbie.....

From yellow_reporter

This was a favourite architectural image of mine, until by new best friend - the Tin Eye reverse image search - enabled me to find where else the same image appears on the web, eventually leading me to its source: a clever photographic manipulation by Dutch artist Jan Oliehoek.


Tin Eye doesn't even have to lead you to the original source for it to be useful - it is valuable for just finding out the name of an object, structure or place, which enables you to conduct a more informed search from there....


This example also shows the deterioration of information through the web - when I first came across this pic on Pinterest, the comment said it was in Ireland, but the rock and background scenery is in Thailand - an understandable mistake when you sound out the words, but the two places could almost not be further apart! 

From wikipedia

More specifically, the rock is James Bond Island in Ao Phang Nga National Park, Thailand, and the castle is Lichtenstein Castle in Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

I know, the castle still looks fake! 

But it truly 

does exist - from my experience Germany 

and Austria really are the best places 

to find fairy tale picture perfect castles

It was almost believable while I was browsing these other pretty amazing (and completely real) constructions that to the laypersons' eye, seem to be gravity-defying or at least testing the limits..... 

From myyellowbells. This is the Capital Gate skyscraper in
Abu Dhabi. It has an 18-degree incline, which is over four
 times more than the tower of Pisa's unintentional tilt, which
itself is beaten by 1.22 degrees by the lesser known church
steeple 'Leaning Tower' of Suurhusen, Germany.

The “South Heavenly Gate” which has a 

narrow walkway of planks skirting the 

mountain rock face while people hold on

 to a big chain attached to the walls. 

Located in the Yellow Mountains of 

Huangshan, China.

'Horizons', a welded-steel sculpture with a carton-like
quality, created by Neil Dawson and located on
“The Farm,” a large private art park in New Zealand.

Le Grand van Gogh by Bruno Catalano,
in Saint-Paul de Vence, France

Tin Eye revealed to me another person who seems to have been taken in by Oliehoek's trickery/artistry... poor fool...

Does he not notice that the castle is JUST NOT THERE in the panoramic picture?

From Teddlinguistics.blogspot.co.uk

I also wanted to blow the whistle on another hoax taking the Pinterest world by storm:

Creating 'Water Marbles' aka Water Beans, Jelly Marbles...

There are step-by-step images and videos going around that claim to show you how you can make these transparent jelly-like marbles from a few simple kitchen ingredients, by various heating/cooling/mixing stages.

From latterdaylearning

From cometogetherkids

Pretty, aren't they? They really seem to have the power to make people go 'oooh'

One characteristic of the water marbles produced by the DIY hoax that produces amazement in viewers is when the marbles supposedly form when you bring them into contact with air - in actual fact, the marbles were there all along in the water, but because clear colourless ones have been used in the kitchen 'experiment', it is very hard to detect the edges while they're in the water.

Anyone who has some general knowledge and didn't completely miss their school chemistry classes by falling asleep might be able to guess that using baking soda, vinegar, calcium bicarbonate and iodized salt will not create such neatly spherical objects.

Also I would question the wisdom of putting your hands into this mixture, it doesn't sound too skin-friendly!

The blogger to whom I owe my enlightenment on this hoax explains all on ChemSpider.

I'll leave you with some more of my favourite Jan Oliehoek photo manipulation creations, featuring both the cute and the shocking:

And one more to calm your nerves and reduce adrenaline after those last two:

Don't forget to think critically about what you find on the internet!

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Internet Doppelgangers: When your identity unexpectedly...

Internet Doppelgängers - when your identity unexpectedly finds its way online

A "that's so weird" blog post

Casually checking how my various internet presences on Blogger, Flickr, Pinterest etc. link up, I stumbled across my internet doppelgänger.

This would not be so strange by itself. I have a relatively uncommon name (I was named after an actress in a horror B-movie from 1989 called The Urge To Kill) - it feels slightly disturbing to hear my name in a song (Genesis, Bob Dylan, you mortify me) or see it in film credits and that's just my first name. On the Google search (25/01/13) to check out the searchability of my blog, 7 of the 10 first-page results relate to me. But I knew it's not absolutely impossible that my full name isn't 100% unique. 

What I found weird about this doppelgänger was that 'she' had written an online article about exactly the same topic I had once written about for an English GCSE coursework assignment back in school. This would be within reason had the doppelgänger gone through the same school system as me - which is specific to the UK and perhaps the region too - and had been set the same coursework, but really, what are the chances? I just don't know.


So what is a doppelgänger?

1. A paranormal double of a living person, typically representing evil or misfortune.
2. An evil twin.
3. A remarkably similar double.
4. A person who has the same name as another.
5. A fantastic monster that takes the forms of people, usually after killing them.

 (definitions and picture from Wikipedia)

And who is this person? Lets narrow down the options:

1. I don't believe in the paranormal
2. I believe my parents when they say I'm an only child
3. I don't know what she looks like but...
4. Same name, same topic.... linked minds??
5. I'm not dead yet

I then thought, wouldn't it be interesting if I could dig up what my 14-year-old self had written back in that Year 10 English classroom, and see how it compares?

And so I did. 

And in the end, this ghost had existed all in my own mind. 

My coursework was written under the title "Analyse the techniques used by Baz Luhrman in making the new Chanel no.5 commercial. How successful is it in your opinion? Does it justify the huge amount of money it cost?" - everything a school essay question should be...
And this doppelgänger's title was simply "Assessing the Chanel No 5 Mega-mercial". Otherwise, the essay was word-for-word, paragraphs identical. 

For several days I genuinely thought there was another person with the same name as me, who had by coincidence written about the same topic nearly two years after I had. However it turned out that the article published in May 2007 on Helium here was my own piece of writing, originally penned in November 2005 with my scrawly black fountain pen. 


This left me with a far less supernatural, but very real mystery. 

I have no idea, no recollection of how, when or why I might have uploaded this article to the internet, to a website that didn't even exist when I first wrote the piece. 

So what might have happened? I had a brainstorm of the options:

• A more internet-savvy version of me in a parallel universe has been publishing my school scribbles?

• I travelled in a time warp to post it?

• Somebody uploaded my work with the idea that as a set coursework piece, other students might be having a sneaky search for answers online to give themselves a clue on what to write, or simply to plagiarise?

This last option - could it be? Given that Helium authors can earn money if their article garners particularly high numbers of views, this worries me a little. 

On the other hand, having listed the article under my name would have been a precautionary step to avert the appearance of mal-intent. Even so, there would have been someone out there using my own work for their own gain without my consent. 

At this point I just don't know what to conclude. Have I found a piece of internet fraud? Do I just have a really bad memory? Was I more forward-thinking and internet-savvy than I thought I was at age 14? 
I'm not even sure how to convince Helium that I am the real author if I contact them to find out how my essay got there! 

&

Has anyone else ever found their work in places they didn't expect or intend?  I can imagine this happening in a picture-version, where a photograph of yourself was used as advertising...

If you have come across your doppelgänger, how did it feel to know there is a virtual stranger answering to your own name?

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Oh Internet, I think
you're pulling my leg