VFYW: Miracle Not Needed

For contest #416, the false field didn't deter dozens of sleuths with correct guesses. (Trigger warning for vegans: deer nuts roasting on an open fire.)

(For the View From Your Window contest, the results below exceed the content limit for Substack’s email service, so to ensure that you see the full results, click the headline above.)

From the winner of last week’s contest:

Awesome! Two more years of Dish please! Love the work that you and Andrew do … keep it coming!

Here’s a followup on the San Francisco view from the super-champ in Milwaukee:

Great writeup last week! Best wishes to the super-chef's hip. And I’m so glad someone found out what those Hausmann-style windows were — it was bugging me, and Street View just didn’t cut it.

Reading other folks’ reminisces made me think of my own visits to SF. On my first visit in 1987, I looked at fish specimens in the museum — where I was grabbed to be a pretend shark-expert in a documentary about the making of Jaws. On my next trip I hung out with my brother and we were almost knocked off the cliff by an inexpert skydiver south of the city. Then I visited a friend in a Pacifica trailer park and got an inside tour of the airplane-repair facilities at the airport. So it was one fun thing after another in SF.

Another followup comes from the super-sleuth in Chevy Chase:

I’m amazed I actually got the room right for once. And I belatedly remembered that I have a VFYW of the night of the Louis Vuitton smash-and-grab:

Snowglobe-worthy scene on the left; SF mayhem on the right.

Andrew just texted me his own VFYW from London, where he just landed to see his family for the Dish’s spring break (therefore the next VFYW results will be posted on May 3rd, when the full Dish returns):

Another SF followup comes from the Berkeley champ:

Last week the DC super-sleuth recommended the east/west-bound California St. cable-car line over its north/south-bound alternatives, on the grounds that it’s less crowded and less of a “tourist hell.” All of which is true. One reason it’s less crowded is that fewer tourists congregate at its starting point in front of the Hyatt Regency. But in my opinion, the main reason is that it’s just not as good a ride as the other two. It follows a mile-and-a-half long straightaway to Van Ness Avenue, which is nobody’s idea of a worthwhile destination for tourists or natives (unless you have reservations at House of Prime Rib, three blocks from its terminus).

I really understand wanting to avoid the “tourist hell” at the other lines’ Tenderloin turnaround on Market Street. I steer clear of that area myself. But you can skip that by catching the Powell/Hyde line at its northern end. There’ll be a lineup of passengers at the Hyde Street turntable, too, but it’s civilized there. It’s at a pretty spot near the bay and there’s plenty to do in the neighborhood for visitors and locals alike.

After spending a morning on the historic ships at the Hyde Street Pier, you can catch a cable car at Maritime Garden, which is across the street from the birthplace of the Irish Coffee (have one if you go). Once aboard, you ride south for about a mile-and-a-half to the Clay Street stop on Powell. There you’re a couple of hilly blocks from one of the best museums in the city, which appropriately enough is the Cable Car Museum (entry is free!). I can’t express how great I think this museum is, especially if you visit it right after getting off of a cable car. Then after the museum, you’ll be on Nob Hill. Go to the Fairmont! Have a Mai Tai in the Tonga Room!

Now here’s the important part; never ride inside a cable car. And when you ride outside, try to avoid having to sit on a bench. If there isn’t room for you to stand on one of the outside platforms, then wait for the next car. Ride like these people:

If possible, take the front spot. The best part of riding a cable car is the centrifugal force you can feel when rounding a turn as you cling to a pole at the most precarious spot of what isn’t, but might as well be, a 150-year-old rattletrap.

Here’s another note from Berkeley, whose wife has surgery this week:

What else am I going to do while hanging out in a hospital waiting room but more VFYW research? One of your previous winners wrote last week, “I wonder if anyone can identify for me a charming independent movie I remember from probably the late 1990s, about a couple who seem to pick each other up in a park (Dolores?) and have an affair — but in fact, it turns out they are already a couple, trying to rekindle their love. The man is a photographer, and it opens with the woman meeting a reporter in a cafe to tell their story.” That would be Nina Takes a Lover (1995), with Laura San Giacomo and Paul Rhys:

A sleuth dissents:

Regarding last week’s contest, no shade to Berkeley’s wife, but Paul Rudd is hot in any universe. OK, maybe we passed Peak Rudd a few years ago, but I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.

And of course he never seems to age:

From a sleuth in Melrose, MA:

I am surprised no one last week saw fit to include the legendary (in terms of montage and special effects) earthquake sequence from MGM’s 1936 blockbuster San Francisco. Please allow me to enter this scene into the VFYW record for San Francisco:

One more followup for San Fran:

Funny to read Eagle Rock’s report of Phi Phi’s dismissal of SF “pretending to be old and European,” since just last night I was reading Michael Moorcock make just that complaint/comparison to LA in 1984. At least one thing hasn’t changed (though he did rate the quality of the Bay Area’s cocaine higher.)

Also, I kicked myself for forgetting to mention that just blocked from view on Geary Street is the apartment building where Fritz Leiber made the view from his window — the precise alignment of Sutro Tower and the Devil’s Seat at the summit of Corona Heights — the plot engine of his 1977 novel, Our Lady of Darkness. At least the VFYW contest hasn’t summoned any demonic presences ... yet.

The UWS super-sleuth gets meta:

I have more to say about the contest in Pattaya. Wow, did I (re)learn a lesson! I wrote that I was getting feedback from Google that the View was in Thailand, but I decided that didn’t seem right to me. So I went with my gut over the search engine. Worse — and I didn’t mention this in my guess — I was specifically getting hits on Pattaya. But no, I went with Chennai, India. Embarrassing in general, but particularly so because I actually know better.  

The underlying issue is this: How do you know when to trust your gut? As opposed to when you should gather/analyze data, follow proven algorithms, etc.?

There’s a very large body of knowledge (and competing arguments) on this topic. As a consultant in the field of organizational behavior, this is the kind of stuff I’m nerdy about. It’s also very timely. A major figure in the field just passed away: the brilliant Daniel Kahneman. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 — as a psychologist who never took an economics class. Kahneman helped create and promote the field of behavioral economics, which acknowledges that none of us really act the way traditional economics has long posited. That is, we don’t collect all the facts and make decisions based purely on logic. On the contrary, emotion and cognitive biases drive our thinking, resulting in choices that are often irrational and that stop us from reaching our goals.

What’s specifically relevant here is a paper that Kahneman and another psychologist wrote about when you can trust your gut. They found that a key determiner is whether you’re in a “high-validity environment.” That’s one where there is a stable and predictable relationship between cues and resulting effects or outcomes. And you must have had adequate opportunity to learn those relationships. That is, you’ve developed expertise in the connections. So, even if you’re not aware that you’re reading the cues, you’ve had enough experience so that this information is essentially hiding somewhere in your brain. When you make a decision on your gut, you’re subconsciously retrieving that information.    

What does that mean for the sleuths? The VFYW environment is a generally stable and predictable one. There are many, many cues one can safely rely on. But you still have to know what those cues actually indicate. Landforms, foliage, road signs, roof pitches ... some sleuths know what they can infer from these. Or they’ve traveled widely and have “place memories.” (Or they’re Chini.) Either way, they’ve built enough expertise to look at a photo and say: this “feels like” XYZ. And be right.  

I have not yet reached that point. For contest #413, I should have believed Google, not my gut. But I’m working on it!

Speaking of the “road signs cue,” I stumbled upon a hypnotic vid this week:

Study up, sleuths!

Recently it was revealed that two super-sleuths live in Ann Arbor, and you probably recall that the newer one goes by the moniker “the amaize-ing sleuth.” The two of them just met IRL:

Less than a week after our two closest celestial bodies perfectly aligned in the sky (well, almost: maximum of the eclipse here was 98.7%), the two Ann Arbor super-sleuths met in a place fittingly called the Windows Lounge:

We had a delightful and wide-ranging conversation about pattern recognition, music, AI, copyright, foreign languages and scripts, children, fulfillment, and much more. It goes to show how much common ground two people from opposite ends of the academic spectrum can find. Thank you for putting us in touch!

BTW, since Ann Arbor is commonly abbreviated as A2, and my wife and I are a team of 2, how about calling us the A2 super-sleuths?

Done. A2 adds, “On to this week’s contest: I’m glad you didn’t post a brick wall (like you threatened to do), and you even left a beautiful clue, because without the dogsled in the background, we wouldn’t have figured this one out.” Another has me covered:

These contests are always lots of fun, and the email must take you forever, so thank you. Given that you’re going to cop a lot of grief about how easy this one is, after SF being easy too, here’s a photo from our study right now — as part of your new “View of a Brick Wall” contest:

Chini will probably still get it.

From our previous winner in Shiprock:

Perhaps this snowy view is a bone thrown to our ski-resort aficionado?

I’m going with Japan. “46” is a significant number in Japanese history, with the post-WWII constitution being adopted then. And yes, they have dog sledding in Japan. When I googled that, Rusutsu is the first resort that came up, so that’s what I’m going with. (So what if some of the blacked-out and beagled-out text appears to be in English? They have that there too.)

Another initially thought Japan, but he eventually got to the right place:

So I haven’t counted yet, but I’m hoping to be near your benchmark of ~25 solves and a win — which I still can’t believe I got so early in my VFYW career — in order to reach my 2024 goal of achieving super-sleuth status. Of course, my next resolution is to be worthy to join the Mt Rushmore/Pantheon of elite solvers one day, but that is my 2030 goal!

While many are going to get this week’s view quickly, I didn’t. This is because there is a famous mountain/ski resort in Japan called Habuka 47, and stupid me thought, “Oh, someone’s been cute and created a ‘46 shop’ because they’re at the bottom of the mountain” (perhaps giving an insight into how my mind works). I had a very happy reminiscence about Hakuba (we lived in Japan for three years and skied there often), and I was reminded of a uniquely Japanese company called Ta-Q-Bin:

For a very modest fee, they came to your apartment on a Thursday afternoon, picked up all your ski gear and luggage, and delivered it anywhere in Japan within 24 hours. Back then it was around US$20 per piece of luggage. Heaven. You finish work early on a Friday, bail up the family, jump on the Shinkansen fast train, and a quick bus later you’re in a lodge with all your gear ready for a weekend of skiing — without all the schlepping!

Another sleuth reveals one of the storefront signs in view:

Turns out it’s a cactus:

Another:

The logo from a store across the street appears to feature a brown cowboy hat (on a cactus, as it turned out), so I assumed it’s somewhere in North America. From the orientation of the solar cells atop the building on the right, I deduced the view was looking eastward. The large, flat expanse beyond the buildings suggested a frozen lake. Curiously, the mountains in the background appeared to have little snow, so I assumed they were not the Rockies. 

Good assumption. Another sleuth unveils the whole span of storefronts:

 Dusty the beagle is doing a great job covering “Alpine Mall”:

From the UWS super-sleuth:

OK, I’m totally perplexed. We see pitched roofs, and you don’t conjure up a dogsled and dogs on the spur of the moment. So seems likely that snow is not unusual here. And yet there’s also ... a presumably fake saguaro right outside a souvenir store? Huh. And do I see a drawing of a cactus wearing a cowboy hat on two of the store’s signs?

For more time than I care to disclose, I went down the path of trying to figure out where one might see both snow and saguaros. There are probably a dozen other useful clues in this View, but I’m laser-focused on cacti. I did consider the possibility that we’re in Alaska or (more likely) Flagstaff, and these are “aspirational” or “comfort” saguaros — i.e., they serve to remind you of the warm weather you’re not currently experiencing. And maybe they aren’t even saguaros at all, which wouldn’t be the first time a plant has misled me.

But I’m going to go with a place that does have snow + saguaros: the Sonoran Desert, upper elevations. Let’s say near the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. I know it’s wrong, but I’d be happy to be in the right quadrant of the country.

I’m ready to be surprised and amazed by your other sleuths! Thanks for the fun!

From another sleuth who was duped by the cacti, at least at first:

We currently live in Phoenix, so we got sidetracked with the saguaro red herring. Nice try! (Turns out there are mushers in AZ, though!) “46” was the clincher, but it took a while. Nothing too notable happened in Arizona in 1946 or 1846, or anywhere else we could surmise.

Another guesses “Alaska USA” and grumbles, “The dogsled says Iditarod, but fuck if I know where specifically.” Chini does:

The grand champion adds a clue:

For those struggling with this view, let me offer some words of advice. Take a break. Get away from the computer. Instead, just head out into nature, and find some place that’s tranquil and calm. Then simply sit, and reflect amidst the serene stillness; surely the answer will come to you.

Another sleuth goes with Canada:

Not sure exactly where this is, likely the Yukon or Alaska. Let’s say Whitehorse, Yukon. I thought for a second it might be my namesake Dawson City, but alas it was not.

The NY Lax Fan squints: “In the faint distance, there appears to be an American flag on a house on the left.” We are indeed in America, fuck yeah. Here’s the super-sleuth in San Mateo:

As a former skier (a long time ago at Alpine Meadows at Lake Tahoe when they didn’t allow snowboards), I usually find scenes of snow-covered fields and buildings beautiful and idyllic. But the window frame this week was distracting. So I removed the frame, de-beagled the entry to the Alpine Mall on the right, “reinstalled” the Alpine Mall sign, enlarged and moved the dogsled to make it more prominent, and then reimagined the VFYW as a cartoon:

From the super-sleuth in Lafayette, CA:

“Probably Alaska because sled dogs,” I thought. But this is no place like Nome. The mountains are wrong. Is that a cactus? What’s the story with the 46? And is the snow not all that deep? How are they dog sledding? This must be a tourist thing, not actual transportation.

From the beginning of the entry from the super-sleuth in Eagle Rock:

Some views are cooler than other, and usually it’s in the details — and a view with an actual dog sled is very cool. That narrows down the possibilities to Utah, Idaho, California, Colorado, Montana, Alaska, Maine, Minnesota, Wyoming, New York, or Michigan — probably.

It’s one of those states. The Berkeley champ looks closely at the surface the dogs are running on:

Long story short, this scene was so anonymous I even started looking for places in Hokkaido that offer dog sledding, because I’d convinced myself the four dark-haired women on the left were Japanese, or at least Asian (as if I imagined Asians don’t travel outside of Asia). That theory led nowhere, but eventually it occurred to me there was a reason the flat expanse of snow with the dog sled on it is so flat and expansive, and it’s the same reason there isn’t a tree or a house or a bush between us and the tree line a quarter mile away. We’re looking at a lake that’s frozen over and covered in snow.

That realization led to an image search for the terms “dog sledding on a frozen lake,” which brought up a bunch of photos from the Arctic and Lake Baikal and eventually ones featuring the location of this week’s view, such as:

Another sleuth got to the lake more quickly:

The “field” in the background was a bit of decoy, since it’s actually Mirror Lake. But I know a thing or two about winter in the northeast and I saw a frozen body of water at once.

San Mateo looks at the “46” sign and describes his initial thinking for its meaning:

Referring to ski slope steepness in degrees is more common at European ski areas, whereas in the US, slope percentages are the more common metric, so I thought that might be an important clue. Incidentally, the calculation to convert slope from degrees to percentage is: percentage slope = tan(degrees) * 100%. So a 46° ski slope would correspond to a 104% percentage slope, i.e. for every 100 feet you travel horizontally, you’d go up (or down) 104 feet. This is very steep!

So given my guess that the sign referred to a 46° ski slope somewhere in Europe, I started searching for European ski areas with very steep ski slopes. Relatively few ski resorts around the world publish runs steeper than 45 degrees due to safety reasons. Some of the most challenging ski areas in Europe do include very steep descents: Verbier, Switzerland; Chamonix, France; St Anton, Austria; Kitzbühel, Austria; Cortina d'Ampezzo, Italy; Les Deux Alpes, France; Andermatt, Switzerland; and La Grave, France. That’s too many for me adequately to search.

Then I noticed the dog sled in the VFYW, so I tried to narrow down the list to those ski areas which also offer dog sledding: Verbier, Chamonix, St Anton, Cortina d’Ampezzo, and Les Deux Alpes. Still too many.

But after all that, it turns out that the sign is not on a ski shop. And it’s not about 46° ski slopes.

Giuseppe further teases the meaning of “46”:

God is indeed in the details. Had I not noticed the little white smudge at the top of this logo, I might not have guessed that the triangular shape represented a mountain:

Another sleuth gets it right:

My first thought was, there are 40ish 4,000 foot peaks in New Hampshire — which is one my favorite hiking and climbing destinations. But I checked and there are 48 of those, not 46. Nevertheless, that number within that logo made it clear that it was 46 of some kind of mountain.

Looking in the background, the mountains don’t look like the Rockies, so I felt pretty confident that I was in the right general vicinity of the US. My next guess was the Adirondack High Peaks, in New York. That number checked out, so then it was just a matter of figuring out which town.

He got to the right town. The Clinton super-sleuth names it:

This view had me stumped all week. I knew it was a town in the northeastern United States, possibly Canada, but I doubted the latter. But where? It could be almost anywhere. 

But then, two things happened: