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Friday, January 30, 2015

What Island is this? -and- Yes, we have no bananas.

Part 1 - What island is this?

US Navy EA-6B Prowler flying somewhere.
I came across this photo on Military Photos dot net. The caption claimed this was Afghanistan. It sure doesn't look anything like the Afghanistan I know. I made an inquiry but received no response, so I started looking around to see if I could identify this island.
    While I am looking I come across a Wikimapia page about Shemya Island. It is small and flatish and sort of off by itself, so this might be the one. It's in the Aleutians, which is kind of far from Afghanistan, but that's basically irrelevant. The US Navy has aircraft flying all over the world, so this island could be anywhere.
    Then it occurs to me that I've heard of Shemya before. I check my archives, and yes indeed. Shemya was home for Rivet Ball, a 1960's era US spy plane.


Part 2 - Yes, we have no bananas.


Wikimapia Turing Test
    I write this bit of info about the Rivet Ball spy plane into a comment on the Wikimapia page. When I submit it, I am confronted with a are-you-a-real-person test. The test itself is not complex, but they use an elaborate mechanism to put it up on the web page. It includes a short video which displays a single image that contains some text which you are to transcribe. It's kind of long string, too, and a far cry from Google's check the check box test.



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