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Sitting at a height of 82.5 metres, the giant structure reminiscent of a swan with a glass neck and body, and copper head and wings overlooked the Swan River in Perth, Western Australia. For all the controversy that surrounded the construction of the now-famous bell tower during the 1990s, no one could’ve anticipated what would become of it in the midst of the 21st century.
Early one morning, the 18 bells inside the swan chimed of their own accord. No human or machine in sight. One by one, red-faced black swans—the state bird of Western Australia—began to arrive. By midday, Barrack Square and as far as the eye could see—if there were eyes atop the Bell Tower—along the river was filled with the birds.
After a year of almost entirely closed borders to keep away a virus—and tourists who could be carriers—it was as if the native swans had been able to thrive without interference. That didn’t explain why they had descended upon the Bell Tower, of all places, for it was not the only popular tourist spot now vacant of tourists.
The birds sat, or stood, or paddled, waiting for something to happen.
Some resident humans who passed through the Supreme Court Gardens began to take notice of the mass of black surrounding them as they exited the gardens on Riverside Drive. Whilst some people only glanced at the birds before continuing on, enough stuck around that they developed into a crowd of their own. Some froze in fear, wondering if Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds had been some kind of prophecy to this day, albeit with completely different birds and an entirely different location—Perth is no Bodega Bay. Others called news crews and emergency workers to the scene.
As police and wildlife service arrived on the scene, they deemed it unnecessary to take any action, as the swans were not hurting anyone. One wildlife service worker said to a news crew, live on television, “This was their home first, we should leave them be.”
In the background, a couple of kids tried to run into the swans to get them to fly away, yet the swans remained, causing the children’s eyes to bulge, then the children turned to flee.
Even when helicopter news crews arrived, the swans did not budge. They were not scared away by the chop-chop-chop sound overhead. Their eyes were transfixed on the Bell Tower, though it had been several hours now since it had last chimed. The Bell Tower staff had been unable to make their way through the swans to enter the structure all day, such that it still remained empty.
By the time dusk fell, many people had gotten bored, and decided to leave. It was too dark for the helicopters to get any more film footage, so they left, too.
Suddenly, the glass neck lit up bright pink from the inside, which caused a bugle-like sound to emanate from the red beaks of the birds that surrounded the glass and copper swan. The Bell Tower chimed again, this time in unison with the birds.
The few people who remained on Riverside Drive got their phones out and started recording and live streaming the sound.
The light inside the glass neck faded from pink to green, and the swans broke from their song. Their necks then each stretched up high, beaks facing the stars in the sky. Then, as the light faded to blue, every swan around the Bell Tower spread their wings and flew straight up. As this happened, the ground around Barrack Square began to rumble, and quake, knocking humans to their arses, and phones to the street, cracking the glass screens and camera lenses.
By the time the people who had remained were able to compose themselves, and stand up straight again, the swans, along with the Bell Tower, had entirely disappeared. No one had managed to capture any videographic evidence of the event.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the residents of Perth had developed a narrative that erased the existence of the Bell Tower from their memories. If a picture of the glass and copper bird entered their minds, they would dismiss it as a dream. Just a simple fantasy. Barrack Square was empty, just as it always had been.
When Western Australia re-opened its borders, and started bringing in visitors from the eastern states, something peculiar happened. Visitors who had been to Perth previously would arrive at Barrack Square, in search of the Bell Tower. When all they saw instead was the jetty and docked boats on the river, they would enquire with the first resident they saw, “What happened to the Bell Tower?”
“There’s no Bell Tower in Perth,” or some variation, was always the response.
“What do you mean there’s no Bell Tower? I’ve seen it before! What happened to it?” visitors would ask.
“You must be mistaken,” they would hear. “Perhaps merely a dream.”
Word got back to the Prime Minister of Australia. She declared, “The West has been isolated too long,” and ordered a federal investigation.
Though the Western Australian Premier protested, investigators from every other state—Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania—arrived by plane to the domestic airport, and were transported immediately to Barrack Square. They weren’t even given time to drop their belongings in their hotel rooms.
Two teams boarded ferries, one to travel along the Swan River south-west toward Fremantle and the coast, and one up river toward the vineyards. A SCUBA team arrived to explore the depths of the river. Several other teams took to the skies in planes and helicopters.
No one managed to turn up any evidence until the eighth day of the investigation.
Though far from the site of the missing Bell Tower, a team had been scouring Jarrahdale Forest, which is home to not the Swan River, but the Serpentine. This team by now had made their way to Serpentine Falls, where they discovered it filled with black swans. The birds covered the rocks and the river. They splashed in the waterfalls.
Curiously, though, in the centre of the river, an investigator saw a glass structure with a copper tip. She pulled out her binoculars to get a closer look, then called out to her team with a “Coooo-eeee” until they joined her.
As each team member arrived, they all looked through their own binoculars, and shared the same confused expression.
“That is the top of the Bell Tower,” one investigator finally said. “But how on Earth did it get here?”
The first investigator to spot the tower looked around at all of the black swans and replied, “I sense fowl play.”
This is fiction, obviously, but I grew up in Western Australia where seeing black swans was a normal part of my life. I remember the days before the Bell Tower and the controversy around building it. It had been erected by the time my wedding reception on a Swan River cruise left from Barrack Square. Some of my childhood vacations were spent in Jarrahdale with hikes to Serpentine Falls.
Early one morning, the 18 bells inside the swan chimed of their own accord. No human or machine in sight. One by one, red-faced black swans—the state bird of Western Australia—began to arrive. By midday, Barrack Square and as far as the eye could see—if there were eyes atop the Bell Tower—along the river was filled with the birds.
After a year of almost entirely closed borders to keep away a virus—and tourists who could be carriers—it was as if the native swans had been able to thrive without interference. That didn’t explain why they had descended upon the Bell Tower, of all places, for it was not the only popular tourist spot now vacant of tourists.
The birds sat, or stood, or paddled, waiting for something to happen.
Some resident humans who passed through the Supreme Court Gardens began to take notice of the mass of black surrounding them as they exited the gardens on Riverside Drive. Whilst some people only glanced at the birds before continuing on, enough stuck around that they developed into a crowd of their own. Some froze in fear, wondering if Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds had been some kind of prophecy to this day, albeit with completely different birds and an entirely different location—Perth is no Bodega Bay. Others called news crews and emergency workers to the scene.
As police and wildlife service arrived on the scene, they deemed it unnecessary to take any action, as the swans were not hurting anyone. One wildlife service worker said to a news crew, live on television, “This was their home first, we should leave them be.”
In the background, a couple of kids tried to run into the swans to get them to fly away, yet the swans remained, causing the children’s eyes to bulge, then the children turned to flee.
Even when helicopter news crews arrived, the swans did not budge. They were not scared away by the chop-chop-chop sound overhead. Their eyes were transfixed on the Bell Tower, though it had been several hours now since it had last chimed. The Bell Tower staff had been unable to make their way through the swans to enter the structure all day, such that it still remained empty.
By the time dusk fell, many people had gotten bored, and decided to leave. It was too dark for the helicopters to get any more film footage, so they left, too.
Suddenly, the glass neck lit up bright pink from the inside, which caused a bugle-like sound to emanate from the red beaks of the birds that surrounded the glass and copper swan. The Bell Tower chimed again, this time in unison with the birds.
The few people who remained on Riverside Drive got their phones out and started recording and live streaming the sound.
The light inside the glass neck faded from pink to green, and the swans broke from their song. Their necks then each stretched up high, beaks facing the stars in the sky. Then, as the light faded to blue, every swan around the Bell Tower spread their wings and flew straight up. As this happened, the ground around Barrack Square began to rumble, and quake, knocking humans to their arses, and phones to the street, cracking the glass screens and camera lenses.
By the time the people who had remained were able to compose themselves, and stand up straight again, the swans, along with the Bell Tower, had entirely disappeared. No one had managed to capture any videographic evidence of the event.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, the residents of Perth had developed a narrative that erased the existence of the Bell Tower from their memories. If a picture of the glass and copper bird entered their minds, they would dismiss it as a dream. Just a simple fantasy. Barrack Square was empty, just as it always had been.
When Western Australia re-opened its borders, and started bringing in visitors from the eastern states, something peculiar happened. Visitors who had been to Perth previously would arrive at Barrack Square, in search of the Bell Tower. When all they saw instead was the jetty and docked boats on the river, they would enquire with the first resident they saw, “What happened to the Bell Tower?”
“There’s no Bell Tower in Perth,” or some variation, was always the response.
“What do you mean there’s no Bell Tower? I’ve seen it before! What happened to it?” visitors would ask.
“You must be mistaken,” they would hear. “Perhaps merely a dream.”
Word got back to the Prime Minister of Australia. She declared, “The West has been isolated too long,” and ordered a federal investigation.
Though the Western Australian Premier protested, investigators from every other state—Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, and Tasmania—arrived by plane to the domestic airport, and were transported immediately to Barrack Square. They weren’t even given time to drop their belongings in their hotel rooms.
Two teams boarded ferries, one to travel along the Swan River south-west toward Fremantle and the coast, and one up river toward the vineyards. A SCUBA team arrived to explore the depths of the river. Several other teams took to the skies in planes and helicopters.
No one managed to turn up any evidence until the eighth day of the investigation.
Though far from the site of the missing Bell Tower, a team had been scouring Jarrahdale Forest, which is home to not the Swan River, but the Serpentine. This team by now had made their way to Serpentine Falls, where they discovered it filled with black swans. The birds covered the rocks and the river. They splashed in the waterfalls.
Curiously, though, in the centre of the river, an investigator saw a glass structure with a copper tip. She pulled out her binoculars to get a closer look, then called out to her team with a “Coooo-eeee” until they joined her.
As each team member arrived, they all looked through their own binoculars, and shared the same confused expression.
“That is the top of the Bell Tower,” one investigator finally said. “But how on Earth did it get here?”
The first investigator to spot the tower looked around at all of the black swans and replied, “I sense fowl play.”
This is fiction, obviously, but I grew up in Western Australia where seeing black swans was a normal part of my life. I remember the days before the Bell Tower and the controversy around building it. It had been erected by the time my wedding reception on a Swan River cruise left from Barrack Square. Some of my childhood vacations were spent in Jarrahdale with hikes to Serpentine Falls.
LJ Idol 3 Strikes: Week 16 - Soup's On!!!
Aug. 21st, 2022 08:38 pmData analytics and coding is my bread and butter. It’s what puts food on the table in my house. So I thought, what better way to talk about it than to build you a demonstration you can explore yourself?
Do you cook? Do you use recipe sites? Have you ever wondered, “Gosh, how can I know what’s the best soup to make?” If you answered yes to all three of these questions, then boy do I have good news for you!
Let me introduce you to Soup’s On! An interactive website where you get to explore a dataset of over 8,000 soup recipes available on food.com.
How do you want to determine which recipes are worth looking at? Is there an ingredient you absolutely MUST include in your soup? Well, you’re in luck, you can decide to filter the recipes based on a must-have ingredient, the number of user ratings, the actual rating, and cooking time!
But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve filtered the data based on your preferences, you can also compare the results on a scatter chart, using information on rating, number of voters, cooking time, number of ingredients, and number of steps, and decide which of these you want on your x axis, and which you want on the y axis! If that’s not enough for you, you can also sort the data on two of these items, to determine how you want to order your top ten soups!
And just look at how sweet the charts look!
Once you’re happy with your top ten recipe list, use the “Select Recipe” drop-down menu to browse through the information about each of the recipes.
What information will this website tell you about the top-ten recipes, according to your chosen settings? You’ll discover the ingredients you’ll need, the number of steps in the recipe, minutes to cook the soup, the user rating, and how many people voted on the recipe.
Then, once you’ve found the recipe you want to make, click the link to check out the recipe on food.com!
In all seriousness, during the pandemic, I took a data analytics boot camp through UC Berkeley and learned the skills to build this website. In case you don’t believe that I built this specifically for Idol, check out the source code and the date I uploaded the content. Taking the boot camp was the smartest decision I made during the pandemic, because it led to me completely changing careers. My day job now involves me working on improving the curriculum of the same boot camp I took, so I get to source data to build charts like these and code in Python or JavaScript pretty regularly. I hope you will go and play around with it, because I had a lot of fun coding it to make it all interactive and fun for you!
And if you're at all curious as to what the raw data looks like in a table, you can check out the initial analysis and exploration I did using Python's Pandas and Matplotlib libraries.
Do you cook? Do you use recipe sites? Have you ever wondered, “Gosh, how can I know what’s the best soup to make?” If you answered yes to all three of these questions, then boy do I have good news for you!
Let me introduce you to Soup’s On! An interactive website where you get to explore a dataset of over 8,000 soup recipes available on food.com.
How do you want to determine which recipes are worth looking at? Is there an ingredient you absolutely MUST include in your soup? Well, you’re in luck, you can decide to filter the recipes based on a must-have ingredient, the number of user ratings, the actual rating, and cooking time!
But wait, there’s more! Once you’ve filtered the data based on your preferences, you can also compare the results on a scatter chart, using information on rating, number of voters, cooking time, number of ingredients, and number of steps, and decide which of these you want on your x axis, and which you want on the y axis! If that’s not enough for you, you can also sort the data on two of these items, to determine how you want to order your top ten soups!
And just look at how sweet the charts look!
Once you’re happy with your top ten recipe list, use the “Select Recipe” drop-down menu to browse through the information about each of the recipes.
What information will this website tell you about the top-ten recipes, according to your chosen settings? You’ll discover the ingredients you’ll need, the number of steps in the recipe, minutes to cook the soup, the user rating, and how many people voted on the recipe.
Then, once you’ve found the recipe you want to make, click the link to check out the recipe on food.com!
Don’t believe me how good this site is?
Try it for yourself!
In all seriousness, during the pandemic, I took a data analytics boot camp through UC Berkeley and learned the skills to build this website. In case you don’t believe that I built this specifically for Idol, check out the source code and the date I uploaded the content. Taking the boot camp was the smartest decision I made during the pandemic, because it led to me completely changing careers. My day job now involves me working on improving the curriculum of the same boot camp I took, so I get to source data to build charts like these and code in Python or JavaScript pretty regularly. I hope you will go and play around with it, because I had a lot of fun coding it to make it all interactive and fun for you!
And if you're at all curious as to what the raw data looks like in a table, you can check out the initial analysis and exploration I did using Python's Pandas and Matplotlib libraries.
