20 ms·
What makes Paris look like Paris? (2012)
- bfuller 8y agoI think the smell of Paris is very unique
- lostlogin 8y agoThe smell of Edinburgh is even more so for me, mostly due to breweries I think.
- _Wintermute 8y agoDepends which way the wind is blowing, if you're lucky it's from the brewery or distillery, sometimes you get the meat processing plant which isn't so pleasant.
- prodent 8y agoThat's about the nicest way to put it.
- smoyer 8y agoI was going to ask the question "What makes Paris smell like Paris" but nobody wants to know that answer.
- baud147258 8y agoThe mix of subway smell, I guess?
- dang 8y agoAlthough that publication says 2015, this work goes back to at least 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4374542 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4374542.
- everdev 8y agoI've always been amazed at how at the epicenter of a large city or event there are many normal looking things that contribute subtly or inadvertently to the overall awe. It's not like everything in Times Square is magical, yet the sum of them is. I wonder how many of these more ordinary objects or store fronts you could remove and still keep the aesthetic wonder of the place. Take out the garbage cans, the street lights, the cross walks, bring the buildings a little closer together or father apart. At what point does it's quality simply change?
- harperlee 8y ago> This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation... but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good. Terry Pratchett, The Fifth Elephant (Discworld, #24; City Watch, #5)
- femto 8y agoThere is a way to test the validity of their result. Go to figure 6 of the paper, in which they have a set of "Extracted Visual Elements" for each city. Cover the captions under each set, then see if you can pick the city. If their results are valid, shouldn't the essence of the city be in their selected photos, allowing a person to identify the city by looking at them? I picked London, but none of the others (which might just reflect my lack of knowledge of each city). What do others see in figure 6?
- jgtrosh 8y agoThere's no reason for a human to be as good as the machine, even though it seems like a very human task. Maybe you can use the results as input to get better at that task yourself?
- baxtr 8y agoGreat idea. I got 3 cities in Europe an one in the US right. I thought Prague was Berlin though, and didn’t get Boston
- keiferski 8y agoAnecdotally, after having lived in Paris for ~6 months, one of the most noticeable aspects of the city is its relative uniformity. Unlike Berlin, London, or Prague, you can wander for awhile in Paris and essentially see the same style of architecture and urban landscape repeated. It has something of an “endless” effect on your time perception.
- eloisant 8y agoThat's because Paris is stuck in the 19th century with its Haussmannian style. Usually a city lives and changes to adapt itself to its times, and Paris was no exception... Until the 19th century. Now the local government wants to "preserve" it for the joy of tourists, to the detriments of locals. Housing is scarce causing high prices. Buildings are old and inconvenients. Paris is a museum-city. Designed for tourists.
- keiferski 8y agoYeah, I can’t agree, sorry. I’m not sure if you’ve lived in Paris or not, but these “it’s a tourist city” comments almost always come from people that haven’t lived there. There are dozens of incredible neighborhoods in Paris that have little-to-no tourist presence. It’s akin to saying NYC is a tourist city because Times Square is a mess.
- csomar 8y agoAre you talking about Paris propre or "les banlieux"? I can agree if you extend Paris to the "banlieux" that there is definitively good voisinage but not for Paris propre. Unless you are willing to pay top dollars to stay in les Champs-Elysses. (which I don't find that good either).
- keiferski 8y agoBelville, Bastille, and most of the 13e are all within the périphérique and are all great places to live and have very little overt tourism.
- Scarblac 8y agoCan this type of software be used the other way around, to turn any picture of some building into a picture of that building in Paris? That's an effect I've seen with many deep learning things but that I don't understand.
- cdoersch 8y agoThe closest I'm aware of is this: http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6650-toward-multimodal-image-to-image-translation http://papers.nips.cc/paper/6650-toward-multimodal-image-to-... However, it requires rectified, segmented training data, unlike the above.
- jghjg 8y agoa lot of black folks?
- nailer 8y agoI'm not sure Paris does look like Paris. It's quite famous for being a let down: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_syndrome
- HAL9000Ti 8y ago"From the estimated six million yearly visitors, [...]around 20 Japanese tourists a year are affected by the syndrome" With 0.0003% of people being affected, I'd argue that this so called "symptom" is hardly a noteworthy phenomenon.
- nailer 8y agoThe syndrome - with panic attacks etc - is the most severe response. Most people I know who've been to Paris with high or romantic expectations just get scammed, spat on, yelled at or robbed and feel a bit disappointed.
- pluma 8y agoI've been to Paris a few times and when people tell me they want to go there for romantic reasons, I just tell them to go to Bruges instead. The Old Town of Bruges is exactly the way most people seem to imagine Paris: old buildings, reasonably clean, lots of street cafés and horse-drawn carriages. Even the Eiffel tower looks better from a distance than close-up (mostly because it's really just a massive lump of steel). There are nice corners in Paris but if you haven't actually ever been to Paris before, you'll probably be disappointed by the overall experience.
- cdoersch 8y agoWow--didn't expect my old paper to re-surface in 2018. Besides being a neat visualization, one remarkable thing (to me) is that this is one of the few computer vision tasks where the state-of-the-art is still the old hand-designed descriptors--specifically HOG. The attempts to re-do this work with deep learning haven't worked so well. The closest I know is https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06343 https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06343 , which I've never even seen applied to cities. The problem is actually that deep nets have too much invariance: they can classify whether a facade is in Paris or not, but there's no easy way to separate out different kinds of facades. If anyone has questions about this work, post below and I'll try to answer.
- bilivar21 8y agoDensity is at max. Transportation facilities and traffic are already totally insufficient. You might be able to stuck more people with big building but you won't be able to allow them to move. EVERY morning Parisians have at least one colleague complaining about transportation. All Parisians are secretly malthusianists. What makes Paris for me ? Money, smell of piss, latent violence.
- twic 8y agoMansard roofs. It's the mansard roofs. I never noticed them until i moved into a flat (not in Paris) which is in a mansard roof, and now i'm hyper-aware of them. Paris has them everywhere, and even has multi-storey ones, which are very rare in the UK.
- buckthundaz 8y agoWell, it isn't called the French curve without reason.