So… This IS tricky. So I’m just going to answer the second part of last week’s Challenge. We’ll get to the “how to search the coastline” later. (As I kind of suspected, it’s one of those questions that requires a bit more work than usual. Maybe…
Yes, it really is hard to search… … all of the coastlines of all the world. In the comments on last week’s Challenge, a few readers (looking at you, Remmij!) expressed skepticism that my approach would work in general. And in general, that’s true…
From the Cronkite Journalism School in Phoenix… … I’m writing this is one of the classrooms before giving my talk about “Deep Search,” which is pretty much what the topic of SearchResearch is all about. It’s a fascinating time to reflect on the co…
I have a file… … of SearchResearch Challenges that I keep updated with new questions. In that document I’ve got a few in the “Odds & Ends” category. Here are a couple of quick questions that have come up in the past few months that I can’t wo…
Generally speaking… …how do you know if it’s faked or real? These days, with wonderfully competent photo editing software, and the sheer number of people generating content, it’s sometimes really hard to tell. Let’s tackle each of these Challenge…
Sorry folks, but it’s been a busy few days, and I neglected to note that I’d be super-busy today. It’s all good, but I didn’t think to write up my Answer for today well ahead of time. Usually I get up early on Monday morning and write everything up fo…
Unfortunately… … people have been faking stories, photos, and claims for as long as humans have been around. Of course now we’re aided by technology, which sometimes makes these deceptions a bit more difficult to ferret out. Here’s an early famou…
This was simpler than I thought… Although I’m intrigued by flowers and such, I didn’t think that searching out the answer would be as simple as it was! Seems to me that when I looked it up (a few years ago, admittedly), this was a much more difficu…
I was out running… … in Southern California last July. As I ran, I found a remarkable white flower growing by the side of the road near the Santa Monica mountains. It’s a large and beautiful flower, maybe 4 inches across, and quite striking. S…
Turns out, it’s tricky… Well, at least the first couple of images were fairly easy to figure out. Let’s look at these and then talk about the last pair of cake images. The first image appeared in my Facebook stream by a friend who wondered how on e…
Is it fake? … is a question that comes up fairly frequently when you’re reading online content. We see news stories, social media posts, or images that flash by and make us wonder “Can that possibly be real?”This week’s Challenge is to explore a cou…
I’m going back to Cape Breton one day… … largely because I’m not sure I’ve been to a friendlier place. I had lots of conversations with people I met there–just chatting about life in Nova Scotia and what it’s like to live there. But this week’s …
Cape Breton… … is a beautiful place on the northeastern end of Nova Scotia. I was visiting there last week, driving around enjoying the local music and the fall colors.But as usual, there were things there that puzzled me–can you help me understa…
Non-watery fountains? This week’s Challenge was fairly simple, but could be as open-ended as you want. It came about when I saw some non-water-based fountains, and was struck by how crazy they could be. In particular, I found one fountain that deeply…
Something other than water? This past week I saw a small fountain of molten chocolate at a hotel reception. You know, the kind you hold your skewered piece of fruit beneath, and then, as you try to eat it, the chocolate drips everywhere. If you’re n…