By now you know… … what kinds of research questions that come up for me. In the past couple of months we’ve done research on: – finding shadows in ball parks – what kind of mirages cause ships to apparently float in mid-air – how to…
There’s simple.. and then there’s simple… The FIRST version of this week’s SRS Challenge was a bit too simple. Finding shade at Yankee Stadium (along with several other stadiums) is pretty easy: lots of fans have written up guides to sun and shade…
Take me out to the ball game… Outdoor sports stadiums sometimes have a little trouble with the sun. Yes, it’s great to be outdoors watching the players doing their thing, but it’s also sometimes a hassle, especially if you’re watching a long basebal…
Odd stories: How can you verify / follow-up? That’s really the question this week–when someone tells you something odd, how can you (quickly) follow-up and check out the veracity (“truthiness”) of their claim? Here are the slightly whacky claims …
Every so often you hear a few stories that just seem to go together. This week, even though I’m teaching in Switzerland (maybe because I’m in Switzerland), I hear three stories that seem a bit too odd to be true. Can you help me figure out if these a…
Geolocating Tweets… People tweet about darn near everything. That’s handy for you, if you’re a SearchResearcher. I figured out that my friend’s house was NOT on fire with geolocated tweets. This week’s Challenges: 1. When the Google I/O event ha…
When big events happen, people tweet about it. Big events can be pure fun (like Red Bull’s Flugtag “flying” event), they can be tragic (such as the recent terrorist bombing in Manchester, England), and they be technological (Google’s I/O developer con…
This is a common problem. In fact, we’ve talked about the problem of mis-remembered names of books and songs before. The problem is that our human memories are chock full of errors. Even memories that seem absolutely true and correct can be really,…
The other day… … I was chatting with some friends and we started to talk about the great cartoons from back in the day when we were kids. Naturally, the conversation went something like this: “You remember that cartoon where… the rabbit did tha…
Fun time! Last week I posted my personal SearchResearch Challenges from the past week as the Challenge for you. As I mentioned, these have fairly simple answers… but as usual, there’s more depth here than you might have expected. 1. What’s a plac…
After that last Challenge, it’s time for some fun. As I read and write and wander about, I often come across things that I have to look up. This week’s Challenge questions aren’t especially hard, but as always, be sure to verify that you found the co…
Many thanks to Remmij…… who in a comment earlier this week correctly pointed out that GeoGebras ARE embeddable in regular web pages. The links Remmij gave in the comments to Wednesday’s post were exactly what we need to let us embed a GeoGebra int…
Okay… it’s NOT May 1!Sorry about not posting on Monday, but it’s been a hectic week. Besides, I’ve enjoyed reading everyone’s comments on the Challenge. Not only is work busy (and I have a strange cold), but this Challenge is proving to be waaay to…
Since there’s so much interest… … and since we seem to be making progress (see the comments in the last two posts), I’m going to continue this Challenge until next week. My answer / analysis will be posted on Monday, May 1st. (We’re so close. Ke…
Let’s work on this a bit longer… Remember that the SearchResearch Challenge this week is to figure out how to make an interactive widget that can interactively show the relationship between height and visible distance in the “island viewing” problem….