What’s the original / natural range? The basic question from last week’s Challenge was “What was the original or natural range of these three animals?” (Lion, Ground Sloth, Camel) It’s a natural enough question, but the ans…
Going beyond avocados and onto animals! As you recall, one of important ways that avocado seeds were dispersed was through the gullet of large animals (like the gomphothere). Many of those animals are long gone–extinct. But they left …
Avocados… … that fruit beloved of millennials on their toasts, that mainstay of guacamole, that luscious green ambrosial centerpiece of tortilla chips… our lives would be poorer without it. But as you know, it’s a food …
Last week we had a survey. It asked the SRS community about what they thought were the most important search skills. (Take it by clicking here, if you want to see what the original survey was all about.) Since I do surveys p…
I’m back! Welcome to the new post-book SearchResearch. Just so you’ll know, it’s provisionally called The Joy of Finding Out. A quick book update: I finished the first draft of the manuscript. Now comes the c…
I’m almost done! Well… that is, the writing of the first draft is nearly complete. Only another 2 or 3 thousand words to go. (That sounds like a lot, but it’s an afternoon’s worth of writing. The problem is that a lot of those …
Normally… … we’d have a SearchResearch Challenge this week. BUT… as you know, I’m working on a book about the SearchResearch experience. It’s not about SearchResearch per se, but about what we learn here–how to frame questions a…
This was supposed to be a fun Challenge… … but perhaps it was more complex than I’d thought it would be. Let’s go through each, one at a time… 1. When in Switzerland, one naturally eats a lot of chocolate. (I cer…
I’ve spent a fair bit of time in Switzerland… … over the past couple of years. Partly it’s because I go there for work, but part of my work last year was teaching a semester-long class in Social Computing at the University of Zürich.&nbs…
Symbols are SUPPOSED to be easy… But as we found out this week, if you don’t already know what a symbol means, it’s sometimes difficult to figure it out. For instance, this symbol means biohazard. And thi…
Symbols are supposed to be easy. The idea, after all, is that a symbol works across languages and let you glance at it, immediately understand what it means, in order to rapidly understand what’s going on. In general, it’s good to…
The naming of parts… … can be tricky, but figuring out WHAT the parts of different things are called is an important SearchResearch skill. Let’s jump right into it (especially since this post is a couple of days late–see at the end…
I was looking at some type samples the other day… … and I ended up with a bunch of questions that seem like basic typography, but I didn’t know the answers! Can you help figure these out? (They seem simple, but might be …
How to find vague concepts? Searching for something as vague or open-ended as this week’s Challenge can be tough. How can we find examples of science fiction being used to invalidate patents? Was this image from 2001 used to null…
Icons can be more, much more… … than just small pieces of art that signify an app. Icons can also be works that are so rich in meaning, so deeply embedded in our culture that they stand for more than just the thing itself. They can …