There are many ways… … to change your body, some you want, some you might not care to have. Working out to grow stronger and more muscled is one conscious way to modify your body, but last week’s Challenge was to find a few answers to questions abo…
People modify themselves… … sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally. As you probably know, the vertebrae in your backbone can be modified if you carry heavy loads for a long time, and you’ll develop Schmorl’s node (a kind of notch in …
Unexpected connectionsYou never know what you’ll find when you go for a run (or walk) at different places. In particular, there are often fun and unexpected connections between different places and people. This Challenge is about finding the connecti…
Unexpected connectionsI love finding the unexpected connections that link things together. I loved that book Connections by James Burke (still highly recommended, both as a book and for the videos), and the ways in which connections can be found betwe…
There are lots of reasons to know about technical conferences… … but for SearchResearch, the primary reason is that they often have the latest and greatest content on any given topic. Let’s answer this week’s Challenges, and then talk about why th…
Just about now, in early spring, pollen starts to show up in the gutters. In between the bursts of rain, early flowering trees—where I live it’s the plums, almonds, and acacia—all start producing pollen in abundance. It all washes down from the …
As you already know… … I travel a good deal for my work. In a typical year, I attend 3 or 4 technical conferences, which are largely meetings where researchers in my field get together to deliver papers on their latest research. We listen, ask que…
Last week’s “flying northeast” question generated a number of answers… Recall that Regular Reader Jon (“The Unknown”) asked: “If I start from my house in Vancouver and fly NE, keeping my plane flying in a straight line, what country do I next enter?…
I watched in dismay as the young student slowly typed her query into the smartphone. This was not going to end well… She was trying to find out which city was the capital of the Belgian Congo in 1923. She very reasonably searched: [capital Belg…
In 1968 Dionne Warwick famously sang… … “Do You Know the Way to San José?” Which asked that question, wondering if she could go back there to “find some peace of mind…” because she was “born and raised in San José” and there’s “lots of space t…
Continuing this “new concept” theme…. … of how to get to the core concept behind a glob of text. Last week we were looking for “compound concept” terms like “beach music,” or “summer romance.” But it often happens that you know a little bit a…
Where is everybody moving to? (Sorry this took so long to answer.. but… The question is easy to ask, but more complicated to answer than our usual research topics!! Our Challenge was.. 1. During the past year, what have been the large movements o…
Can it be that we’re making search into a harder problem than it already is?Could be.Once upon a time, before Google Docs & Spreadsheets, if I knew I had put together a spreadsheet for some kind of analysis, I knew it was in Excel and it was on my …
Let’s continue this “new concept” theme…. … of how to get to the core concept behind a glob of text. Last week we were looking for “compound concept” terms like “beach music,” or “summer romance.” But another version of this problem is when…
Really well done, SRS team! This Challenge was fascinating. There were more comments in the stream than usual (the ordinary run-rate is around 7 comments / week), all of which are great. What’s more, you found some solutions that I hadn’t anticipated…