Mysterious signs… … are everplace in our lives; this just happens to be one that I got curious about. And as it goes with human cognition, once I saw this sign while running, now I’m seeing it just about everywhere I go. More generally, once you’…
While running… … in a nearby open space preserve on the San Francisco peninsula the other day, I came across a somewhat mysterious sign. I figured this must mark something pretty impressive, because it’s just out in the middle of a field near a ni…
When I say… “Thinking outside the box,” I could be referring to any of many boxes that we get ourselves stuck in. As you know, there are lots of bias effects that can influence our problem-solving (or research) skills. We’ve talked about some of th…
Some problems are hard. But often, if you know where and how to search, the answers can be found without an excess of work. This week’s Challenge is an example of exactly this idea. If you spend more than 5 minutes on this Challenge, you should stop…
That was fun! This past week I was in the western Caribbean, on the island of Bonaire (part of the Netherland Antilles), and I’m seeing a bunch of extremely interesting animals. Our Challenge this week was pretty simple and fun: Can you figure out wh…
As you know… … I’m actually on vacation this week. More on that later, but I’m trying to NOT spend much time online. For what it’s worth, I’m completely failing at this. However, I thought I’d post a purely fun Search Challenge this week. It’s …
It’s interesting to answer.. .. an SRS question about hills when I’m back in Bonaire, spending most of my free time underwater. As you probably remember from the parrotfish Challenge of 2 years ago, this is a fascinating place. But we were talking ab…
I climbed the hill… … and just a bit more down the path, I climbed another one just like it. A bit more down the path, ANOTHER one just like it. Interesting–how long would this repeated series of seemingly identical hills go on? As I flew across…
Finding extraordinary people… …that was the Challenge. I gave a list of people (Galton, Da Vinci, Alberti, Goethe, von Humboldt, Pallas, Bernoulli…) and asked if you could find some more folks like this… That is, 1. Can you find more people l…
I managed to get a few minutes… … to pull together a master list of all the text lessons from the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com online course. Here’s the list for you. Again, as with the master list of video shorts (see my post about the PowerSea…
I don’t really buy the Great Man theory… … of history, nor am I a fan-boy of celebrities, current or past. But I AM an admirer of people who are (for lack of a better term) broadly talented and effective. That is, learning about such people is ki…
Something I hear a lot in my search classes is the complaint of “… but I can’t browse books the way I used to!” Well, wait a second. That’s not quite right. You can definitely see MORE books that are on the same “shelf” if only you know one little…
As you’d expect… … there are many ways to search in a scanned PDF for some text. Let’s review: the SearchResearch Challenge for this week is meant to give you an additional powerful tool for importing scanned documents and making them findable. 1….
If your research is like mine… … you fairly frequently find a document that’s from another era. It doesn’t even have to be that long ago before you find yourself dealing with infernally annoying crufty docs. For instance, when I’m searching, I fa…
There are many solutions… … and it’s taken me a LOT longer than I thought it would to explore them. (Hence, this post being a day-late.) The thing is, it’s not hard to find timeline creation tools, but it IS tricky to find one that has the right …