There are many great info visualization tools… … but the plain old timeline is still incredibly useful for organizing a collection of events that happen over time. For instance, here’s a timeline showing the history of Macs (you can click on it to…
One of the stranger things you’ve seen… but perhaps hadn’t thought about… is the strange way in which older texts are capitalized. Noticing this led me to our most recent Search Challenge which asks why the capitals seem scattered almost at random…
When in the course of human events… … it becomes necessary for one person to understand something strange, weird, or unexpected, they often turn to a Search Engine. And with that Sentence, I illustrate the Challenge for today. As you probably not…
Let’s talk about the simplest first. Clearly, figuring out Challenge #2 from last week (from whence do these posts come?) was pretty straightforward. So let’s talk about that first. Recall the Challenge: 2. What are these posts for? Who built them…
I ran a few images of devices … that might have been found in a Danish opticians office past Elin over the weekend. Here is the one that she said seemed most-like the one she remembered. This is a keratometer from the 1950s. In particular, it wa…
Often the most difficult … … Challenges come from friends who are Googlers (so they’ve already done their own searching on the topic), and who are still stumped by what they seek. Difficult Challenges are also characterized by not knowing where to …
We just finished running… … the updated version of the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com course. As you might guess, it’s a lot of work to pull all of this content together, making the videos, writing the content, and so on. I’d like to make it as ava…
Fog is a thick cloud of tiny water droplets… … suspended in the air near the ground, reducing visibility to less than 1km. That’s the technical definition. But, as many SearchResearchers found out, sometimes it’s something more than just water dr…
If you’re like me… … you probably think about London as a great metropolitan city–a royal city, a capital, a place of museums, castles, wonderful to visit… and… foggy. Yet in all of my visits to London over the past 20 years, I don’t think I’…
When searching for an insect…… be sure to think about how many insects there are. As we see from the first two butterflies here, insects often seem very similar to each other. And there are milions of insect species, making identification sometime…
Entomologically speaking…… this Challenge shouldn’t be that difficult. But as we’ve seen, sometimes these things can spiral out of control and present real challenges. This summer has been a series of insect encounters. Luckily, few of them have b…
Once again, the reality is more complex… … than I thought. If you’re like me, you thought that there might be as many as 24 time zones. You probably knew that China was all one giant time zone, and that Newfoundland (Canada) was a bit odd. Tim…
As you’ve probably noticed, once you’ve spent some time on a topic–like our Search Challenges–you start to notice these things in your daily life. Comet tales: I know a lot of you have been watching the saga of Rosetta / Philae and the story of Com…
Time zones… … are a 19th century invention, really. TIME has always been around, of course, and for the largest part of human history, time was defined by whenever noon happened locally. That’s easy to figure out, but as tech advanced, we suddenl…
Three different building shapes… How hard can it be to give names to these? Here’s what I did to figure these out… 1. What is this kind of building called? Why does it have this distinctive shape? Building Type A: It’s located at 47.5529417,-12…