Watching the sun… … is something that humans have done since we noticed that it traces out a pattern in the sky over the course of a year. Of course, it’s much easier to do this if you live on an open plain, where it’s obvious that…
We all watch the sun… … sometimes with sunscreen, but nearly always at sunrise and sunset. We notice when the days grow shorter or longer, and as we’ve seen in earlier SRS Challenges, it’s an endless source of fascination for people, sha…
How is this like that? .Seems to me that noticing how ideas, people, places, and words all link together is a fundamental to creative thought. Last week’s Challenge was an example of this kind of connective thinking, one that…
Finding connections… … is a good part of what I do in my day-to-day work. As a professional researcher, I often look at data and try to figure out what this data is telling me, and how it connects to other things I know about. In p…
Seeing the Earth from space… … is a truly remarkable ability. It literally changes your perspective. What’s even better, in these days of ever-cheaper costs to fly a satellite, and the increasing capabilities of small satelli…
We live in a complicated time… … with all kinds of conflicts, disasters, and changes in the landscape of our world. There’s a conflict in Ukraine, recent fires in Colorado, massive flooding in eastern Australia, and conflicts over fishin…
We live in a multi-media world… So why shouldn’t search engines work on audio files as well? This question originally came up for me when I was looking for a particular episode of RadioLab. This is a wonderful…
Podcasts? Well, of course! While I have my usual line-up of podcasts that I like (you can see some of them above), every so often I’ll want to search around through audio to find something that’s particularly on my topic of inter…
#8.3 Assessing Credibility of News Sources Foreword: This is part two of our chapter on finding news (and late-breaking information). Mario Callegaro and I have been writing this to let you know some of the best practices i…
This flower has changed names… P/C Daniel M. Russell (2022).. which is fairly common thing to do. People generally call this a shooting star, although I’ve always known this particular flower as Dodecatheon hendersonii…
Last week I took this photo of a beautiful woodland flower… P/C Daniel M. Russell (2022)I’ve always known this particular flower as Dodecatheon hendersonii, aka, a “shooting star” or “mosquito bills.” If memory serves me correctly, th…
How to find: News & Breaking Events: Keeping track of your news sources (part 2) Foreword: This is part two of our chapter on finding news (and late-breaking information). Mario Callegaro and I have been writing this to let…
This was a curious question… The tide comes in near Gualala, California. P/C Dan…. which is my very favorite kind of question. This Challenge really started from a chance observation (“the times of the tides are different here…
I was at the sea the other day… The tide comes in near Gualala, California. P/C Dan.As usual, I had looked up the tides before going, so I’d know when both high and low tide were to happen. That’s an easy query on Google. …
All I wanted was a full-view version of Audubon’s masterpiece, The Birds of America… A page from Audubon’s “Birds of America”… but I was having a hard time findingi it. But with a little help from my friends on the Books team, I le…