I hate to do this to you… … because the answer to last week’s Challenge is fun.. but I’m doing a tour of upstate New York this week. I’m teaching at Cornell today and the University of Rochester tomorrow. “Far above Cayu…
Estimation is an art… … that deserves practice. And by practice, I mean that you very deliberately look at your mistakes and learn from them. In an earlier post about Fermi Estimation, I showed how I estimated Enrico Fermi’s h…
Last week I flew from San Francisco to Austin, Texas… … as usual, I had a window seat to I could see the landscape slowly rolling past the window. In my opinion, this is one of the most wonderful things you can do: look out the window at…
How many pianos in Salzburg… … can you Ferminate and answer the Challenge? Well… okay… let’s just jump into it. The Challenges from last week, please… 1. As you know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a…
My brother is a pilot… … and every so often he sends me a picture from somewhere in the world asking “So, smart guy, where is THIS photo taken?” Here’s one such photo he sent me recently: Nice pic. Of course, I took up th…
Salzburg was Mozart’s home … … in his pre-Vienna years. It’s where he was born, lived, and launched his career. When I was visiting earlier this year, I visited several of the places that Mozart lived and performed. As y…
Being a good estimator… … requires two kinds of knowledge: (a) facts about the world, and (b) basic math estimation skills. Those skills let you work from the basic facts, combining the data and doing quick math estimates to get to…
It’s often hard to find good data sets. But it just got a lot easier. Earlier this week Google announced a new Data Search mode that lets you do a Google search just for data sets.My colleague Natasha Noy wrote in the G…
Are you a good estimator? How tall was Enrico Fermi, the physicist? How would you estimate? Assume he doesn’t have extraordinarily long legs. An important skill in a lot of skilled reading (or fact checking, or just being a …
What makes a page difficult to find? (Part 2)I was impressed by how well (and how quickly!) SRS readers were able to figure these out. Some of the search paths were lovely and inspired. Nice work, Readers! Here’s what I did…
What makes a page difficult to find? (Part 2)As we saw last week, sometimes you remember the page, but have difficulty figuring out the exact words for your query. In one case, I remembered seeing an article on a topic (the American author …
There are many reasons… … why a particular page might be difficult to find. Sometimes your memory is just plain wrong; sometimes your memory is so generic as to not remember anything that would let you pick the right page out of t…
Every so often you know a web page exists, but it’s tough to put your finger on it. This last week I had several search Challenge pop up in my work. Here are a couple of questions I found myself asking, and was ultimately able to …
Water flowing uphill? It was a huge surprise to me to see the stream apparently running uphill. What’s up with that? How would that be possible? To remind us of the Challenge, here’s a recap. Here’s the pla…
I’ve been in Salzburg, Austria for the past week… It’s just as lovely as you might imagine–the Alps surround a large river valley, it’s endlessly green, and the Altstadt (“old town”) is full of medieval streets, lined with churches and shops th…