This turned out to be simpler than I expected… The Challenge this week was to find a lake somewhere in the world that had turned deadly. How deadly? And how was it deadly? We were looking for a non-poisonous, non-boiling lake… That is, NOT lik…
Not long ago I was reading about a strange lake… I know what you’re thinking–how strange can a lake be? A lake’s a lake, right? In this case, the lake I’m thinking of seems not just strange, but deadly. The lake I’ve been reading about directly c…
As you know… … the language of the past is somewhat different than the one we speak (and write) now. As a consequence, when you’re trying to search for historical content, you sometimes (often?) have to shift your language to accommodate the way …
There’s always been a gap between …those who know how to use information resources and those who don’t. Students who knew the ways to leverage a library for research could consistently do better research than those who couldn’t. That’s not a …
One of the greatest problems with the past… … is that the language they spoke then is different than what we speak (or write, or blog). As a consequence, when you’re trying to search for historical content, you sometimes (often?) have to shift you…
TILT: Things I Learned TodayOne of the true pleasures of life in the Age of the Internet is our historically unparalled ability to notice something interesting out there, and then using your SearchResearch skills to figure what’s the backstory to this …
TILT: Things I Learned TodaySince I’m a curious guy, I often write down things that I notice during the day. Usually, at the end of the day I spend a few minutes to look these things up and write them down in my notes as TILT, Things I Learned Today.T…
Why do you need to know stuff? This is a question I often get from students and from people who don’t do much research. If you spend any time actually doing research, you realize that it’s crucial for you to have the ability to recognize things and th…
There are some things you just have to know… … or should be able to just figure out off the top of your head. A great question to think about is this: What should those basic pieces of background knowledge be? This week’s Challenge might not be t…
Surprise! Although I thought that this week’s Challenge would be difficult, it turned out to be fairly simple and straightforward. Here’s what I did (obviously only AFTER I wrote the Challenge)… 1. Over the past 150 years there have been a huge num…
Finding what’s in common… … is often an important step in making sense of complex or confusing information. Finding what’s common across a collection of data is often the key insight to figuring out what’s going on. Scientists look for common dat…
Traveling is an endless source of questions… This week brought the “who’s on the teapot?” question (as seen on a teapot from my host’s home) and a more commonplace question–“what kind of trees are those?” As it turned out, the man on the teapot too…
As you know, I travel a fair bit… .. and one of the pleasures of travel is discovering new things. And, of course, from a SearchResearch perspective, traveling is just an unending stream of curious moments… many of which bring fascinating Challeng…
That was simpler than most… It’s sometimes hard to predict how hard a Search Challenge will be, but you loyal and skilled SearchResearchers made short work of this! The Challenge began with me scanning around on Google Maps over Greenland one day an…
Finding the background about remote places can be tricky… … yet, it’s something we often want to know. There are often places that are intriguing, but that have no handy signposts to tell you what’s going on. What do you do when you want to find …