A few questions to keep you searching for a bit… … questions that seem straightforward enough, but ones to which you might not know the answers. 1. You’re driving a rental car and driving into the gas station. How can you tell (without getting ou…
Turns out they’re the Tohono O’odham people… Yes, I know I asked about the Papago, but remember this: Things Change Over Time. This is one of those things you have to remember, especially when looking for cultural identities or political bodies–st…
I spent a couple of years living in Arizona when I was young… … in Cottonwood, AZ, centered in the desert landscape of the Verde Valley, not far from the red rocks of Sedona and the mining ghost town of Jerome. In school, we’d visit local Native A…
There’s a backstory here… It’s not often that as you walk the street, you run into a few buildings that seem as though they fell out of a Streamline Moderne fantasy. This was an architectural style that was from the 1930s, with swooping curves, long…
Did you know that you can often find online PDF versions of books for free? I recently found a great blogpost at OpenCulture.org pointing out that lots of places with large catalogs (especially museums) are scanning their collections and making them a…
As I strolled through San Francisco… … I was surprised to find some really interesting buildings. That, in itself, isn’t odd–San Francisco is full of interesting and odd buildings–but this particular cluster of buildings looked to be some kind o…
This isn’t a Search Challenge… … but rather, a quick reminder for everyone who enjoys reading SearchResearch that you can get this delivered to you via email by joining the Wednesday SearchResearch Challenge group. Here’s the link to join the Searc…
It’s SNOWING in the Sierras. Huzzah! The best thing we Californios could have at the end of 2015.Regular reader Fred had an excellent idea. “Why not,” he wrote, “do a summary of the year in SearchResearch?” A kind of year-end look back at the best-of…
Sometimes lyrics don’t make sense… … or, are intentionally baffling. Many Steely Dan song lyrics fall into this category. Yes, I know you can make up a backstory for “Deacon Blues,” but really? You can write a story to anything, even intentional…
There are a few things to catch up on for SearchResearch… … so I wanted to drop you a note with a few odds-and-ends. 1. If you haven’t seen today’s Google Doodle, you really should. It’s worth playing the Doodle game all the way to the end. Ju…
Do song lyrics ever baffle you? More than once I’ve written a note to myself about some obscure song lyric that I wish I understood. This happens fairly often, so I have lots of notes to myself, usually “what does it mean when they sing ….?” For …
If you want to know about how often a word… … occurs in our language, you need to find some data–usually the bigger, the better. This week’s Challenge is all about comparing how often people write about certain ideas. How often do they mention L…
Bing just launched a new maps feature that you might want to know about… They now have a new layer in their maps product that lets you locate and see the current view from traffic cameras. This is especially handy if you live in a high-traffic area …
When we write, we reveal much… … about ourselves, and about the way we think. Linguists have known this for a while, and often do studies where they try to figure out how what we think/feel/believe is reflected in what we write. This week’s Challe…
I don’t know if he was a polymath… … but the subject of this week’s SearchResearch Challenge was definitely an interesting character. I’m not sure we’ll be able to sort out fact from exaggeration, but let’s see what we can find. Here are the Chal…