I climbed the hill… … and just a bit more down the path, I climbed another one just like it. A bit more down the path, ANOTHER one just like it. Interesting–how long would this repeated series of seemingly identical hills go on? As I flew across…
Finding extraordinary people… …that was the Challenge. I gave a list of people (Galton, Da Vinci, Alberti, Goethe, von Humboldt, Pallas, Bernoulli…) and asked if you could find some more folks like this… That is, 1. Can you find more people l…
I managed to get a few minutes… … to pull together a master list of all the text lessons from the PowerSearchingWithGoogle.com online course. Here’s the list for you. Again, as with the master list of video shorts (see my post about the PowerSea…
I don’t really buy the Great Man theory… … of history, nor am I a fan-boy of celebrities, current or past. But I AM an admirer of people who are (for lack of a better term) broadly talented and effective. That is, learning about such people is ki…
Something I hear a lot in my search classes is the complaint of “… but I can’t browse books the way I used to!” Well, wait a second. That’s not quite right. You can definitely see MORE books that are on the same “shelf” if only you know one little…
As you’d expect… … there are many ways to search in a scanned PDF for some text. Let’s review: the SearchResearch Challenge for this week is meant to give you an additional powerful tool for importing scanned documents and making them findable. 1….
If your research is like mine… … you fairly frequently find a document that’s from another era. It doesn’t even have to be that long ago before you find yourself dealing with infernally annoying crufty docs. For instance, when I’m searching, I fa…
There are many solutions… … and it’s taken me a LOT longer than I thought it would to explore them. (Hence, this post being a day-late.) The thing is, it’s not hard to find timeline creation tools, but it IS tricky to find one that has the right …
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…
The National Park Service, a FIA partner, is using a roadside noise meter to help visitors to the Grant Teton National Park better understand the noise their vehicles make and the impact it can have on the park.
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 …