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 I'm sure this happens to you... You're out and about when something captures your eye.  Quick! Pull out the phone/camera and grab the image.  Later, when you get back home, you can look it up.  (Usually.)  Recently I...

We all need some basic fact-checking skills... This week's Challenge was about what you do in your personal fact-checking.  How often do you check?  How do you check?  What do you check? A wave of assertions comes at you every ...

 People keep asking me: Dan, what's the best site to monitor the fires in California?  Or a variation on that: What's the best site to get satellite images of fires in the West?  Without going into all the detail, here's my lis...

In the swirl of current news and political tempests, we all need some basic fact-checking skills... ... and I'm curious about what you do to exercise the ability to do some basic checks on the things you read. A wave of assertions comes at yo...

 Since our last post, the situation has gotten worse...  When I originally posted this SRS Challenge, the fire map for the Bay area looked like this: Aug 26, 2020 Now, it looks like this: Sep 7, 2020While it's easy to get ...

 As you probably know, ... California is having what is probably the worst fire season in the past few centuries.  It's bad enough that I check the local Air Quality Index before I go outside to do anything active.  When the AQI get...

 Why is the US/Canada border so complicated and strange?  If you look at a map of the United States, most of it kind of makes sense.  There are lots of straight lines that are clearly the result of surveyors and politicians drawing ...

 Why is the US/Canada border so complicated and strange?  There's a lot of discussion about the border between the US and Canada. At the moment, the border is technically closed to US citizens because of COVID, and because of that, there...

Finding the latest information about COVID-19 is sometimes tricky. Here's why...     As you might recall, last week I was planning on visiting a friend's house for a very small outdoor garden dinner party.  But there was a conc...

I'd planned on spending a few days.... ... at the Sonoma Valley Author's Festival in beautiful downtown Sonoma. But, as you'd expect, that's not happening this year. The organizers have moved everything online. So... I'm giving my talk about "The Joy...

I had a personal information challenge the other day... and I failed!  Maybe this has happened to you as well.  We were about to visit a friend's house for dinner--socially distanced, of course!  The plan was to go to their hou...

As I said, I was thinking about gomphotheres... ... as one does, and realized that they were native to North America, but also show up in South America.  Likewise, other animals (such as opossums, armadillos, etc.) were native to one continen...

The other day I was thinking about gomphotheres, as one does on nice spring afternoons... ... remember them?  They're a kind of elephant-like animal that lived in North America during the Pleistocene?  We mentioned them in an earlier SRS...

I couldn't resist... ... an addendum to my previous post about Collections.The thing about collections is that there are so many of them.  And yet, if you don't think about searching for a collection, you might miss a huge treasure trove...

While collections are fundamental... ... the organization of them is just as important.  AND, for our purposes, searching for a collection that contains the stuff you seek is just as important.  What's a SearchResearcher to do?&nbsp...