SearchReSearch

 Once again we're at the close of the year... Sunset over the Pacific with a tiny green flash... and I'm trying to summarize all that happened in SRS as a way of looking back over the year.  It's a bit of a complicated story--we certainl...

 Colorful tropical birds... Keel-billed Toucan in Belize, Arctic tern in Alaska.  P/C William Walker © 2016, 2010 see: BirdWalker.comLead us to a mystery--don't tropical birds seem much more colorful than the bir...

Colorful tropical birds... Keel-billed Toucan in Belize, Arctic tern in Alaska.  P/C William Walker © 2016, 2010 see: BirdWalker.com... are one of the glories of the avian world.  And I've noticed something odd--don't tropical ...

I was reading in the hammock... Image by Parti. Prompt: "Robot swimming in a sea of text" ... in my parents backyard, swinging beneath a guava tree and reading scads of science fiction and old National Geographic magazines.  It was summe...

It can seem magical... ... when you realize that you have the ability to read another language, especially one that you don't know and in a script that you can't even identify.  But that's what this week's Challenge was all about--a...

 I'm never one to turn down an SRS opportunity... As you can imagine, in the back pocket of my mind I've got 4 or 5 SearchResearch Challenges queued up and ready to go, questing ever onward bringing you the tidbits of knowledge we all need in...

 I ended last week's post with this... Once you know that other animals capture and eat bats, you can do a more direct search for them (e.g., [ spider eats bat ]) and get even more articles to expand your range of bat-dining predators, i...

 Bats are mysterious...  Greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) P/C C. Robillier, from Wikimedia.... creatures of the night, and you have to admit they have a real PR problem--vampires, high-pitched squeaky noises, their long assoc...

A small bat flittered by me... Greater mouse-eared bat (Myotis myotis) P/C C. Robillier, from Wikimedia.... early one summer evening a few weeks ago, flashing in a hinky-jinky flight path across the blueing sky.  Bats have always been creatur...

 This mysterious space in the park...  What was once here? ... is mysterious no more thanks to the remarkable SRS Regulars!  To remind you of the Challenge for this week...  I was walking through a park in Berkeley (C...

 Blank spaces on maps intrigue me, What was once here? .. as do blank spaces on the land.  More than a few SRS Challenges have centered on attempting to find out what happened here--this week's is in that category--what happened her...

 Let's wrap this up...  Side comment:  Why so long between posts?  Answer: In addition to my regular gig at Google as a research scientist, I'm ALSO teaching a class at Stanford University on "Human-Computer Interaction & A...

 Another way...  As I mentioned last time, there are multiple ways to think about answering this question.  I'll give one way today, and then ANOTHER answer later this week.  (I promise that next week we'll move to another Chal...

   Let's think about this some more...   This is such a rich topic that I'm going to break my answer up into multiple posts.  Here's the first with the simplest way to use Wikidata.  1. Can you find a way to...