mortiz080

Every so often you hear a few stories that just seem to go together.   This week, even though I'm teaching in Switzerland (maybe because  I'm in Switzerland), I hear three stories that seem a bit too odd to be true.  Can you help me figure out if these are real stories or not?   Here they are.  In each case, what's going on?  True.... or not?  1.  I keep reading about people going whale watching in Lake Superior.   Can I really see whales in Superior??  (It is, after all, a great lake.  Could whales possibly live there?)  2.  I was reading a bit o' Irish history and happened to read about a place called Clonmacnoise, where, once upon a time, a few of the monks apparently saw a sailing ship fly past in the air.   How would such a thing be possible?  Can you figure out any plausible way that people could see ships in mid-air?     3.  Since I'm in landlocked Switzerland, someone happen to mention th...

Geolocating Tweets...  People tweet about darn near everything.  That's handy for you, if you're a SearchResearcher.    I figured out that my friend's house was NOT on fire with geolocated tweets.   This week's Challenges:   1.  When the Google I/O event happened last week, I wanted to see what kinds of things were being tweeted about.  Unfortunately, not everyone adds the  #GoogleIO  hash tag to their tweet, and sometimes people add the hashtag when they weren't really there.   Can you find tweets that were posted from INSIDE of Google I/O 2017?     We want to search for tweets that are geo-located to a particular place.  In this case, the location of Google I/O 2017.   And where was that?       [ Google I/O 2017 ]  quickly tells you that it was held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre, right by the Googleplex.  (lat/long: 37.4263042,-122.080828)    You can search for Twitter's ...

When big events happen, people tweet about it.   Big events can be pure fun (like  Red Bull's Flugtag "flying" event ), they can be tragic (such as the recent terrorist bombing in Manchester, England ), and they be technological ( Google's I/O developer conference last week).   But when big events happen, people share on social media--Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, etc.   Often the real-time event is tracked on Twitter.  So it's occasionally useful to use Twitter to figure out what's going on.   For example:  Is that my friend's house on fire???  Luckily, not my friend's house. I recently used my ability to search the tweet-stream to find out why there was a huge plume of smoke from a house fire near my home.  In just about 1 minute, I went from finding the tweets in my area, searching them for mentions of "fire" and then discovering that a local television station was showing real-time video.  That was a fantastic search experience becau...

This is a common problem.  In fact, we've talked about the problem of mis-remembered names of books and songs before .     The problem is that our human memories are chock full of errors.  Even memories that seem absolutely true and correct can be really, really wrong.  (See this Guardian article for a short simple test of how bad your memory is .)   The big problem with remembering cartoons (or movies, or books, or short stories) is that we often get the details all wrong.   The Challenge this week was to figure out the cartoons from just the descriptions below. Some people are chronologically gifted  enough to just recognize them from their own experience.  But most people actually had to search them out.   Given these descriptions, can you figure out what these two cartoons are?  How would you seek out such things?    1. This cartoon features a character that's playing with (or fighting with) the frame of the cartoon. ...

The other day...  ... I was chatting with some friends and we started to talk about the great cartoons from back in the day when we were kids.   Naturally, the conversation went something like this:  "You remember that cartoon where... the rabbit did that weird thing with the edge of the film?"  Or "I'm sure you recall that one cartoon series with Russian characters... what were their names?"   The big problem with remembering cartoons (or movies, or books, or short stories) is that we often get the details all wrong.  Doing our SearchResearch thing means that we can figure out the names and titles despite  having almost all of the details be incorrect.  It's search in spite of the data ...  Here are two cartoon descriptions that we had a bit of trouble with, but I was able to figure out in the end with just the information provided here.  Until I did the searches, these "facts" were all we could remember.   Given these descriptions...

Fun time!   Last week I posted my personal SearchResearch Challenges from the past week as the Challenge for you.  As I mentioned, these have fairly simple answers... but as usual, there's more depth here than you might have expected.   1.  What's a  placket ?   (This might be obvious to you, but it's a word I've only ever heard before, so I had to look it up.  In the book I was reading, it seems to refer to both shirts AND petticoats, which doesn't seem to make any sense.  Can you tell me what it is and what the shirt / petticoat connection is?)  I began by just looking up the definition with:       [ define placket ]  which tells me that a placket  is:  So... it's a slit or opening in a garment covering fastenings (such as buttons or a zipper) OR it's the flap of fabric that's under such an opening.   That's fine, but what do they look like?  I clicked on the Images tab to see this:...

After that last Challenge, it's time for some fun.   As I read and write and wander about, I often come across things that I have to look up.  This week's Challenge questions aren't especially hard, but as always, be sure to verify that you found the correct  answer.  (You'll almost always want to do at least two searches to make sure.)   Here are my personal SearchResearch Challenges from the past week.   1.  What's placket ?  (This might be obvious to you, but it's a word I've only ever heard before, so I had to look it up.  In the book I was reading, it seems to refer to both shirts AND petticoats, which doesn't seem to make any sense.  Can you tell me what it is and what the shirt / petticoat connection is?)  2.  Speaking of clothing, what's that little loop on the back of a man's shirts called? And WHY is it there?   3.  At the local pond, red-winged blackbirds  ( Agelaius phoeniceus ) are out in force. But ...

Many thanks to Remmij... ... who in a comment earlier this week correctly pointed out that GeoGebras ARE embeddable in regular web pages.   The links Remmij gave in the comments to Wednesday's post  were exactly what we need to let us embed a GeoGebra interactive animation widget in your web page.   UNFORTUNATELY , because Blogger won't let me edit the header of this post, I can't embed it here in the regular SearchResearch post.   HOWEVER ... I can embed it in an Interactive Distance to the Horizon page  I'm hosting on my own website!  Bummer that I can't put it into a blog post (but perhaps someone will show me how to do that as well).   When you click on that link, it will take you to this web page (illustration below) that's on my server, showing that you can in fact download the HTML and then edit it for whatever purposes you'd like.   Full credit where it's due: This interactive GeoGebra animation was created by Paul  and is almost exac...

Okay... it's NOT May 1! Sorry about not posting on Monday, but it's been a hectic week. Besides, I've enjoyed reading everyone's comments on the Challenge.   Not only is work busy (and I have a strange cold), but this Challenge is proving to be waaay to much fun.   The SearchResearch Challenge this past week was to figure out how to make an interactive widget that can interactively show the relationship between height and visible distance in the "island viewing" problem.  That is:   1.   Can you make an interactive widget that illustrates "how far out to sea can you see" without going into full-developer mode and writing a bunch of HTML, CSS, and Javascript?   Interestingly, and oddly, before the world-wide web, modern browsers, and Google, this USED to be fairly straightforward.   There were a number of simple animation tools that would let you (the teacher) create an interactive animation to demonstrate basic physics principles.  In particular, ...