mortiz080

Icons can be more, much more...  ... than just small pieces of art that signify an app.   Icons can also be works that are so rich in meaning, so deeply embedded in our culture that they stand for more than just the thing itself. They can represent an entire zeitgeist and aspirations.   When I was young, the year 2001 was such an icon.  2001 was the year when the future would officially begin.   I remember saying things like "... in the year 2001... " which was synonymous with the far future.  "In the year 2001, self-flying cars will be common."  Or, "In the year 2001, we'll all have computers with 20 megabytes of memory."  (How wrong we were!)    Of course, like the book 1984 (which is an icon for authoritarianism), the movie 2001: a space odyssey represented the grand and glorious techno-future, complete with moon bases, artificially intelligent computers, and regularly scheduled flights lifting from Earth into orbit....

And we remember... sometimes with help...  If you're like me, you probably constantly re-searching for things you only vaguely remember.  A few years ago, my friend Jamie Teevan of Microsoft Research did a study about how often people try to re-find information that they'd already found.  She found that 33% of the time, people are doing web queries that they'd done before .  That suggests that people really are looking for memory support--a way to find things they've already found, and need to recover from the dusty halls of memory.   We all have moments like this--a bare memory of something that you'd like to recover.  But how can you do it?  This week is about how to do that.  Let's start with the first Challenge.    1.  I remember visiting a bunch of colleges in the Eastern US with my daughter (who was checking out different institutions as a prospective student) and hearing a remarkable story at one of them.  The story...

We forget , of course ,  ... and that's part of the reason we have search tools--to help us find and recover what we've forgotten.   I don't know about you, but I'm constantly re-searching for things I only vaguely remember, and I need all the help I can get.   This week's Challenge comes in three parts.   First, a question of something I once heard about, but have forgotten.   Second, a question of something we have collectively forgotten (or somehow misplaced) in our cultural memory.   And third, a question to you of what tools you use to help find things forgotten or misplaced in memory.   1.  I remember visiting a bunch of colleges in the Eastern US with my daughter (who was checking out different institutions as a prospective student) and hearing a remarkable story at one of them.  The story was that this  concert hall was the one that staged a concert of a piece of music by a slightly crazed but rath...

Hate 404 errors?   I do.  If you do active online research (which is pretty much the whole point of SearchResearch), you fairly often run into web pages that are 404.  When this happens, it means that the link you're trying to follow leads to a page that is missing.  It might have been removed by the author, or just moved elsewhere.  In any case, the link you've got doesn't work any more.   This actually happens more often than you'd like.   Normally , I'd just use Google's cache: operator like this:       cache:my-broken-url.html  and Google will serve up its cached version of the page.  But every so often, that cached version is missing as well.  THEN what?  A friend told me about a Chrome extension called WayBack Machine that watches your browsing activity, and if you get a 404 error, it jumps in and offers to search for that URL on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine  (which is an incr...

As you recall,  ...our SearchResearch Challenge this week was to figure out the history behind this funny group of houses that extends from Lyon Street into the Presidio.   Here are the 6 houses that have somehow pushed the boundary of the Presidio a bit to the west. How did this tiny enclave come to be?  (My edits of a Google Maps image.)   1.  What's the story behind this odd row of six houses that are inset into the natural boundaries of the Presidio?  How did this state of affairs come to be?     I have to admit that I was a little puzzled about how to even describe this set of six houses. Is there some term of art that I could use to find a relevant document that would describe this?  Maybe "enclave" would work, but searches like [ Lyon Street enclave San Francisco ] just were NOT working out.  (I had to add the "San Francisco" to the query to miss all of the Lyon streets in other places.) So, how can I find out about this...