mortiz080

Going beyond avocados and onto animals!   As you recall, one of important ways that avocado seeds were dispersed was through the gullet of large animals (like the gomphothere ).  Many of those animals are long gone--extinct.  But they left an indelible effect on our landscape, leaving a trail of guacamole behind them.     That made me start to wonder about those beasts and what the landscape must have looked like back in the day when gomphotheres wandered around through southern Mexico and Central America.   If I recall my Pleistocene history correctly, there were a LOT of charismatic megafauna back then--including ones that we think of as being native to some other places.  I associate sloths with South America, but there used to be really big  sloths in North America as well (although there are none today).  Likewise, I think of lions in Africa and camels in the Middle East + Africa.   But it wasn't always this way....

Avocados...    ... that fruit beloved of millennials on their toasts, that mainstay of guacamole, that luscious green ambrosial centerpiece of tortilla chips...  our lives would be poorer without it.  But as you know, it's a food of the New World, having originated somewhere between southern Mexico and Peru.  There is some evidence that avocados were domesticated at least 3 times, r esulting in the currently recognized Mexican ( aoacatl ), Guatemalan ( quilaoacatl ), and West Indian ( tlacacolaocatl ) landraces .  (See the Wikipedia entry on avocado .)      As noted, that seed is pretty big.  And that led me to this week's SRS Challenges.  How would you work out the answers to these questions?   1.  How are avocados dispersed?  If they rely on just falling from the tree, that doesn't seem to work well... so is the "natural" dispersal by animal?  If so, WHAT animal would eat an avocado... and then b...

Last week we had a survey.   It asked the SRS community about what they thought were the most important search skills.  ( Take it by clicking here, if you want to see what the original survey was all about .)   Since I do surveys professionally (for my research work at Google), I know this isn't a perfect survey.  The sample size is too small, too biased towards professional researchers, and doesn't have a broad enough set of questions to be accurate.  I don't care.   What I wanted from this survey is a sense of what experts think  about search advice.  That is, I really wanted to hear what you, gentle reader, had to say about search methods and conducting online research.   The good news (for me) is that many of the ideas you put into the survey are covered in my book.  The better news is that I don't cover everything you mentioned.   To everyone who filled out the survey, many thanks for your comments....

I'm back!  Welcome to the new post-book SearchResearch.  Just so you'll know, it's provisionally called The Joy of Finding Out.    A quick book update:  I finished the first draft of the manuscript.  Now comes the copyediting, approvals, publisher comments, figuring out the color pages, etc etc.  One of my friends who's an accomplished author said "Congratulations.. now the work begins!"   Ummm.... What was all that stuff I just did?  When this thing is all done, I'll give you a bit of a breakdown in terms of effort--how much time was spent writing, how much time editing, etc.   Realistically, this book is probably a 2019 publication.  (But I'm hoping for an earlier, limited release!)  Stay tuned.  I know I promised you a  breakdown of the survey results from last week, but I'll get to that tomorrow.  There were a LOT of insightful (and lengthy) comments--it's a bit more than I can whip out in just an...