mortiz080

How many pianos in Salzburg...    ... can you Ferminate and answer the Challenge?    Well... okay... let's just jump into it.  The Challenges from last week, please...    1 .  As you know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a famous sister--also a performing prodigy.   Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart , called Marianne and given the nickname "Nannerl, was his older sister.  But in nearly every picture of her, she's got a remarkable head of hair.  See this picture below:  Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart playing two-handed duets at the piano The question I had was  How do you sleep with hair like that?   Or, I suppose, the other way to think about it would be  How much time do you spend on hair like that?   Any ideas?   This is a pretty open-ended question, and it's worth noticing that while I asked the question about Nannerl, a simple image search for:       [ 18th century big hair ]...

My brother is a pilot...  ... and every so often he sends me a picture from somewhere in the world asking "So, smart guy, where is THIS photo taken?"   Here's one such photo he sent me recently:  Nice pic.  Of course, I took up the Challenge and did my usual Search-By-Image search tricks .  But searching for this on Google didn't give me anything.   So I tried the Cropping-the-Image trick, cropping it to this close-up, and then re-doing the Search-By-Image.   But that didn't work either.  I kept cropping it in different ways, but I didn't get very far.  It takes time to crop the image, save it, then re-load it into Image search.  So I tried this on Bing's image search tool .     Like Google's Image search, Bing also has the camera icon, which lets you upload an image to Search-By-Image.   When I uploaded this image, the UI looks like this:  Bing's search-by-image UI. And.. as you can see on th...

Salzburg was Mozart's home ...  ... in his pre-Vienna years.  It's where he was born, lived, and launched his career.   When I was visiting earlier this year, I visited several of the places that Mozart lived and performed.  As you'd expect, as I looked around, I noticed a few things--things that struck me as funny/odd.  Of course, being a curious fellow, I had to look these things up with a bit of online research.  Can you answer these oddities as well?   Here are three of the things I had to look up.  I was surprised at the answers to each of these.   1 .  As you know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a famous sister--also a performing prodigy.   Maria Anna Walburga Ignatia Mozart , called Marianne and given the nickname "Nannerl, was his older sister.  But in nearly every picture of her, she's got a remarkable head of hair.  See this picture below:  Nannerl and Wolfgang Mozart playing two-handed duet...

Being a good estimator...  ... requires two kinds of knowledge:  (a) facts about the world, and (b) basic math estimation skills.  Those skills let you work from the basic facts, combining the data and doing quick math estimates to get to some numbers that give you the information you seek.   How tall was Enrico Fermi, the physicist?  How would you estimate?  Assume he doesn't have extraordinarily long legs.   Fermi Estimation needs both kinds of knowledge--along with a bit of practice in figuring out how to go from point A to point B.   Let's practice with a true Fermi estimation!   1.  Can you estimate how tall Enrico Fermi was?   In this example, I give you a piece of data: Fermi's head is 9.4 in (23.9 cm) tall.   How would you estimate his height just from this information?   Ask yourself, What other information do I need to know?    If you're an artist, you probably learned that...

It's often hard to find good data sets.  But it just got a lot easier.      Earlier this week Google announced a new Data Search mode that lets you do a Google search just  for data sets. My colleague Natasha Noy wrote in the Google Blog  that  "There are many thousands of data repositories on the web, providing access to millions of datasets; and local and national governments around the world publish their data as well. To enable easy access to this data, we launched  Dataset Search , so that scientists, data journalists, data geeks, or anyone else can  find the data  required for their work and their stories, or simply to satisfy their intellectual curiosity." For people looking for online data, this is a godsend. To use it, visit:        toolbox.google.com/datasetsearch   and do a search.  Here's one of the first things I tried to do... (Naturally, I checked local data that I probably would recogn...

Are you a good estimator?  How tall was Enrico Fermi, the physicist?  How would you estimate?  Assume he doesn't have extraordinarily long legs.   An important skill in a lot of skilled reading (or fact checking, or just being a skilled SearchResearcher) is being able to do quick estimates of values by just doing a bit of thinking about them.   This estimation technique is often called Fermi Estimation , after the famous physicist who was known for his ability to good approximate calculations with little or no actual data.  These are sometimes called "back-of-the-envelope calculations," but great Fermi Estimators don't actually do this without any data--they need to start somewhere... but they know a few key facts, and then work forward from what they know towards an estimate. Fermi estimationg problems typically involve making reasonable guesses about quantities, their variances, the upper and lower bounds, and how to combine guesses togethe...