Dennis Turner
TAKING DIRECTIONS
Like everything else in life, Web searches have become more complicated. There are now some 11 billion pages to choose from at Google - but they're pikers compared to Yahoo, which claims to index some 20 billion, nearly twice as many! Of course, search engine technology is better now than in the past - but still, it can be a bit daunting when you're presented with 150,000 pages for your perusal. Often, what you're looking for is in the first 10 or 20 choices on the list, but not always; and just as often, the best choice, with the "real" information that you need, is on page 716 of the search, which you'll never bother looking at. Do enough Web searches, you start to feel like you're drowning in a sea of blah blah. So how about a Web search engine for right brainers that will free you from Internet blah blah? Instead of a jungle of Web sites you have to ferret through in order to find what you're looking for, it would be so much easier if you had a "map" where you could narrow down your search without having to click through dozens of pages of results. Well, here it is – and it’s free…
ARGUMENT AGAINST JACK’S CELEBRATION OF HAMAS’ VICTORY
This is Dennis “The Wizard” Turner’s rebuttal to my Celebrating Hamas of last week. My comments are at the end. ---JW The core of Jack’s celebration is that now Europe and America could no longer delude themselves about the Palestinian’s intentions. Funding, diplomatic support, and pressure on Israel for further concessions would dry up. Hamas’ victory was a week ago Wednesday (1/25). Already the international community’s initial comments are weakening. I will give pertinent extracts from a few articles published just six days later (1/31).
DVD MATH
You know what they say about computers - the minute the newest models come off the assembly line they're already obsolete, because back in the lab they've already developed a prototype two generations ahead of the most advanced commercially available systems. As the old saying goes, "If cars had progressed as fast as computers, we would be driving at 500 MPH in a $25 car that gets 2 million miles per gallon and seats the population of China." This is relevant to many of us who are interested in burning DVDs ...
THE SAGE
The Sage is a comprehensive dictionary/encyclopedia with a completely integrated dictionary and thesaurus that defines words, terms, concepts, historical events and even has an anagram decrypter - with nearly everything cross-referenced, allowing you to jump from word to concept with just one click. What's in a word? Well, according to The Sage, a word is far more than the definition listed in the dictionary; it's a lemma, which means that it really is a "topic" or a chapter heading; for example, a word can be defined as a part of speech (noun, verb), a hypernym (part of a larger category), synonym, holonym, antonym (look them up), or other type. Israel, for example, is a country (hypernym), a part of the Middle East (holonym), the home of Israelis (meronym) and it can be defined in dozens of other ways.
LITTLE KNOWN WEB DELIGHTS
The Internet is like what the North Pole and the Moon used to be – a great, unexplored terrain with all sorts of life-changing phenomena, just waiting be discovered, and used for your betterment. Of course, it depends on how you define ‘betterment.’ For many people that means having the computer spit out a can of Coke because they’re too lazy to get up and fetch one from the fridge themselves. If you’re in the neighborhood of MIT, you can use your computer to conjure one up. However, if you want your kids to get fresh air, you might consider the Internet to be the second most useless invention in human history, a close runner up to the TV. But forget TV: the miracle of the Web is that there are sites that are not only fun, but amazingly useful, too.