The flowering trees are blooming, but the leaves are still struggling to come out, and it's practically the end of April already. Usually around here all this would have been weeks ago. When they talk about 'global warming', I don't doubt it, but I'm surprised to learn that it isn't what I expected. I thought it meant that temperatures everywhere would rise equally, and that isn't how it works, apparently. Like the weather itself, it varies from place to place and region to region. So here I am, still learning things at my age.Speaking of which, one of the best learning tools known to man is good old Google. We can ask it anything, no matter how stupid or basic or silly, and it never says "Go ask your Mom" or "Go ask your Dad", or "Don't bother me just now - I'm too busy" or "It's in the book - just keep reading!"
Instead, it provides us with multiple choices of sources where an answer may be found, and it doesn't censor either the questions we ask it, or the answers when found. It leaves all that up to us, without wagging its finger and making critical comments. And that's good, because with Google, even old people like me can ask it really childish questions, and get straight answers to them. Like, for example, "How many time zones are there in the world?" And we learned that each time zone contains 15 degrees of the earth's 360-degree circumference, so 360 divided by 15 equals 24. But another answer said there are 40, because in addition to the ones for exact hours, there are others for the half-hours and even quarter-hours in some regions, (like Newfoundland for example) which increase the total from 24 to 40 world-wide.
So I learned that even a simple question that I thought I knew the answer to really wasn't so simple after all, and that I really didn't know the answer after all. And that's the really marvelous thing about Google. It provides us with information we probably couldn't get nearly as easily anywhere else, and certainly not all in one place, and for free.
Yeah, I also couldn't do without Google. There are even more search engines around apart from Google, but they don't seem to be that important. Maybe they're designed for special purposes, I don't know.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I'm not commenting each time, I eagerly follow all your interesting posts on computers and OS's. Thanks for sharing.
You're very welcome. It's always encouraging to know that someone is actually reading all this, besides me. And sometimes, I wonder about that. I saw a piece where the head of Technorati was asked what percentage of the nearly one hundred million blogs are actually read by someone other than the blog's writer, and his answer was very sobering. He said that about 97% are being written in total obscurity, and nobody else knows they are there, because they have never seen them. That's why I put the little counter on it, so I could tell how many visits it gets.
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