Break out the snowshovels! Scientists are suggesting that global climate change might actually mean more snowstorms than before. The additional heat energy in the atmosphere makes snowy conditions more likely, even in the face of an overall warming trend. Certainly the monster blizzards in the Eastern US dubbed the Snowpocalypse have people wondering. As if a [more...]
Everyone thinks of Google as a search company. And I suppose they are. But no one pays to Google-search the internet. Instead, Google makes it billions from online ads…it’s really an advertising company! And thank goodness for that, for Google’s business model allows millions of small website owners to earn income through its Adsense program. Our [more...]
Life often involves putting great trust in people you may not know very well. Hiring a new employee, say. Asking a babysitter to look after your child, or a contractor to work on your home. Even going on a date, or meeting a new college roommate, may leave you wondering if the person you’ll be spending [more...]
There are a few legitimate reasons for needing to know a person’s Social Security number (and a fair number of illegitimate reasons, but we won’t go there!). Perhaps you need to handle some estate matters for a deceased relative. File some records for a former employee. Confirm the Social Security number (SSN) of a new hire. [more...]
Interested in taking a few college courses for free? You can do it online at some of the most prestigious universities in the world, all at no charge. At the Massachusetts Institution of Technology…good old MIT…you can take advantage of their MITOpenCourseWare offerings. There are more than 1,900 free online classes here, graduate and undergraduate, all [more...]
http://v3.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/originalDocument?CC=GB&NR=189311604A&KC=A&FT=D&date=18930715&DB=EPODOC&locale=en_EP Did Someone Named Crapper Really Invent the Toilet? You’ve heard the story…right? An Englishman by the name of Thomas Crapper invented the toilet. In so doing, he not only put the world on the path to modern sanitation, but he also generously contributed the word crap to the English language. True story? Only partly. Crapper didn’t invent, but did [more...]
Ancestry.com is the 600-pound gorilla in the family history field… it simply can’t be ignored, and is, in fact, the richest, deepest source of genealogical information available online. It also costs money! In the neighborhood of $150 for an annual subscription for US ancestor research, and close to $300 for full access to world records. Truth [more...]
You got your musical chops somewhere. But in which branch of the great family tree of your ancestors did the musical talent first make itself known? There are a number of very good sources for searching back several generations or more to find musically talented folk who were part of your family’s heritage. The best [more...]
Anyone can research their ancestors going back a generation or two. Just ask grandma! But how about going back, say, six or seven centuries. A new genealogical database will let you do just that, particularly if your family has roots in England, and even more particularly, if one of your ancestors was a medieval soldier. A recently-released database, [more...]
REO or real-estate-owned properties are hot commodities these days. An REO house or other property (such as a plot of land, or a commercial building) is one that has reverted to bank ownership because the original owners defaulted on their mortgage, and the property was not purchased at a foreclosure auction. In cases like that, [more...]
You’ll hear a lot these days about sustainable business. But what does that mean? What do sustainable business practices look like? Or more to the point, do sustainable businesses even exist? The idea of sustainability harks back several decades, at least as far as the Rio Conference in 1992, also known as the Earth Summit, or [more...]
Exactly what were mom and dad doing back in their college days? Seeking new knowledge in the library, or sneaking out the dorm for a midnight rendezvous? Getting stoked for the big game, or getting a secret smoke behind the gym? I can’t tell you all the details, but maybe with a bit of prompting, you can get your [more...]
Photovoltaic cells directly convert sunlight into electricity. In the past few decades, this elegant source of solar energy has become more efficient, cheaper, and more versatile in how and where they can be put to use. As the world ever-so-slowly weans itself from a dependence on fossil fuels, solar power from PV cells will play [more...]
The French people have an amazing history, a beautiful language, and a justifiable pride in their culture. But they’ve done a surprisingly poor job of preserving these things in the form of French-language online newspaper archives. Still, there are a few good sources to know about, from France and other French-speaking areas, such as Quebec [more...]
Quezi, I am told, is Australian slang for question, as in, ’scuse me, mate, I’ve got a quezi for ya’. Don’t believe me? Try looking up the history of the word in old newspaper archives. There are a number of free online newspaper archives covering Australia and New Zealand. Here are the major ones you should [more...]
Online newspaper archives are a wonderful source for researching your ancestors, studying history, learning more about your family, hometown or roots, or simply browsing to learn what was happening in day-to-day life in earlier times. There are some wonderful free newspaper archives online covering history and news in Canada. Did I mention they’re free? Take a look! Canadian newspapers [more...]
There are literally billions of pages of newspaper archives available online. Only a small portion of them are from the UK, and a still smaller portion can be viewed for free. Nonetheless, the few free archives that are available from England, Scotland and Ireland are a rich source of history writ large and small. Here are [more...]