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Don’t Believe Everything You Hear…or Read…or Watch…

It’s an  election year. Candidates are saying a lot of things to get people’s votes, which means many of them are, to be blunt, lying. How do you know what to believe? How do you sort fact from fabrication? Surprisingly, the Internet can actually help if you go to the right places. Factcheck.org is just…

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Martian-Inspired Recipes

Remember Mark Watney in The Martian modifying the astronaut habitat to grow potatoes? Over at Quirk Books Danielle Mohlman has posted some potato recipes from various online sources. And if you’re interested in food real-life astronauts would eat, Tara Ziegmont of Feels Like Home has instructions for making astronaut pudding. The post includes a video…

Searching the Deep Web

A recent issue of American Libraries featured an article called “Going Beyond Google Again,” a sequel to an earlier article exploring the uses of alternatives to general-purpose search engines (e.g., Google and Bing). The more recent article gives urls and descriptions of various free online databases that give you more focused search results than you…

The Internet: It’s Not Just Google

Search engines such as Bing, Google or DuckDuckGo  can only access about 0.03 % of all the information stored on the Internet.  Search engines compile their collection of websites available for searching by using crawlers, programs that gather information about web pages for their indexes.  However, crawlers can’t find information that needs to be accessed…

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Now for Something Completely Different

Somerville is a community of makers. It's home to the Artisan's Asylum, a community and school for hobbyists, inventors and tinkerers. It's a place where imaginative historical markers can spring up overnight and robots will soon roam the streets. So today's post is a nod to that Übermaker, Leonardo da Vinci. Among the many inventions…