"can crazy people vote in alaska?" - More Interesting Google Searches

One of the 'problems' of this blog is that it's not focused, at least in the same sense as a bike blog, a political blog, or an art blog. But it is focused in a much broader topic - how we know what we know. Which means I can tie in lots of diverse topics. (And sometimes I don't tie them in too well, but if I do it right, at least some of the people who see any given post will see something that makes them rethink what they know or learn something new.)

It's nice, then, to see google hits for some very specific things on a wide range of topics which get to a post that really does address what they were looking for. Here are some examples from the last couple of months:

rice huller traditionally used by hill-tribes in thailand - And I've got two different rice-hullers at a Thai hill tribe village we visited here.

skeena bakery hazelton - As we were driving from the Cassiar Highway in British Columbia to Prince George on the Yellowhead Highway (16) we stopped in Hazelton and asked where we could get free wifi.  That got us to the wonderful Skeena Bakery which I posted about here.


road to child's glacier - got to a post that showed the bridge that is failing which has caused the Department of Transportation to close the road for the next few years. 


taut zehlendorf house - this got to a post about housing in Berlin's Zehlendorf neighborhood designed by architect Bruno Taut in the 1920s as part of a progressive move to build decent housing for working class folks. 


kalanchoe pronounce - a post on how to pronounce the name of this common houseplant. 

how much are polar bears worth - Yes, there's a post that addresses this by taking Alaska's governor's estimation of what it would cost to save the polar bear and showing what else costs about the same.  Is saving the polar bear worth the pizza crusts that get thrown away in the US each year?

strassenbahnhaltestelle joseph beuys -  Joseph Beuys is an artist whose work we saw in Berlin.  One piece was called Strassenbahnhaltestelle (streetcarstop).  And this person got to the post about the Beuys exhibit with three photos of the Strassenbahnhaltestelle piece.  The whole exhibit at the Hamurger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin captured me completely when we were there in April 2010.  I couldn't explain to you why (This is NOT Norman Rockwell!), but I knew this was something special. I didn't buy the huge book on Beuys they had and CS commented that she had it and I could borrow it.  I have it now.  CS is no longer with us.  Joe, I'm keeping it safe for you.  Meanwhile, here's a description of the exhibit from the Independent from August 2011


how do you say hello in karen language - Bingo!  This person gets a video of a Karen teaching me how to say hello in Karen.  But I have to say there are several dialects, and I don't know how different they are in the greeting.

how to find blood volume of a shrew  -  Yes, I have it in this post which has the answer in the title:  "If a 2 g shrew has a reasonable volume of blood to support its metabolism, say 0.1 g, a 2 ton elephant will require 100 tons of blood, an obvious impossibility."
It was from a paper by a Dr. Melanie Moses who gave a talk through the University of Alaska Anchorage Complex Systems Group on how size determines the growth and behavior of organisms and societies.. 

how to tell the gender of a butterfly - I didn't even know I had this one.  But there it was in a past google search post with links to pages that help you figure out if you should call your butterfly he or she.

Then there are those that apparently google doesn't know what to do with and they end up here because I have a post or page with some of the terms the person was looking for. 

can crazy people vote in alaska? - Yes, and they can run for office.  And they win too.  This searcher got a post about the last US Senate race.  A commenter talked about crazy Alaskan voters.  

aliens causing electrical problems -  Extraterrestrial visitors?  The person got to America's Wealth of Fact Free Political Opinion, which seemed a good choice.  But why?  It looked at nonsense about illegal aliens. 



doctor have baby factory in polyps in colon what would life span be - Here's another google search phrase that holds at least a short story.  They got to a post on colonoscopies.


racial bloc analysis of redistricting with vacation homes  - OK, I get 'racial bloc analysis of redistricting.'   There are posts that mention that.  This searcher got to Redistricting Court Challenge: Dr. Arrington's Voter Rights Analysis Primer but how did the vacation homes get into this?  I'm sure there's an interesting story, especially since the searcher is from a Department of Justice computer.