I think and use dancing bears as a metaphor for websites that have popups, video and audio clips that you cannot shut off, animations that are selling things, and flashing banners telling me that I won a new "whatever". These sites are very common and mostly annoying as it takes time to find the content. Now, I understand commerce and appreciate the marketing theory that moving images sell products. But there is such an idea as overkill. But that's not what this post is about.
This website is relatively new at about six months of age, and with four blog pages it is fun to keep up with readers as they increase in number. I have been fortunate to have posted some projects and content that have interested readers and as a result, I have had a good number of people who return and send links to other sites. This causes blog watchers to pay attention to traffic as it is another potential dancing bear opportunity. I receive emails to sell almost everything imaginable  and today I received an offer to review items for an electronics distributor. They will send a product of my choice, I review it, and write a review with a link to their site. And I get to keep the item, free! But, as I have posted before, there is no such thing as free. As I said above, I understand commerce and good for them. But they don't understand my views and expectations for  the website.
When I started this site I had several goals in mind. I wanted to share space and ideas, entertain and inform, and be commercial free. Those ideals have not changed. You will never see dancing bears here-ever! When I post a project I try to source locally and to have readers find materials easily. In the case of special items I have sourced particular brands, but not as an endorsement but as a guide. I do not receive payment for any of my posts. And that is the way it will stay. I may post photos of frogs or monkeys, but no dancing bears, I promise...Thanks for returning and being part of the site!

There was a time in our recent past when the best way to accomplish a task was to focus and work toward finishing that task. Interruptions were considered a distraction and not well tolerated. But, that all changed in the age of technology and we had no such limitations on our ability to do more than one thing at a time. The term multitasking comes from the computer analogy of parallel processing by the processor. In reality, a single core processor does not do more than one task at a time; it simply is able to switch quickly and appears to be "multitasking". A dual core processor can do two tasks at once. But, the brain is a single core device and cannot process multiple tasks effectively. We can believe that we are able to text, drive, and carry on a conversation, but the odds are that something bad will happen.
It really is all about attention that dictates whether or not we can effectively juggle two or more tasks. Consider for a moment traveling along a highway at 60 miles an hour. Assume that the telephone poles are 100 feet apart, and they are generally less. That means  that you are driving at 88 feet per second. If you turn to look at a person in the passengers seat for just two seconds, you will have traveled 176 feet and if something has entered your lane in front of you it will get hit. The brain will not have been able to even think about using the brakes with that short a time period.
So, we can watch TV, talk to a friend on the phone, and read a magazine article. But we cannot attend to any of these tasks with dedication and we will probably lose a lot of detail. I believe that if we use the multitasking skillon on a resume we should add an asterisk with "just not very well"!
There is a great article in The New Atlantis Magazine here. Good documentation and an easy read. But I have to end this post now. Cooking turkey, calling a friend, and watching football. Cheers...

There are millions of searches processed every day using basically just a few search engines. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are among the most used, and generally, they provide the information requested. But, you may have noticed that a lot of the pages have absolutely nothing to do with what you wanted. There are many reasons that the information listed may be useless to the searcher. The first is that the search terms may be vague, too inclusive, or simply not needed. If you want to buy a TV and use TV as the search term, you will get many irrelevant pages. If you add the word buy, the results will be narrowed but there will also be a lot of advertisements listed. So, thinking about what it is that you want can make the search more productive. Most search engines ignore articles like "a" and "the". The Boolean operator "and" is also not needed by most search tools. So "buy TV" will work without "buy and TV". But, this post is not about search strategies, as there are great tutorials online. This is about expanding the way to obtain useful information.
The problem with the popular search engines is that they are popular and the questions asked have been asked by many people before. So, the same information shows up again and again along with the sites that have paid for ranking them at the top. But this is not always true as the top page may be the site with the most links to it. But there is an alternative to the "most popular search engines".
There are literally thousands of search engines and databases and some are very specialized. For example, if you have an interest in mushrooms you can search for "mycology database" and find all sites for fungus and related information. So, use the popular search engines to find the more specialized information by searching for databases and new  search engines and expand your horizons. Here is a link to one site with more search engines. Hopefully, this will whet your appetite for better information. Seek and ye shall find...