Seeking Search-Engine-Fu : comments [Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος]

In rasing cattle, the term is 'acreage per cow' (ie, about 2 in eastern pasture and 5 in the west). Also expressed as 'cow per acre'. I've seen it referred to as the 'domain' of an animal. Another term to use could possibly be 'sustain'; a quick search for 'gecko space sustain' turned up a document with the phrase: "Despite their hunting capabilities, the dragons still operate on the relatively low overheads of the lizard metabolism and do not need to eat every day, or even every week. Therefore these islands, which possess a fairly stable prey population of wild pigs, deer and other animals, can easily sustain the known population of about five thousand dragons." That's referring to Komodo dragons, but that's the search that let me know that that would be a starter term for the search; you can sort through that or refine it at will.

Sadly nobody pays me to do random searches for this, because I'm pretty good at it; I could likely have your info for you in an hour to an hour and a half (I once found a cd for

tafkar based on it being bhangra techno and she'd seen the cover a few weeks earlier and described it). I am very good at this for no reason that I can understand. :-)

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Perhaps you could teach classes to the rest of us "search challanged" people. :)

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don't think I can, though. See, the way this search went, I thought "Hmm. I was reading about that a couple hours ago, though it was in terms of space allotment for cattle. How did they refer to that? (grab book, riffle through it) Ok, just 'you need to figure 5 acres per cow here.' Ok, let's feed 'acres per cow' into Google. Oh, look, that turns up a lot of stuff related to 'acreage per cow' instead. let's see how that does. Ok, lots more, and lots of PDFs from the government; that's more likely the official type term. Ok, then, let's toss acreage into Dictionary.com's thesaurus, see if that comes up with anything. Oh, domain. That's a good one. Let's see. 'domain support gecko'. Hmm. Not quite right, but...Oh! That google snippet for that page refers to 'sustain'. Much more likely to be that. More scientific sounding word. 'gecko space sustain'. Well, there's a quote that indicates this is likely the right path, I'll give him that."

This is dull, and suppositional, and I'm not sure I could actually explain to people how I skim 20 result summaries and pull out an idea from there and say 'aha!', and it also has to do with Sheer Amount of Crap in Stephanie's Brain that makes me say "hey, they were discussing something similar to that in an incindental, throw away conversation in that book earlier..."

So basically, I'd need to learn how to teach people how to have a brain that makes connections as randomly as mine does.

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This is exactly how I do it, too, and I also find the intuitive part hard to explain. It's a matter of saying "You just go with the idea that feels right" and I admit that is unsatisfying as wither student or teacher.

I'd also love to be paid for this ability. :-)

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