Today's amusing search request: should I make an outline slide for my APS march meeting talk?
My physics category archive is the second hit for this search in Google. This is a surprising query to see from (presumably) a physicist: an overspecific question phrased in standard English is not the most well-formed Google search. (Some search engines are designed to take queries in this form, but Google is not one of them.) Nevertheless, the searcher lucked out: the fifth hit is a set of slides on giving good scientific talks.
I'll answer the question anyway in case anyone else is wondering. If it's an invited talk, the answer is almost certainly yes—a 30-minute talk will cover enough different points that an outline at the beginning will help the audience follow the transitions. If it's a contributed talk, with only ten minutes of material it may not be necessary. If the talk divides nicely into multiple distinct sections, it's a good idea, but if it's centered on a single result you probably don't need it.
I almost forgot to do this. All these are from the old site since the new one has yet to obtain a high ranking in the various search engines.
I need to leave the old server up just so I have more of these next month.
Search queries that led to this site last month in bold, editorial comments in italics.
Another installment of search requests from my referrer logs. Not much of interest this month, except for the guy trying to use it to ask me questions.
Should I make this a regular feature? As usual, the boldface items are search requests that led to this blog last month, and the italics are editorial comments.
356 searches for the word "gazebo" last month, almost double that of February. One could probably track seasonal demand for gazebos this way. (But what about seasonal demand for Gazebo?)
From the referrer logs, these were all searches leading to pages on this blog. Editorial comments in italics.
The most popular search string was (as always) "gazebo", 189 hits last month.