Fluff filters, and why you want to read with them turned on

You can simply read a page,

... or you can READ a page with some intelligence. 

One of the important skills I teach in my search classes is Reading through the fluff.  Or, in a catchier turn of phrase, reading with a Fluff Filter.  

That is, reading to get to the heart of the content while ignoring all of the persuasive text that’s added to get you to believe what they’re writing is true, wonderful, or desirable. 

Example:  While searching for a particular online lesson, I found this description of a company that's looking for a group to partner with them.  They wrote:

…they are on a mission to design a new revolutionary program, seeking out external partners to join them. Today we'll learn about the comprehensive process they took to find, evaluate and select a top tier creatively innovative third party Core Design Partner.

That’s fine, but let’s cut this down to the real core content by removing the fluff.  

Here's that paragraph with strike0uts for things that are merely descriptive or don't contribute anything: 

…they are on a mission to design a new revolutionary program, seeking out external partners to join them. Today we'll learn about the comprehensive process they took to find, evaluate and select a top tier creatively innovative third party Core Design Partner.

That is, as I read this my brain Fluff Filters this prose into the following: 

…they are seeking partners. Today we learn about how they will evaluate that partner.
 

It’s shorter and simpler to understand.  I don't really need to know about their mission (or that it's revolutionary... of course it is).  I don't really need to hear about their "comprehensive process" to find a "creatively innovative third party Core Design" partner.  

Here's my Fluff Filter:  

a. trim the descriptive text down to what you really need to know, 

b. take out anything that you know to be true already,

c. remove all of the puffy adjectives that pump up the description and make it sound great

  

Let’s try this with something you might come across--a description of a new online game. 

With a cute and chaotic cartoon art style and hordes of bizarre enemies, things can get seriously crazy. The depth of your choice in how to defend is unsurpassed with dozens of towers, each with their own upgrade trees to climb.

As I read this with my Fluff Filters on, I read: 

Things get crazy. You defend by building towers. 

See where I’m going with this?  Cut to the chase and read only the parts that carry the core information.  

Another example:  If you read the following (made-up!)  menu description with your Fluff Filter on, you’ll emerge with the key concept: 

The Grand Armadillo Soufflé is an angelic symphony of the most tender, center cut, marinated,  free-range armadillo steaks imaginable.  Sautéed with Sonoma Valley garlic and drenched in 17-year-old balsamic vinegar from Anderson Valley grapes grown on century old, organically raised vines. 

That key concept?  It's: 

Armadillo marinated in vinegar. 

As you read your search results (or menus, for that matter), keep your Fluff Filters on full.  See the content inside the content. 

Have any good examples of especially fluffy prose that you’ve seen in your searches?  Leave them in the comments below.

Search on. 

Answer: Where is this place? Where do the people live?

A little out of sequence... 

... but with this post, we'll get back on track.  

Recall what this Challenge was: 

Flying back to the US from Europe I looked out the window and saw a few islands glinting greenly on the  sea.  What could be down there? 

Where is this place?  (This isn't an image out of the window, but a pic from Google Maps showing the location.)  

I figured it out later, but I thought this would make a nice Challenge.  
 

1.  From this blue satellite image, can you figure out what island archipelago I was flying over?  

This was the easy part.  I noticed two things about this image... (1) it says "North Atlantic Ocean" on the left.  (2) there's a giant crack that makes an upside-down Y shape in the center of the image. (Aside:  That shape is called a  pall in heraldry. In this case it's an inverted pall.) 

I thought I'd start by just moving my Google Maps view to the North Atlantic to see if I could spot anything.  Look what I found! 

Surprise!  In the middle of the ocean I found a group of islands!  If you read carefully, you'll see one called "Ponta Delgada."  

Naturally, I wanted to be sure that this was the right one, so I had to check the Satellite view of this area by clicking on the Satellite button in the lower left.  If you do that, you'll see that same inverted pall shape in the ocean floor.  So this is clearly the same place.  Zooming in a bit (past the cloud layer) shows us what's down there:  

Aha!  It's the archipelago of the Azores, an autonomous region of Portugal in the mid-Atlantic. Note that it's spelled Açores in Portugese.  

The unusual submarine topography is caused by the Azores Triple Junction (ATJ), a geologic triple junction where the boundaries of three tectonic plates intersect: the North American Plate, the Eurasian Plate and the African Plate. This triple junction is on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the middle of the the Azores, almost due west of the Strait of Gibraltar.

This is an area of great vulcanism, with fantastic volcanic mountains and more than a few hot spots with geysers and hot springs.  


2.  After I found out what the islands are, I did a bit of reading and found that a favorite dish is cozido, which has an unusual method of cooking.  What is that cooking method?  Are there other countries that also cook with this unusual method?  

It's straight-forward to search for   [ cozido ] and find that it's a Portuguese stew (often made with vegetables (beans, potatoes, carrots, turnips, cabbages, rice), meat (chicken, pork ribs, bacon, pork ear and trotters, various parts of beef), and smoked sausages (chouriço, farinheira, morcela, and blood sausage), among others. It is traditionally spiced with a fair amount of red pepper paste, white pepper and cinnamon.

But that's the traditional Portuguese version--what's special about cozido in the Azores?  

     [ cozido Azores ] 

quickly tells you that in the Azores (especially in Furnas, one of the villages), with abundant geysers, cozido is often cooked with an underground heat source, usually by burying the pot in the steam-heated earth.  Here they are lifting the pot from a cooking hole that's dug near an active geyser: 

In the bottom of each hole the ground water is boiling.  (I want to know who dug that hole and how!)  

And here's a YouTube video  showing how it's done:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7-iflAUh4g 

Traditionally, it was made with veggies, pig ears and pork belly, but I imagine family recipes vary tremendously.  And, as Regular Reader Luís Miguel Viterbo points out in his comment, it might taste a little sulfurous!  

One day I'll get there and let you know what my taste buds say!  

To find other places that cook with this method, I did the search: 

     [ underground volcano OR geyser cooking ] 

and found a restaurant on Lanzarote (near the Canary Islands) that uses underground heat, as well as a thriving tradition of cooking hverabrauð, a kind of bread baked by volcanic heat in Iceland.  I also found a traditional Japanese dish, onsen tamago (温泉卵), that's cooked in the hot waters of a spring.  

Given that story, I figured there might be more examples if I just searched for [ place with hot springs  hot springs cooking ] where I'd substitute a place name in for the .  Sure enough, with the query: 

      [ Yellowstone hot springs cooking ] 

I found the fabled Fishing Cone on Yellowstone Lake--a place where you can catch a fish and then drop it into a nearby fumarole with boiling water.  Three or four minutes there and you'll have poached fish.   

(Although, as a footnote points out:  While boiling live fish in the thermal features of Yellowstone Park has been prohibited since 1911, some who have tried it since have reported that the fish are imparted with an unpleasant taste of sulfur and other minerals which makes the novel method less than ideal as a practical approach to cooking.)  

I guess if there's heat, someone will figure a way to use it.  (And sometimes prohibit it!)  



3. This island group is pretty small, but the people are famous around the world.  It might seem an obvious question, but where do most people from these islands live?  

This could be a tricky question:  do I mean living emigrants from the Azores, that is, people who were born there... or do I mean descendants of people who once lived in the Azores?

This time, I'm going to do a search for: 

     [ emigration Azores ] 

to look for documents about people who left the Azores, both recently and historically.  

The Wikipedia article about the Azores says (lightly edited for clarity): 

Since the 17th century, many Azoreans have emigrated, mainly to Brazil, Uruguay, the United States and Canada.  In the US, Rhode Island and Southeastern Massachusetts.  From 1921 to 1977, about 250,000 Azoreans immigrated to Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Emigrants from the US East coast later returned to Azores and taught the American dory fishing technique to the Portuguese who began catching cod again on the Grand Bank in the 19th century.

Northern California was the final destination for many of the Massachusetts immigrants who moved on to the San Joaquin Valley  (especially around the city of Turlock).  In the late 1800s many Azoreans emigrated to the Hawaiian islands and Bermuda.  

Florianópolis and Porto Alegre in the Southern Region of Brazil were founded by Azoreans, who accounted for over half of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina's population in the late 18th century.  

The Great Recession of 2011-2013 led to an increase of out-migration from the Azores. 

It's useful to follow up the links in the Wikipedia article (which I did) to validate these claims.  They do seem to be pretty correct. 

In particular, one link from the Wiki-entry led me to a wonderful NYTimes article about Azorean emigration; the author points out that "..About a million North Americans were born in or descend from the Azores — four times the current population of these islands."  That's a powerful lot of emigrants, and that's just in North America.  I'm willing to bet there are similar numbers in Brazil and South America generally.  

Search Lessons 

1.  Just looking at the maps sometimes works!  Especially when you have a big clue like the label on the map.  Don't ignore obvious clues... 

2.  Even rare terms (like cozido) sometimes need a place specifier to get the correct sense of the term.  I was surprised to find that cozido is a well-known Portuguese term.  So to get the RIGHT version of cozido we had to add Azores to learn about the Azorean version of this subterranean treat!  

3. Poking around with synonyms (as we did with place with hot springs) will often expand the range of things you find.   Try it!  Google doesn't think of Yellowstone as a synonym for Azores or Japan, but if YOU know that there are hot springs in all those places.  (Want to find more hot spring places to try--check out a search like [list of countries with hot springs] 



Search on! 

Answer: How can I find this old song?

I didn't realize until now... 

... that I'd accidentally gotten off by one week.  I SHOULD have answered the previous Challenge last Wednesday rather than written a new Challenge. 

But I woke up last Wednesday morning with that question ("How can I find his old song?") running through my head.  I was so excited to pop out of bed with a fully-formed SRS Challenge that I didn't think to check if this was a  "Challenge" week or an "Answer" week.  

Ooops.  

Let's do the "How can I find this old song?" answer, and I'll catch up later this week and answer the previous Challenge ("Where is this place?")... then we'll be back on track.  

So... Remember the "old song" Challenge?  Here's the recap: 

1.  I remember hearing a beautiful a capella song in a Christmas concert where the lyrics were something like:  Yule, Yule, Yule.  The problem is that the song wasn't in English, but in a Scandinavian language.  From just this fragment of description, can you find the original song?   (A link to a YouTube recording of it would be nice.)  What's the actual title?  

The answers in the comments are great!  (Thanks, readers.)  

But here's what I did.  

First, I translated "Yule" into Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish.  

     [ yule in Swedish ] 

Turns out that it's always "Jul" in all three languages.  (It's pronounced the same as the English "yule." Makes sense.)   

Then my query was simple: 

     [ jul jul jul Swedish song ] 

which quickly told me that the song title is actually "Jul, jul, strålande jul,"  a Christmas carol with lyrics by Edvard Evers and music by Gustaf Nordqvist. (1921)  Finding a lovely YouTube version of that was easy.  There are many beautiful versions out there, but I'm partial to Sanna Nielsen's version with a fingerpicked guitar accompaniment.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnY2bZoBF0A

I was ready to do  [ jul jul jul  Swedish OR Norwegian OR Danish ], but since the word for Yule was always the same, it seemed superfluous.  (I should note that the Zero8 version of the song done by a men's choir is also gorgeous.)  


2.  When I was visiting a German biergarten last fall, about every fifteen minutes the band would play a short song and EVERYONE would sing the chorus together.  But I couldn't quite get one word in the chorus.  It's just Eins, zwei... sofa??  I know "eins" and "zwei" but what's "sofa" got to do with it?  Can you find what the lyrics REALLY are?  (Mostly, what's the deal with"sofa"?) 

I thought this might be hard, but amazingly enough the simple query: 

     [ German beer song eins zwei sofa ] 

quickly found several pages that all pointed to the same song, Hofbräuhaus Lied.  A search for that leads to multiple sources that all say the same thing... it's not "sofa" but "g'suffa," a Bavarian expression that means "to drink" or "to guzzle"!  (That is, drink rapidly and heartily. Or, as the translation below says, "Drink up!")   

A useful source here is the GERMAN language Wikipedia page which notes that "..The beginning of the melody, however, is similar to the Munich city anthem Solang Alte Peter." (It's true--it IS the same!)  In something that's this traditional, the language of origin (German) Wikipedia page is probably a great source.  

You can see the full lyrics at many places (e.g., Oktober-Fest Songs).

The song starts like this (first verse + chorus):  

Da, wo die grüne Isar fließt,
Wo man mit "GrüßGott"
dich grüßt,
Liegt meine schöne
Münch'ner Stadt,
Die ihresgleichen nicht hat.
Wasser ist billig, rein und gut,
Nur verdünnt es unser Blut,
Schöner sind Tropfen gold'nen Wein's, Aber am schönsten ist eins: 

In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus: Eins, zwei, g'suffa!
Da läuft so manches Fäßchen aus:
Eins, zwei, g'suffa!
Da hat so mancher brave Mann:
Eins, zwei, g'suffa!
Gezeigt was er so vertragen kann
Schon früh am Morgen fing er an
Und spät am Abend kam er heraus
So schön ist's im Hofbräuhaus.

In English, this is: 

There, where the green Isar flows,
Where you greet with "Greetings God!",
Lies my beautiful Munich city,
The likes of which you've never seen.
Water is cheap, pure and good,
But it thins our blood,
Far better is a drop of golden wine,
But the best is this: 

In Munich is the Hofbräuhaus:
One, two, drink up!
There so many kegs are emptied:
One, two, drink up!There is always some good man:
One, two, drink up!
Who wants to show how much he can drink
He starts in the early morning
And late in the evening he comes out
Because it's so nice at the Hofbräuhaus.

{ In full disclosure, I had a summer job playing in a polka band at the Alpine Village in Torrance, CA--a slice of Germany in the heart of LA.  As a consequence, I have a fondness for biergartens both in the US and in Germany.  So I kinda knew what the answer was... }   

  

3.  At another concert in the middle of summer I heard a lovely fa-la-la-la song with an unusual lyric in the middle--it was something like running in and out delights thee.  As a runner, I noticed that line and remembered it, but I can't figure what song it is!  Can you figure out what song this is from?  

Extra credit:  When was that song first published, and what was the title of the songbook? 

This wasn't hard, but it's a great example of when you want to use double-quote.  My query was: 

     [ "running in and out delights thee" ] 

I used double quotes because it was a phrase search.  

You quickly find out that this lovely madrigal is "Come Away Sweet Love" by Thomas Greaves, published originally in the book in “Songs of Sundrie Kinds” from 1604.  Here, a really nice video by the Cambridge Singers scrolls the text of the song past as you listen. 

Search Lessons 

This week wasn't that hard, but a lot of fun.  A couple of quick notes: 

1.  Searching in another language isn't hard, but translate into that language first.  And be sure to have your Chrome set to translate into English (or whatever you prefer) if you don't read Swedish, as I don't! 

2. Use double quotes when searching for a phrase.  Be SURE you know what the phrase is, and use a 4 or 5 word sequence (rather than 10 words--you're likely to get a word wrong).  

3. Search for a word that "sounds like" the word you're searching for... it often works!  Why?  Because you're probably not the first person to hear it that way.  This is why searching for [ eins zwei sofa ] works!  

Hope you had a good time.  I'll get back later this week with the answer to the other Challenge.  

Search on!