Blog Jones

Everyone reading this knows that you can search for webpages on Google. But did you know about some of these other things you can do with Google:

• Find the weather: Search for “weather ” + the zip code/city
• Find out about a stock: Search for “stock ” + the ticker symbol
• Perform a currency conversion: Search for the amount ” in ” the desired currency, as in “10 dollars in Euros” or “5000 yen in pesos”
• Perform a calculation: Search for the equation, such as “(2+3) * 4″
• Find a word definition: Search for “Define ” + your word
• Find a movie from a movie quote: Search for “movie: ” + the quote, as in “movie:You can’t handle the truth”
• Find out the owner of a phone number: Put the phone number in the search box
• Find out the status of your UPS or FedEx package: Put the tracking number in the Google search box

All kinds of neat stuff.

CNN reports on the disconnect between what federal officials are saying about the conditions in what’s left of New Orleans, and what’s actually going on. Here’s a taste:

Hospital evacuations

• Brown: I’ve just learned today that we … are in the process of completing the evacuations of the hospitals, that those are going very well.
• CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta: It’s gruesome. I guess that is the best word for it. If you think about a hospital, for example, the morgue is in the basement, and the basement is completely flooded. So you can just imagine the scene down there. But when patients die in the hospital, there is no place to put them, so they’re in the stairwells. It is one of the most unbelievable situations I’ve seen as a doctor, certainly as a journalist as well. There is no electricity. There is no water. There’s over 200 patients still here remaining. …We found our way in through a chopper and had to land at a landing strip and then take a boat. And it is exactly … where the boat was traveling where the snipers opened fire yesterday, halting all the evacuations.
• Dr. Matthew Bellew, Charity Hospital: We still have 200 patients in this hospital, many of them needing care that they just can’t get. The conditions are such that it’s very dangerous for the patients. Just about all the patients in our services had fevers. Our toilets are overflowing. They are filled with stool and urine. And the smell, if you can imagine, is so bad, you know, many of us had gagging and some people even threw up. It’s pretty rough.

Un-believable.