About a month or two ago I found an interesting site on the Web, part of Yahoo! I happened on it when I read a story on the CNN web site saying how Stephen Hawking displayed a question on the site. The site is answers.yahoo.com , in which people submit questions and other surfers answer them. They can be of any number of subjects. I tried it out and found it a good place to answer other people's questions - sort of like a general purpose tutor.
There is a point system with Answers.yahoo.com . If you visit a site on a day, you get 1 point. If you ask a question, you lose 5 points. Apparently, you pay to have your questions answered with points. If you answer a question, you get 2 points. From what I gather, after some people answer a question, the originator can select a best answer. That person gets 10 points. If he just abandons the question after leaving it there, it goes to a vote, with the most votes getting "best answer". After you get a certain number of points, you can rate questions, answers, and selections as best answer. You can get email notifications of such things as an answer to your question or being selected best answer to a question.
There's a wide variety of types of questions. Some of these are deeply philosophical, such as "Does God exist?" Others are presumptive, such as "If Tel Aviv were bombed, who would George Bush get his orders from?" Some of them are hilarious or whimsical, such as "Do snakes sneeze?" Some questions occur over and over again, such as "What is 2 + 2?" I've been answering that "5", citing as my reference George Orwell's 1984.
The first question I asked was "When mathematicians refer to the square root of -1, which one do they mean?" Many answerers simply said "i", as this is used as a symbol for the square root of -1. The whole point was that there are two such square roots (i and -i) and it is hard to tell them apart because they have identical properties. I was surprised that an answerer named "mathematician" came up with a way of distinguishing these! He said take the polynomial ring R[X] modulo X2 + 1, and take i to be the image of X in this quotient ring.
I asked "Is Jupiter a planet", hoping to get someone arguing that it was a dwarf star or something. Everyone said it was a planet, however. The "demoting" of Pluto to a "dwarf planet" generated a lot of questions, many of them from "Pluto" fans.
I found that many of these questioners use bad English spelling and grammar, to the point sometimes of changing the meaning of their questions. Some of them evidently have some other language as their primary language, and the resulting English constructions sound weird, and in some places the meaning has changed. Some even answer in Spanish. This is not allowed. There is a Spanish language version of Yahoo! they can go to. I answered one such question in Spanish and English, then later I found the question had been removed.
One effect of answers.yahoo.com is that it drew me away from blogging. I am uncertain of getting a response by blogging, but I do get it from answers.yahoo.com . However, I usually don't get a record on my hard drive of my Yahoo! answers.
Many of my answers have been in mathematics and astronomy, but not all, and in general I find it a good place to get answers from people even if they are facetious.
A Journey through Blogrealm