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that when you type in the word murder, you get somewhere around 88 million hits.  Isn’t that sad?”
“Yeah, real sad.  Where does the genius part come in?”
“Well, obviously, I don’t have time to read about 88 million murders, plus there’s the whole eewww factor, so I added ‘Florida’.”
Eye roll, “I give, how many hits came up for Florida?”
“Something like 2.2 million.”
“That seems high.  If there are 88 million murders and there are 50 states, how come Florida has 2.2 million murders? Wonder what the population in each state is like.  You really shouldn’t have as many murders in, say, Montana, since there aren’t as many people there, but you would think that a place like New York where there are easily a gazillion more people than Montana would have a much higher number of murders.”
I shook my head and said, “Slow down there my little bean counter.  Remember, it really isn’t the number of actual murders; it is articles about murders and news coverage about murders and pretty much any time the computer sees the word ‘murder’, anywhere in the whole universe I think.”  I wiggled my eyebrows and looked right at her, “And you were making fun of my computer skills.  Listen to me, I almost sound like I know what I’m talking about.  I’m getting good at this computer thing, but, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”
“Ok, so you do a search for Florida murders and you get back 2.2 million hits.  Then what?”
I continued to explain, getting more excited with each layer of the telling.  I’m Irish, that’s what we do.  “Well, that’s still way too many for me to deal with, so I typed in unsolved Florida murders .  Now we’re getting somewhere, down to just over a quarter of a million.”
Her eyebrows met in the middle, “Please tell me you’re not going to try to read a quarter of a million articles in hopes that you will get enough information to solve a murder, any murder, that might not even be in that group, to earn $100,000, or some other reward, before they turn your lights off.  What am I missing here?”
“Ya didn’t let me finish.  You might just be the most impatient person I’ve ever met.”
“No Cara, you’re the most patient person on the planet, which just makes us normal people look rushed.”
I puffed, “Fine, you want to hear this or what?”
“Go.”
I took a deep breath and pulled myself back to the subject at hand, “So I’m looking at the first article.  It’s about a child.  Oh my God I cried.  I can’t be reading about murdered kids or I’m going to lose my mind.  Especially murdered children whose case hasn’t been solved yet.  Can you imagine what that would do to your soul?   Think about how it would feel to work on a case like that, or worse, know a child that had been murdered.  I thank God I can’t even imagine how hard that would be.”
I forced myself not to cry for all the lost children and their families and said, “So I’m reading like every third line, hoping to skip the really heartbreaking stuff, and I get to the bottom of the story, and it has related stories.  I click to a related story, and at the bottom, there are stories related to that one.” 
Triumphant, I said, “One of the related stories is about the cops profiling crimes on MySpace hoping someone will come forward with information that could help.  Another related story is about how cops are using other computer stuff.  They’re using computers.  Just like us.”
She rolled her huge blue eyes, yet again, it really seems to annoy me these days, but she couldn’t stop if her life depended on it, so why make a big deal out of it?   Besides which, although few people seem to understand the concept these days, I was raised to believe that my right to not be annoyed does not supersede her right to be annoying.
She said, “Great, so the cops already have this figured out.  You have no idea what you’re doing.  They are trained