Lost in a government maze

How to get lost!
Originally uploaded by pirate_paddler

This is the most depressing article I have read in months. Daniel Cornwall at Free Government Information pointed it out. He says:

The folks at the Center for Democracy and Technology and OMBWatch have documented how someone relying on a
commercial search engine misses *a lot* of government information. Some examples in the report are:

+ A search for “New York radiation” does not find basic FEMA and DHS information about current conditions and monitoring.
+ A search to help grandparents with a question about visitation of their grandchildren in any search engine does not turn up an article of the same title
located on the Web site of the Administration for Children & Families.
+ A search for “small farm loans” turns up the commercial offers for loans, and statistics about government loans, but not most of the major federal government programs designed to help fund small farms.

The authors of the report say that while usa.gov helps searchers who find it avoid a lot of commerical materials, usa.gov often can't find the hidden content either because the underlying database is from a commercial search engine that has a hard time indexing a good amount of federal content.

Saluting the kernel

silver kernels
Originally uploaded by storm runner

I recently attended an archaeology conference (for us wannabees) and it got me thinking about a phrase you hear a lot in studies of old texts: "kernel of historical truth." As in "No one today believes that the Greeks, inspired by the goddess Athena, build a wooden horse, but we can ask whether there is a kernel of historical truth in Homer's tale of the Trojan War."

It's a cliche, obviously, but where did it start? After looking at Google Books, Making of America and other places, I reached a few conclusions.

"Kernel of historical truth" appears in an essay by Johann Wilhelm Loebell which appeared in a book about Barthold George Niebuhr in 1852. The same essay seems to appear in Sharpe's London Magazine, and Google Books says the publication date is 1845, but I can't tell if that is the beginning of the magazine or the true date for the essay. (Google Books could use a little clean up there.) Of course, Loebell was probably writing in German, so perhaps this phrase is the translator's baby.

"Kernal of HISTORIC Truth" appeared in 1855, in the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, in an article by Elihu RIch. It is part of a phrase in quotations, but he doesn't say who (if anyone) he is quoting.

"Kernel of Truth" (no history) dates back at least to 1791. John Fletcher used it in a book called American Patriotism

So, does anyone know of earlier uses of these terms? Pass 'em on and I'll print them here.