Google Gets Wired Today

In case you missed it, if you've done any Googling today, they have a commemorative (of sorts, well, for physics geeks, surely) logo up;



It is in honor of Hans Christian Ørsted.

Who?

From The Guardian;

Probably not even the physics geeks remember much about Hans Christian Ørsted, although Google's Doodle logo illustrates his key discovery. That is, if you run a current through a wire – in this case, from the battery at the front – then the electricity creates a magnetic field, which will deflect a compass needle.

[snip]

As with many great discoveries, it happened by accident. In 1820, Ørsted, a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, was preparing an evening lecture when he noticed that a compass needle moved away from magnetic north and pointed to the wire whenever current flowed from the battery.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the compass needle pointed in the opposite direction when you flipped the battery round.

With an invisible current creating an invisible field that moved a physical needle, this caused quite a stir at the time. In London, the Royal Society gave him a medal, and he was also made a knight of the Prussian Order of Merit, of the French Legion of Honor, and the Danish Order of the Dannebrog. On his death in Copenhagen in 1851, he was given a state funeral.

[snip]

To honour Ørsted, the scientific community named the unit of magnetic induction after him, in what we now call the CGS (centimetre-gram-second) system. Sadly for him, people no longer measure things in oersteds, because nowadays we use an international metric system (SI) that honours people such as Ampere, Ohm, Hertz, James Prescott Joule, James Watt and Michael Faraday instead.

Hmmm ....

Since today is August 14th, they could have put an illustration of Rosebud.


Bonus Google Riffs

Top Ten Cloves: Possible Reasons Google Flu Tracker Didn't Pick Up Swine Flu

Life Imitates Art ... Or, Did Burt Lancaster Invent Google Earth?

Breaking News! Giant Search Engine Downed By GOP and RNC Staffers ...Google Crashes! Besieged With “I’m Feeling Lucky” Searches From White House, Congress ...Amazon, D.C. Novelty Stores Hit With Run On Magic 8-Balls

Top Ten Cloves: Possible Reasons Google Flu Tracker Didn't Pick Up Swine Flu

News Item: Google flu tracker had trouble with latest virus

10. Having to accommodate Michelle Bachmann likely stressed the calculations

9. Coordinates, and program, set to track only a very, very small, very particular section of Palo Alto

8. It was in Beta Mode, Invitation Only

7. Had to throw out thousands of searches, from South Bend, Indiana, wishing Swine Flu on President Obama

6. Got sidetracked, tracking Arlen Specter's defection to Democratic Party

5. Couldn't decide , like it's cool logo, on the color palette for "Swine Flu"

4. An unusually high number of "I'm Feeling Lucky" Swine Flu searches skewed results of program

3. Because of Swine Flu, Google shut down its' bus services, so workers couldn't get in to read results

2. Got confused when they started calling it the "H1N1 virus."

1. Wasted weeks trying to find Swine Flu on Google Earth

Top Ten Cloves: Ways Google Can Provide Better Day Care

News Item: On Day Care, Google Makes a Rare Fumble

10. Out with the "organic, natural" food and in with cheaper McDonald's Happy Meals!

9. Offset cost for parents by renting the Google Day Care kids out as focus groups

8. Make the kids generate revenue - put'em to work on the Google Phone

7. Send the kids out on the grounds of the Google Campus, collecting bugs, and then announce the new "Google Gas" (but only in Beta-Mode, fill-ups by Invite-Only)

6. Resolve Viacom dispute with own content - Start putting a daily "Best of Google Day Care Bloopers" up on YouTube

5. Hire Chuck Norris to run the program - Just his staring at it will make it perform better

4. Cut down on Waiting List and notify parents of acceptance by having them hit the "I'm Feeling Lucky" search bar

3. Weed out any of the toddlers who have been using Google Earth for "pool parties"

2. Sponsor multi-million-dollar contest - Google Day Care Preschoolers vs. John McCain, on using the Internet

1. Public Service - Have them do a group "Not Alex" commercial

Good Post Alert: How Google Got Its Colorful Logo

The Garlic has gotten a lot of mileage with Google (one such post - our first Google riff - is in today's This Date ... On The Garlic), including a good one, on their infamous "I'm Feeling Lucky" bar.

Earlier this week, The Garlic stumbled onto a post (H/T to Good Morning Silicon Valley), on the development, and numerous iterations of the infamous logo

From Wired Magazine's Sonia Zjawinski "How Google Got Its Colorful Logo";

"In just a few short years, Google's logo has become as recognizable as Nike's swoosh and NBC's peacock. Ruth Kedar, the graphic designer who developed the now-famous logo, shows the iterations that led to the instantly recognizable primary colors and Catull typeface that define the Google brand. Kedar met Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page through a mutual friend nine years ago at Stanford University, where she was an assistant professor. Page and Brin, who were having trouble coming up with a logo for their soon-to-launch search engine, asked Kedar to come up with some prototypes. "I had no idea at the time that Google would become as ubiquitous as it is today, or that their success would be of such magnitude," Kedar says.

It's an eight-page image display, with descriptions of each iteration, what was right or wrong about it, some of the changes so infinitesimal, it's like a head-scratching WTF!.

In all, it's an entertaining look at something that has become so engrained in our daily lives, our every minute on the World Wide Web, the logo encompassing the company name, that, much to Larry and Sergey's consternation, has become a verb all over the globe.

Check out "How Google Got Its Colorful Logo"


Bonus Google Riffs

ThinkProgress: Bush says he uses “the Google.”

Google Fires Executive Chef; Caught Searching Recipes On Yahoo, MSN

Stymied By Publishers, Google To Digitize Bazooka Joe Comics

Google Launches Lobbyist; As Usual, In Beta-Mode and By-Invite Only

Top Ten Cloves: Reasons Google Needs A Lobbyist

Google May Come To Terms With Publishers; Will Digitize Cliff Notes Only

Google Begins Talks With White House To Digitize Wiretaps