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

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Top Ten Cloves: Things About New Google Chrome Operating System

News Item: Google developing a PC operating system that would compete with Windows

10. Based on one specific inquiry, Google Chrome OS will work in Argentina

9. Google tried to develop Sarah Palin version, but the OS kept quitting on them

8. May be a delay, in getting your computer to "invite" you to use operating system

7. Other users of Google Chrome OS can use Google Earth to read your computer screen

6. Google Chrome OS will be Twitter-Friendly, so Gmail on it limited to 140 characters, per email

5. Some super application is bound to make its way into the vernacular - "Can suck the chrome off a Google Operating System"

4. Google Chrome OS is so promising, Senator John Ensign's mother is going to buy it, and give to his ex-mistress as a gift

3. With built-in Google Flu Tracker, Chrome OS let's you know when you are sick

2. New feature on boot-up: "I'm Feeling Lucky"

1. To gain market-share, Google issuing a special edition Michael Jackson Chrome OS, that will run endlessly, and come with automated Diprivan dispenser


Bonus Links

Elise Ackerman: Google's Chrome OS a direct shot across Microsoft's bow

Michael Arrington - Google Chrome: Redefining The Operating System

Joe Trippi: Google announces netbook OS. What next?

MG Siegler: Google Drops A Nuclear Bomb On Microsoft. And It’s Made of Chrome

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It's Not Global Warming, It's Google Warming!

In the "Now, What Do We Have To Worry About?" Department;

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches

Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.

Holy Hot Search Bar, Batman!

I'm destroying the planet, just for my searching for discounted lambs wool sweaters!

While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon. “A Google search has a definite environmental impact.”

[Snip]

Google is secretive about its energy consumption and carbon footprint. It also refuses to divulge the locations of its data centres. However, with more than 200m internet searches estimated globally daily, the electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emissions caused by computers and the internet is provoking concern. A recent report by Gartner, the industry analysts, said the global IT industry generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines - about 2% of global CO2 emissions. “Data centres are among the most energy-intensive facilities imaginable,” said Evan Mills, a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Banks of servers storing billions of web pages require power.

[Snip]

Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, has calculated that maintaining a character (known as an avatar) in the Second Life virtual reality game, requires 1,752 kilowatt hours of electricity per year. That is almost as much used by the average Brazilian.

“It’s not an unreasonable comparison,” said Liam Newcombe, an expert on data centres at the British Computer Society. “It tells us how much energy westerners use on entertainment versus the energy poverty in some countries.”

Hmmm ... Perhaps the first volley in what will be an epic battle down the road, "the colonisation of real space by virtual space"?

Okay folks, this means you have to cut down on your searches for Jennifer Lopez's butt, or Carmen Electra, and you can wait to see the newspapers to find out the score, or latest news, from Manchester United.

And solar power your tea ...

We've got average Brazilians to save!


Bonus Google Riffs

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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

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