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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 8: "ASCII Art." Several tech blogs noted today that if you enter "ascii art" into the Google search engine, you'll find an ASCII representation of Google's logo next to the results. ASCII art is a graphic-design technique that uses only the symbols and characters available on your computer keyboard to create images. The most well-known example is probably the truck made out of @ symbols.
No. 24: "death risk rankings." Carnegie Mellon researchers launched a new Web site today that compiles public data from the United States and Europe to compare mortality risks. Visitors to the site can compare the risk of dying as a 22-year-old female in New Jersey, for example, versus the risk of dying as a 22-year-old female in France. (The results indicate it's a good time to move to Europe.) They found that while men have a much higher annual death risk than women, women in their 30s and 40s have a much higher risk of getting cancer than men. Visit Deathriskrankings.com to find out your chances of dying.
No. 98: "Pentacene." This month's issue of Science (out today) contains the first published image of individual atoms within a molecule. IBM scientists were able to capture the image by using an atomic force microscope. The molecule they chose to examine, Pentacene, is a crystal structure known for its properties as an organic semiconductor. Watch a video interview with the scientists here.
Photograph of ASCII art courtesy Porsche997SBS at Wikipedia Commons.
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This morning, Buzz Aldrin and I got to pretend we were on the moon. The astronaut was in Washington for the unveiling of the new-and-improved Google Moon, a digital lunar model with the same fluid navigation as Google Earth. The guest of honor, however, didn’t stay on message. While he would “love to talk about Google and Google Moon,” Aldrin said, he felt obliged to make the case for heading to Mars, a point he emphasized by brandishing what appeared to be printouts of a PowerPoint presentation.
Back to Google Moon: Armchair astronauts can dip down to the surface, tip the camera to the horizon, and admire the topography. To help those of us who are not intimately familiar with lunar neighborhoods, Google Moon is indexed with the sites of the moon landings, the treks of various rovers, and a variety of geological landmarks. As you mosey along, you might chance upon a 3-D rendering of a lunar lander or run into a few astronauts. (They look like Lego men.)
The product, which you can download as part of Google Earth 5.0, is certainly fun to play around with, even if the scenery is a tad barren and monochromatic. On one point, however, I was sorely disappointed: Google cannot fly you to the moon. Presently, it can only teleport you there.
The only way you can get to the moon as of now is to select it from a dropdown menu within Google Earth. (Mars, rendered in much less detail, is also available.) There is no direct flight from the porch of your childhood home to the Paracelsus crater. This is a shame, because Google Earth’s killer feature isn’t its imagery. It’s the mesmerizing navigation—the fact that you can be wandering through downtown Tulsa, type in “Giza Pyramid,” and lift into space to take a giant leap across the ocean.
Fortunately, Google does want us to soar through space eventually. Brian McClendon, who is in charge of most of Google’s geography products, told me it’s a feature they’d like to implement once all the databases can be squared with one another. It seems as if it should be doable. We did put a man on the moon.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 10 a.m.)
No. 1: "Obama Looking at Girl"; No. 2: "Obama Checking out girl"; No. 3: "Mayra Tavares"; and No. 7: "Tail to the chief." You wouldn't think a wire photo of world leaders at the G8 summit would own the top three Google Trends spots. But the Drudge Report, TMZ, and other sites yesterday picked up on a Reuters shot in which President Obama and French President Nicolas Sarkozy appear to be ... appreciating certain assets of Mayra Tavares, a 17-year-old Brazilian delegate to the summit. Since then, the photo has been making the rounds across the web. Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times claims, after video review, that it was Sarkozy, not Obama, who was doing the real ogling.
No. 20: "Edgar Martins"; No. 21: "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." The New York Times on Wednesday removed photos from its Web site after it was revealed that the photos had been digitally manipulated. Metafilter commenters were the first to uncover the manipulation, and the animated simulation of the alteration is striking. The work of Edgar Martins, the photographer responsible for the images, is now being rigorously examined for other instances of manipulation. The Times's "Lens" blog promises Martin will tell his side of the story soon.
No. 45: "Nikola Tesla Inventions"; No. 53 "Nikola Tesla Death Ray." Google has decided to go all out in celebration of the 153rd birthday of the pioneer scientist whose experiments formed the basis for modern electric power. The Google logo today features purple sparks and electricity leaping from the letter G, which is drawn in the shape of his Tesla coil transformer. This follows the April celebration of Samuel Morse's birthday with a Morse code Google logo.
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If we are what we Google, then Google Hot Trends—an hourly rundown of search terms "that experience sudden surges in popularity"—is the Web's best cultural barometer. Here's a sampling of today's top searches. (Rankings on Hot Trends list current as of 9 a.m.)
No. 4: "google operating system." A day after finally taking Gmail out of beta, Google announced its newest project, the Chrome Operating System. Chrome OS (not to be confused with the Google browser of the same name), will be targeted at "people who spend most of their time on the web," according to Google's official blog. Since this statement describes an increasing number of mainstream computer users, the Google system could end up in direct competition with Windows: "The Internet is Everything," writes TechCrunch.com's Michael Arrington, "all the OS has to do is boot the damn computer."
No. 28: "sevin nyne." "civil conspiracy" and "theft of trade secrets" could be the newest addition to Lindsay Lohan's impressive rap sheet: The 23-year-old embodiment of the phrase "hot mess" is being sued by a Florida chemist for allegedly filching her artificial tanner formula and passing it off as her own designer line, Sevin Nyne. The product's provenance might not be its biggest problem if this Amazon review is accurate: "It turned me orange. Enough said."
No. 68: "4chan down." 4chan.org, possibly the fourth-largest bulletin board on the Internet, has been brought down by a sustained denial of service (DoS) attack. It's just desserts for the site, probably best known as the unruly spawning ground of some of the Web's oddest pranks: In May, 4chan users bombarded Youtube with porn, and they were probably to blame when "#gorillapenis" appeared at the top of the Twitter trends list on Sunday. (An unrelated DoS attack linked to North Korean hackers was launched yesterday against the Washington Post.)
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When word of Michael Jackson's death first spread, Google News went on the defensive. CNET is reporting that Google initially interpreted the tremendous spike in Jackson queries on Thursday as evidence of nefarious web sabotage and, in response, did the search-engine equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and singing "la-la-la" (or "ma-ma-se, ma-ma-sa, ma-ma-coo-sa"): Many users who searched for Jackson news around 3 p.m. received an error message that read, "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now."
Slate's Jody Rosen is among those who have remarked that, with Jackson's death, the "monoculture," long on the wane, enjoyed one (final?) astounding spasm: For a few days, everyone was talking about, reading about, and listening to one man. The Google News story—along with stats demonstrating that Jackson drew in Yahoo's biggest single-day audience ever (16.4 million unique visitors, surpassing the previous record of 15.1 million set on election day, 2008) and dwarfed Iran and swine-flu posts on Twitter—raises a related question about what happens when the supposed agents of the monoculture's fragmentation—Google searches, Twitter feeds, Facebook status updates, MP3 blogs, etc.—all collude to resuscitate it. With the possible exception of Obama's win, Jackson's death is the most significant culturequake of the 2.0 era (which missed 9/11, Kurt Cobain's suicide, and the O.J. chase). And so it's not just that, for a spell, everyone was talking about the same thing again. Isn't it also the case that more people were talking about the same thing than was ever possible before?
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