I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses. “Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on May 17, 2013 -
30 comments
Google is celebrating what would have been graphic designer Saul Bass' 93rd birthday with
a Doodle celebrating some of his most famous title sequences. The doodle, set appropriately to
Dave Brubeck's "Unsquare Dance, " pays homage to Bass' visual work on
Psycho,
The Man With The Golden Arm,
Spartacus,
West Side Story,
Vertigo,
North by Northwest,
Anatomy of a Murder, and
Around the World in 80 Days.
posted by troika
on May 8, 2013 -
30 comments
Predicting Google Shutdowns. "In the following essay, I collect data on 350 Google products and look for predictive variables. I find some while modeling shutdown patterns, and make some predictions about future shutdowns. Hopefully the results are interesting, useful, or both."
Gwern exhaustively analyzes Google products past and present with an eye to establishing what's not long for the bitverse. tl;dr?
Results.
posted by mwhybark
on May 4, 2013 -
87 comments
On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural UK at the time and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.
[more inside]
posted by palbo
on Apr 25, 2013 -
40 comments
Postcards From Google Earth:
"I collect Google Earth images. I discovered them by accident, these particularly strange snapshots, where the illusion of a seamless and accurate representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. I was Google Earth-ing, when I noticed that a striking number of buildings looked like they were upside down." [more inside]
posted by Room 641-A
on Apr 6, 2013 -
37 comments
The
Language Council of Sweden has been the semi-official arbiter of the Swedish language since World War II. It monitors "the development of spoken and written Swedish" and publishes a list of new words each year to ensure consistency of spelling and make sure that Swedish is a "complete language, i.e. [is] possible to use in all areas of society." This year, for the first time, the Council has
taken a word off the list:
ogooglebar, which literally meant "ungoogleable" but was defined as "a thing or person that does not produce relevant results when typed into a search engine."
[more inside]
posted by Etrigan
on Mar 26, 2013 -
43 comments
Google Glasses are being tested by tech writers as we speak. But are they a good thing?
The
long awaited Project Glass is
nearly here.
There are articles about them
here,
here, and
here among many others.
But is it a good thing? Questions are being asked both about
safety and about
privacy.
Everything good, bad and ugly about the online world is about to get more intense. Are you ready?
posted by BillW
on Mar 25, 2013 -
218 comments
OMGif! [Wired] "On Tuesday, Google announced via
Google+ that Image Search now has an “Animated” filter. That means that if you’re only searching for animated magic, you need never be bothered with a still image again. Finally that search for
Jennifer Lawrence GIFs from the Academy Awards just got a whole lot easier."
posted by Fizz
on Mar 20, 2013 -
31 comments
We've all seen it. The off-white UAV is seen side on, nose tilted slightly down, a stubby missile caught at the moment of launch beneath it, a blue and grey landscape of treeless mountains behind it. There's no motion blur and none of the markings on the aircraft have been obfuscated. It's a perfect shot. Except for one or two details.
[more inside]
posted by mwhybark
on Mar 19, 2013 -
56 comments
Rebecca Solnit on how Silicon Valley corporations are transforming San Francisco: I weathered the dot-com boom of the late 1990s as an observer, but I sold my apartment to a Google engineer last year and ventured out into both the rental market (for the short term) and home buying market (for the long term) with confidence that my long standing in this city and respectable finances would open a path. That confidence got crushed fast. It turned out that the competition for any apartment in San Francisco was so intense that you had to respond to the listings – all on San Francisco-based Craigslist of course, the classifieds website that whittled away newspaper ad revenue nationally – within a few hours of their posting to receive a reply from the landlord or agency. The listings for both rentals and homes for sale often mentioned their proximity to the Google or Apple bus stops. [more inside]
posted by liketitanic
on Jan 31, 2013 -
143 comments
Google is challenging Facebook by using a controversial tactic: requiring people to use the Google+ social network. The result is that people who create an account to use Gmail, YouTube and other Google services—including the Zagat restaurant-review website—are also being set up with public Google+ pages that can be viewed by anyone online. ... The impetus comes from the top. Google Chief Executive Larry Page has sought more aggressive measures to get people to use Google+, two people familiar with the matter say. ... Some users of Google's services are startled to learn how far the integration can reach.
There's No Avoiding Google+ from the Wall Street Journal
posted by Jasper Friendly Bear
on Jan 2, 2013 -
200 comments
Can autonomous vehicles navigate the law? This year has been full of big news about the progress of self-driving cars. They are currently street legal in three states and Google says that on a given day, they have a dozen autonomous cars on the road. This August, they passed 300,000 driver-hours. In Spain this summer, Volvo drove a convoy of three cars through 200 kilometers of desert highway with just one driver and a police escort. Cadillac's newest models park themselves. The writing, one might think, is on the wall. But objects in the media may be farther off than they appear.
posted by modernnomad
on Dec 14, 2012 -
83 comments
"To the credit of today's social networks, they've brought in hundreds of millions of new participants [...] but they haven't shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they've now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don't realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be."
Anil Dash laments
The Web We Lost, and offers some suggestions for moving forward.
posted by oulipian
on Dec 13, 2012 -
74 comments
