A bug on Google search...Kafka's cockroach

"Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis becomes Google doodle"

Anniversary of author's birth honoured with image from classic short story

by

Liz Bury
    
July 3rd, 2013

guardian.co.uk

Did you feel OK when you woke up this morning? Spare a thought for Gregor Samsa, that most unlucky of literary heroes. "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed … "
 
Thus Franz Kafka opens one of the most resonant stories of 20th-century literature, about an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an bug of indeterminate kind – an insect, a beetle, a cockroach – the original German "ungeheueren Ungeziefer" leaves his exact species ambiguous. (There has been much debate about this point over the years).

This nightmarish image of the human-insect lodged in our imaginations is now a Google doodle marking the 130th anniversary of Kafka's birth on July 3 1883 - but so far, in a machination worthy of the master himself, in almost all of the world except for the UK.

Why should this be? Is it that the powers-that-be at the global search engine don't feel he has universal appeal, or that he's too weird and European for British readers? That conclusion would seem odd, as Kafka was a master at finding universal metaphors that have grown ever more powerful with time.

And why, anyway, has Google chosen Metamorphosis rather than The Castle or The Trial to represent the master? John Banville would probably have opted for the "great and terrible novel of guilt, judgment and retribution", The Trial, while Guardian blogger William Burrows is not the only reader to believe that The Castle is Kafka at his most beautiful and most emotional. "The Trial and Metamorphosis are full of their own depth, and their own complicated sadness, but they don't strike the heart with the same poignancy as Kafka's final, unfathomable novel," he wrote.

Perhaps it's the beauty of beetles that was the draw, or maybe it's because the transformation of poor Gregor Samsa illustrates more clearly than any other of Kafka's images John Banville's view that "Kafka's work is a perfect illustration of Freud's conception of the uncanny as the familiar re-presented to us in unfamiliar guise".

Either way, Google's nod to the great Czech mythmaker seems appropriate in the creepy-crawly world of modern surveillance, where whistle-blowers Edward Snowden and Julian Assange are trapped in a no-way-out nightmare reminiscent of The Trial.

And what would Kafka, the great miserabilist, have made of his sudden elevation? Judging by one diary entry for 1910, not much. "Today," he wrote, "I do not even dare to reproach myself. Shouted into this empty day, it would have a disgusting echo."

Metamorphosis [audio presentation]...

 
Kafka again

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Niels Bohr [Wikipedia]

Niels Bohr Quotes

The Niels Bohr Library & Archives at the American Institute of Physics


Ge Ge--Niels Bohr's Chinese Translator

Nicolas Steno and a Google Doodle

"Nicolas Steno, 17th century myth buster, gets Google Doodle"

January 11th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Nicolas Steno, recipient of a Google Doodle on Wednesday, was a 17th century brainiac with the type of weird genius that led to his discovery of the human salivary duct and a made him a pioneer in geology. But in the end, he threw it all over for God.

It was Steno, born this day in 1638, who slapped his forehead and said: "Hey, you can see history in these layered rocks." That simple yet profound observation was at the core of a 1669 treatise with a long and windy name: "The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno's Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid."

Because of "Prodromus," many now see Steno as the "father of geology," according to James Aber, geology professor at Kansas' Emporia State University. But Steno's geology career lasted all of three years. And at the time, his contemporaries pooh-poohed him.

Steno was born in Copenhagen into a family of well-to-do Lutheran goldsmiths. His later fame was perhaps fated: "Sten" in Danish is "rock." So his surname (Stensen, to the Danes) means "Son of Rocky," Aber notes.

Steno started out studying medicine, which took him to Amsterdam for a study of human anatomy. There, the Son of Rocky had his first eureka moment when he discovered the parotid salivary duct -- also called the Stensen's duct. Obviously. At least he was appreciated as a physician -- he was appointed personal doctor to Grand Duke Ferdinand II in 1665.

For reasons not quite clear, the duke requested in 1666 that Steno dissect the head of a large shark.

The good doctor concluded that shark teeth were identical to "glossopetrae" found in rocks.

To put this in perspective, glossopetrae -- fossilized shark teeth -- were at one time believed to have magical properties. In the Middle Ages, it was thought they were tongues of serpents that Saint Paul had turned to stone while visiting the islands of Malta. Thus they were called glossopetrae or "tongue stones." Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder (AD 23-79) thought they fell from the sky during lunar eclipses.

From sharks' teeth, Steno went on to other solid objects found inside other solid objects -- i.e. a layer of rock. His reasoning came to be known as "Steno's law of superposition," according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology -- layers of rock are arranged in a time sequence from oldest to youngest with youngest on the top "unless later processes disturb this arrangement."

After making such scientific observations -- at the time underappreciated -- Steno got religion.

He became Roman Catholic in 1667 and tossed aside science. In 1675, he became a priest and in 1677 a bishop. He was apostolic vicar of northern Germany and Scandinavia and spent the remainder of his life -- which wasn't that long -- doing missionary work. He died at age 48.

Nicolaus Steno [Wikipedia]

The Prodromus of Nicolaus Steno's Dissertation Concerning a Solid Body Enclosed by Process of Nature Within a Solid

Google Doodle for Robert Noyce

"Robert Noyce, superstar of Silicon Valley, gets a Google Doodle"

December 12th, 2011

Los Angeles Times

Robert Noyce -- called a modern-day Thomas Edison in his 1990 obituary in the Los Angeles Times -- was smart, yes. The co-inventor of the microchip also was charming, good-looking and lucky that as a youth his penchant for invention didn't end with him breaking his neck.

Noyce has been honored with a Google Doodle on the 84th anniversary of his birth. For a man who invented something so small, Noyce dreamed big from an early age.

The son of a preacher and a preacher's daughter, Noyce at 13 built a box kite with his brother that he rode off the roof of a barn. He and the kite hit the ground. Then the brothers hooked the kite to the back bumper of a neighbor's car and, with the neighbor driving, managed to glide, getting the contraption up to 12 feet in the air.

Noyce also used an engine from an old washing machine and a propeller to amp up his sled.

When the Iowa native was attending Grinnell College, he stirred things up, setting off fireworks and tipping outhouses, but he really got in trouble when he and another student stole a 25-pound pig so they could have a luau with friends, according to author Tom Wolfe. They put an apple in the pig's mouth, roasted it, and there was a feast. The farmer, not pleased, brought criminal charges. In the end, Noyce weathered a one-semester suspension.

Still, things just seemed to go Noyce's way.

From Wolfe's "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on the Silicon Valley":

With his strong face, his athlete's build, and the Gary Cooper manner, Bob Noyce projected what psychologists call the halo effect. People with the halo effect seem to know exactly what they're doing and moreover make you want to admire them for it. They make you see the halos over their heads.

Noyce, born Dec. 12, 1927, in Burlington, Iowa, had such a fast-moving brain that his friends were said to have called him "Rapid Robert." By the end of his life, he held 16 patents on semiconductor methods, devices and structures. He co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, leaving it to co-found Intel in 1968.

His contribution to the integrated circuit is arguably his greatest work.

Microchips are interconnected electronic components etched or imprinted onto a tiny chip of semiconducting material, i.e. silicon. The microchip affected the design of all computers, shrinking the size of electronics and the cost of making them.

Noyce and Jack Kilby, who is credited as co-inventor of the integrated circuit, worked separately on the idea in 1958 and '59 and received separate patents. After several years of legal battle, Texas Instruments, Kilby's employer, and Fairchild Semiconductor agreed to cross-license their technologies.

In February 1990, four months before Noyce died at age 62 of a heart attack, he and Kilby were honored by President George H.W. Bush for their invention. It is "unimaginable to believe we could ever live without" integrated circuits, Bush said. "The microchip ... helped America change the world."


The nerd and entrepreneur

"Doodle" for Halley

"Edmond Halley's birthday celebrated by Google doodle"

Google marks 335th birthday of astronomer and mathematician who accurately predicted return of comet later named after him

by

Cherry Wilson

November 7th, 2011

guardian.co.uk

English astronomer and mathematician Edmond Halley has been given the Google Doodle seal of approval to mark his 335th birthday.

Google artists have recreated a logo depicting planets and rockets to celebrate the life of the man who was the first to calculate the orbit of the comet later named after him.

London-born Halley, a graduate of Queen's College, Oxford, dedicated most of his life to astronomy and compiled a catalogue charting the location of stars in the southern hemisphere that was the first to contain telescopically determined locations.

In 1705, he published 'A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets' in which he depicted the parabolic orbits of 24 comets that had been observed from 1337 to 1698.

In his dossier, he showed that the three historic comets of 1531, 1607 and 1682 were so similar that they must be the same comet and accurately predicted it would return in 1758. It is now known as Halley's comet.

In 1720, Halley succeeded John Flamsteed to become the second appointed Astronomer Royal in Greenwich, a position which he held until his death on 14 January 1742.

He was married to Mary Tooke and the couple had three children.

Edmond Halley [Wikipedia]

Other Google doodles...

Charles Robert Darwin's birthday...Google style