Needles, noodles and nanodes

Goolge has celebrated the work of science fiction author Stanislaw Lem with a doodle inspired by a story in The Cyberiad about two bickering robotic inventors who create a robot that can produce anything beginning with the letter 'n' upon request. The robot brings forth a needle, noodles and nanodes before one of the inventors foolishly asks it to make nothing, and the robot obliges.
The illustrations in the book were apparently by Daniel Mróz, and it's these that inspire the doodle as much as the Lem story.

Google country settings

I'm abroad for a while, using my old Lenny laptop, and doing some Googling this morning, I noticed I was getting results from google.com- not what I wanted as I was looking specifically for UK based advice pages on a certain topic and was seeing US pages. I remembered that I'd been able to set Firefox to use google.co.uk on my other laptop while abroad- fortunately I found the link again. The Mycroft Project has a page that allows you to set Google search in Firefox to get results from just about any country's own Google page.

Bucky balls & browsers

It was the the 25th anniversary of the discovery of fullerenes today and Google marked the occasion with an interactively rotatable fullerene C₆₀ molecule as the second 'o' in their logo.
The animation was done by a large javascript on the Google homepage, which proved very CPU demanding for some users. Hardly surprising as the animation contains 60 points in 3D space, making up 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons with all the connecting lines involved.
Interestingly, Firefox seemed to struggle the most with the animation; Opera and Chrome handled it with less effort.

Firefox CPU usage:


Opera CPU usage:


Chrome CPU usage: