Heinrich Rudolf Hertz Google Doodle Update

Google Doodle Update: Heinrich Rudolf Hertz

Today it is techie day at the Google Doodle Graphics Factory. In honor of Heinrich Rudolf Hertz Google changed its logo to a frequency wave. This is part of the discoveries Heinrich Rudolf Hertz discovered. At the time of his discoveries he did not think much of his own work.

Yet still today his name is synonymous with some of the most important technologies of our time.

When I first opened Google this morning and I saw the Radio frequencies and the name Heinrich Rudolf Hertz I had no idea who Heinrich Rudolf Hertz is. Yet without knowing his name I have talked about his discoveries and inventions millions of times. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz is synonymous with terms of electrical frequencies and his surname is the naming convention for electrical frequencies: Hertz as in Kilohertz (kHz) and Megahertz (MHz).

Christian Klüber – I’m afraid it wasn’t a “techie” who designed this doodle – the curve is not a sinus curve but just a number of halfcircles patched together by somebody who had not even a high school level understanding of physics.

Seeing this, Hertz would probably start crying…

Christian Klüber – Honor? Yeah. But it’s a bit like inventing the wheel, and then being commemorated using an hexagonal logo…

Alexandre Fernandes – Really strange. I thought they modulated his name or something ( Google, for example), but worths the honor.

Victor Zamanian – Yeah, except not as extreme. Geez, I hope Hertz himself wouldn’t be so nit-picking that he would feel insulted by this. If so, I would have little respect for him.

Victor Zamanian – And then he links to Wikipedia. ^^

Guys, it’s art. The purpose of the doodle is not meant to be accurate, it’s meant to be artistic. Can we, as academics/scientists/engineers drop the stick-up-our-ass attitude and just enjoy the occasion? Never mind frequencies and z-transforms and Fourier-transforms and all that jazz. It’s a piece of art that looks kind of like a wave function but isn’t really one. Deal with it.

sarif sorkar – thanks

Hunter Larco – clearly this “wave” is a representation of google’s logo. If you look carefully you can see it

Henrik Blitger – Talking about no “techie” desgning the doodle. It was probably meant to say megahertz but it is actually saying milihertz. That’s a pretty low frequency 🙂

Thomas P. – +Victor Zamanian , There’s is absolutely no doubt that the Doodle falls under the art category (and I don’t think anyone would deny that) The problem is that casual Google users (like humans are most) don’t generally make any attempt to drill into information served “in-their-face” (unless the source is well known as being untrustworthy to them, – and Google is generally not know as untrustworthy) . The human brain does however tend to pick up pieces of information – and so, … Google is in effect aiding in building bogus/crap/false-knowledge into the population of the world by their insinuating Doodle(s) The problem is that facts accumulate, and the more people accumulating same set of bogus facts (and possibly also making same deductions, and thus constructing more “facts”) , the more screwed the world is going to get.

In that respect, then Google is in a somewhat unique position (by emitting information on truly global scale & reach) to either making good or the opposite (by laziness/ignorance) An example from the real world of bogus common knowledge having spread through media (and likely also subsequent mouth-to-mouth … though not really directly coupled to Google ) is the word “bandwidth”. Many (most?) people think that “bandwidth” is alias of “speed” when talking about technical digital communication channels (like manifested in their modem/router/NIC) … It’s actually gone so bad, that even some manufacturers of network equipment is nowadays using the term “bandwidth” to mean raw channel capacity in their technical specifications Why/How did it come to this(?): It’s certainly not because “bandwidth” is a shorter or a generally more familiar word than the word “speed”. I’d say that the explanation is extremely likely found by observing the terms used by media (newspapers, magazines, advertisers, …).
… (semi-off-topic: it’s actually a bit of a deja vue: When analogue modems ruled the world, then there was a long period of time where modems were sold as being e.g. “14.4 kBAUD” or “28.8k BAUD” )

Victor Zamanian – +Thomas P. Okay. So what false knowledge do you consider today’s Google Doodle to perpetuate? That all signals look like a bunch of connected semi-circles? Like I said, this is art. The purpose of art is not necessarily to educate, nor to spread facts in general. Its purpose might even be to provoke! Which, if it were so in this case, it would’ve done quite splendidly for those who are apparently missing the point.

I wouldn’t say that the problem is that media is using the terms incorrectly. I would say that the problem is that the people who talk about these things withthe media are using terms that reference things that are not even in the vocabulary of the people in media. They have no idea of what “bands” we are talking about when we are talking about their width. They have no idea of what is actually being sent through the “tubes”. They just don’t know. We need to, rather, find words/units that make sense to the average person rather than chastise them for using our technical jargon incorrectly. Such was probably the case when truncating the “BAUD” from “28.8k BAUD”, where only a magnitude is left.When I was in high school and my friends were comparing Internet connection speeds, they were talking about their speeds in terms of minutes required to download a ~700 MiB feature film. People need to convert technical jargon into practical and meaningful things, so they attribute them to such things, naturally. We will likely never see the day when all technical jargon is used correctly. All we can do is to educate those who are interested, and leave everyone else alone to read up on Wikipedia or something. Most importantly, don’t go on a rage about it. :PPS: I’m not really used to your unusual style of editing. Are all those long chunks of italicized text quotes or just you being very emphatic during long sentences? It kind of looks a little bit like you are whispering. 🙂