今天的Google logo又变了，2008年6月6号，是什么日子呢？

Google查询了一下，原来西班牙著名画家委拉斯贵支(Diego Velázquez)的生日，关于这个画家，咱们来一起了解一下吧：

委拉斯贵支(June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660)是西班牙的巴洛克式画家，也是西班牙具有贵族威严的绘画巨匠。他出生在塞维利亚，从小就喜欢画画，他的父亲也很能理解他的这份天才，于是就把他送到了画家帕奇邱的门下。到了帕奇邱门下以后的委拉斯贵支不久就和他老师19岁的女儿结婚了。1622年，委拉斯贵支亚以到了马德里。当时19岁的腓力四世和25岁的委拉斯贵支之间有着极亲密的交往，腓力四世每天到委拉斯贵支的画室来观赏。因此委拉斯贵支就乘机为腓力四世画像，在他一生的画作中腓力四世肖像占了大多数。在此期间，鲁本斯作为外交官赴西班牙，很欣赏委拉斯贵支的才能，劝其去意大利学习深造。于是他在29岁那年去了艺术之都意大利。他到了意大利，在威尼斯研究了意大利的绘画。他的宫廷肖像画严谨而精彩，而且充满感情。

今天的Google logo 是委拉斯贵支的名画“宫娥”（Las Meninas (1656, English: The Maids of Honour)）中的场景，大图如下：

Velázquez (or Velásquez), Diego (1599-1660). Spain’s greatest painter was also one of the supreme artists of all time. A master of technique, highly individual in style, Diego Velasquez may have had a greater influence on European art than any other painter.

Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velasquez was born in Seville, Spain, presumably shortly before his baptism on June 6, 1599. His father was of noble Portuguese descent. In his teens he studied art with Francisco Pacheco, whose daughter he married. The young Velasquez once declared, “I would rather be the first painter of common things than second in higher art.” He learned much from studying nature. After his marriage at the age of 19, Velasquez went to Madrid. When he was 24 he painted a portrait of Philip IV, who became his patron.

The artist made two visits to Italy. On his first, in 1629, he copied masterpieces in Venice and Rome. He returned to Italy 20 years later and bought many paintings–by Titian, Tintoretto, and Paolo Veronese–and statuary for the king’s collection.

Except for these journeys Velasquez lived in Madrid as court painter. His paintings include landscapes, mythological and religious subjects, and scenes from common life, called genre pictures. Most of them, however, are portraits of court notables that rank with the portraits painted by Titian and Anthony Van Dyck.

Duties of Velasquez’ royal offices also occupied his time. He was eventually made marshal of the royal household, and as such he was responsible for the royal quarters and for planning ceremonies.

In 1660 Velasquez had charge of his last and greatest ceremony–the wedding of the Infanta Maria Theresa to Louis XIV of France. This was a most elaborate affair. Worn out from these labors, Velasquez contracted a fever from which he died on August 6.

Velasquez was called the “noblest and most commanding man among the artists of his country.” He was a master realist, and no painter has surpassed him in the ability to seize essential features and fix them on canvas with a few broad, sure strokes. “His men and women seem to breathe,” it has been said; “his horses are full of action and his dogs of life.”

Because of Velasquez’ great skill in merging color, light, space, rhythm of line, and mass in such a way that all have equal value, he was known as “the painter’s painter.” Ever since he taught Bartolomé Murillo, Velasquez has directly or indirectly led painters to make original contributions to the development of art. Others who have been noticeably influenced by him are Francisco de Goya, Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet, and James McNeill Whistler. His famous paintings include The Surrender of Breda, an equestrian portrait of Philip IV, The Spinners, The Maids of Honor, Pope Innocent X, Christ at Emmaus, and a portrait of the Infanta Maria Theresa.

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今日的Google logo 主题是：large hadron collider，字面翻译是：大型强子对撞机。

欧洲核子研究中心(CERN)的世界最大型强子对撞机，已于北京时间10日下午3时34分左右正式启动，将第一束质子束流注入对撞机。专家指出，该对撞机正式启动具有里程碑意义，中国将参加相关试验的物理分析。

在瑞士和法国边界地区的地底实验室内，科学家们正式展开了被外界形容为“末日实验”的备受争议的计划。他们启动了全球最大型的强子对撞机(LHC)，把次原子的粒子运行速度加快至接近光速，并将互相撞击，模拟宇宙初开“大爆炸”后的情况。科学家希望借这次实验，有助解开宇宙间部分谜团。但有人担心，今次实验或会制造小型黑洞吞噬地球，令末日论流言四起。

    这项实验在深入地底100米、长达27公里的环型隧道内进行。科学家预计，粒子互相撞击时所产生的温度，比太阳温度还要高10万倍，就好比137亿年前宇宙发生大爆炸时那一剎那的情况。

    The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

Two beams of subatomic particles called ‘hadrons’ – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyse the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC.

There are many theories as to what will result from these collisions, but what’s for sure is that a brave new world of physics will emerge from the new accelerator, as knowledge in particle physics goes on to describe the workings of the Universe. For decades, the Standard Model of particle physics has served physicists well as a means of understanding the fundamental laws of Nature, but it does not tell the whole story. Only experimental data using the higher energies reached by the LHC can push knowledge forward, challenging those who seek confirmation of established knowledge, and those who dare to dream beyond the paradigm.

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Google logo 0604：第一次热气球飞行

找了半天资料，还是没找到关于“第一次热气球飞行”，ms第一次热气球飞行不是今天啊？？

莫名其妙，占个位，有空过来补。最近太忙了……

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1953年人类第一次登上喜马拉雅山脉珠穆拉马峰：5月29日,英国登山队的新西兰人希拉里和印度籍夏尔巴人丹增·诺尔盖两人从南坡首次登上顶峰。

It was Sir Edmund Hillary, who was born in New Zealand, and Tenzing Norgay, a Nepalese Sherpa, who reached the summit first, at 11:30 a.m. on May 29, 1953.

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Obviously, this logo is to commemorate the 125th anniversary of Walter Gropius’ birth. A photo of the great architect will be posted at the bottom of this page, and the following is some information about him: (courtesy to wikipedia)

Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of Walter Adolph Gropius and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber. Gropius married Alma Mahler (1879-1964), widow of Gustav Mahler. Walter and Alma’s daughter, named Manon after Walter’s mother, was born in 1916. When Manon died of polio at age eighteen, composer Alban Berg wrote his Violin Concerto in memory of her (it is inscribed “to the memory of an angel”). Gropius and Alma divorced in 1920. (Alma had by that time established a relationship with Franz Werfel, whom she later married.) In 1923 Gropius married Ise Frank (d. 1983), and they remained together until his death. They adopted Beate Gropius, also known as Ati. Gropius, like his father and great-uncle Martin Gropius before him, was an architect. But all sources agree that Walter Gropius could not draw, and was dependent on collaborators and partner-interpreters all through his career. In school he hired an assistant to complete his homework for him. In 1908 Gropius found employment with the firm of Peter Behrens, one of the first members of the utilitarian school. His fellow employees at this time included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Dietrich Marcks. In 1910 Gropius left the firm of Behrens and together with fellow employee Adolf Meyer established a practice in Berlin. Together they share credit for one of the seminal modernist buildings created during this period, the Faguswerk, Alfeld-an-der-Leine, Germany, a shoe lace factory. The glass curtain walls of this building demonstrated both the modernist principle that form reflect function and Gropius’s concern with providing healthful conditions for the working class. Other works of this early period include the office and factory building for the Werkbund Exhibition (1914) in Cologne.

Gropius’s career was interrupted by the outbreak of the first world war in 1914. Called up immediately as a reservist, Gropius served as a sergeant major at the Western front during the war years, was wounded and almost killed.[1] Ironically the war provided an opportunity which would advance his career during the post war period. Henry van de Velde, the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar was asked to step down in 1915 due to his Belgian nationality. His recommendation of Gropius to succeed him led eventually to Gropius’s appointment as master of the school in 1919. It was this academy which Gropius transformed into the world famous Bauhaus, attracting a faculty which included Paul Klee, Johannes Itten, Josef Albers, Herbet Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy, Otto Bartning and Wassily Kandinsky. Students were taught to use modern and innovative materials and mass-produced fittings, often originally intended for industrial settings, to create original furniture and buildings.

Also in 1919, Gropius was involved in the Glass Chain utopian expressionist correspondence under the pseudonym ‘Mass’. Usually more notable for his functionalist approach, the “Monument to the March Dead”, designed in 1919 and executed in 1920, indicates that expressionism was an influence on him at that time.

In 1923, Gropius aided by Gareth Steele, designed his famous door handles, now considered an icon of 20th century design and often listed as one of the most influential designs to emerge from the Bauhaus. He also designed large scale housing projects in Berlin, Karlsruhe and Dessau from 1926-32 that were major contributions to the New Objectivity movement.

With the help of the English architect Maxwell Fry, Gropius was able to get out of Germany in 1934, on the pretext of making a temporary visit to Britain. He lived and worked in Britain, as part of the Isokon group with Fry and others and then, in 1937, moved on to the United States. The house he built for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, was influential in bringing International Modernism to the US but Gropius disliked the term: “I made it a point to absorb into my own conception those features of the New England architectural tradition that I found still alive and adequate” (see [1]).

Gropius and his Bauhaus protégé Marcel Breuer both moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and collaborate on the company-town Aluminum City Terrace project in New Kensington, Pennsylvania, before their professional split. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

In 1945, Gropius founded The Architects’ Collaborative (TAC) based in Cambridge with a group of younger architects. The original partners included Norman C. Fletcher, Jean B. Fletcher, John C. Harkness, Sarah P. Harkness, Robert S. MacMillan, Louis A. MacMillen, and Benjamin C. Thompson. TAC would become one of the most well-known and respected architectural firms in the world. TAC went bankrupt in 1995.

Gropius died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts, aged 86. Today, he is remembered not only by his various buildings but also by the district of Gropiusstadt in Berlin.

In the early 1990s, a series of books entitled The Walter Gropius Archive was published covering his entire architectural career.

阅读全文…

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      大家都知道，Google logo人性化的百变也是它独特的吸引人的地方。每逢一些特殊日子，Google都会依据既有的Logo做变化，产生既有应景的logo。今天发现Google.com换成了这样一幅具有光泽感，速度感的图片。鼠标悬停发现这样的label：invention of the first laser。

      马上上网Google一下，却发现中文网页介绍激光的发明的很少，只有少的可怜的信息。

1960年5月16日，在美国加利福尼亚的休斯空军试验室里，一束激光由红宝石棒中发出，虽然它仅持续了三亿分之一秒，然而它却标志着人类文明史上一个新时代的来临。

      最后在一个叫做laserfocusword的网站上找到了更详细一点的信息。激光的发明人叫做Theodore (Ted) H. Maiman，而他已经在2007年的5月5号与世长辞了。下面是关于他的一些生平资料，同学们可以自己看一下，在心里默默的缅怀一下这位伟大科学家：

    Maiman was born in 1927 and learned electronics from his father, Abe, an electrical engineer for the American Telephone & Telegraph Corporation (AT&T). He began his academic studies at the University of Colorado and earned a B.S. degree in engineering physics in 1949. Two years later he attended Stanford University and obtained a master’s degree in electrical engineering followed by a doctorate in physics in 1955. At Stanford, Maiman studied under the theoretician Willis Lamb, who received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1955, months after Maiman received his doctorate.

    In 1960 Maiman invented the first functioning laser while working at Hughes Aircraft Company. Hughes’s managers had previously assigned Maiman to build a more practical version of the maser using microwave emission from chromium atoms in synthetic ruby crystals. Maiman created a new maser design that eliminated the external magnets in favor of a magnet inside the Dewar, thereby reducing the weight from 5,000 to 25 pounds. In 1962 Maiman established his own enterprise, Korad Corporation, which undertook the development and manufacture of lasers. In 1968, after selling the company to Union Carbide Corporation, Maiman founded Maiman Associates. From 1976 to 1983, Maiman served as vice president of advanced technology at TRW (now Northrop Grumman), where this photo was taken in 1985 to mark the 25th anniversary of his invention of the first working laser. He was most recently a director of Control Laser Corporation and a member of the advisory board of Industrial Research Magazine.

    Maiman is the author of the basic patent on the ruby laser and a number of patents on masers, lasers, laser displays, optical scanning, and modulation. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize and was given membership in both National Academies of Science and Engineers. He was also a recipient of 1983/1984 Physics Prize, the same year he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Three years later he became laureate of the prestigious Japan Prize, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. He was a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the Optical Society of America, and the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.

P.S.: 中国大陆直接访问www.google.com会被自动转向到www.google.cn而看不到Google百变的logo，大家可以在Google.cn主页点击页面右下方的Google.com in English来进入google英文主页。

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