April 1, 2010
Google funniest joke of the year (that I’ve noticed so far)
I just noticed a subtle and really funny Google joke. Look at where on the search results page it tells you how long the search took. They’re screwing around with the units of time (and in some cases substituting actual measures of speed). So far I’ve noticed figures in units of:
- Centibeats
- Microfortnights
- Microweeks
- Nanocenturies
- “The velocity of an unladen swallow”
- Planck times
- Shakes of a lamb’s tail
- Warp (Star Trek, of course)
- Centons (Battlestar Galactica)
- Parsecs (a unit of time in Star Wars Episode IV 🙂 )
- Jiffies
- Skidoo (23.00 skidoo, to be precise)
- Gigawatts (pretty hard to explain how that’s a unit of time or velocity)
- Epochs (one precise figure was 1.25e-15 epochs)
- Hertz
- Femtogalactic years
I haven’t tried to check or estimate the conversion factors used.
Related links
- 2010 April Fool’s Day highlights
- My recent roundup of past years’ April Fool’s highlights
- A companion roundup of other, even funnier pranks
- My alternative to pranks: April No-Fooling Day
- Google Operating System with more on Google’s 2010 April Fool’s jokes.
Comments
Leave a Reply