Does it bother anyone else that the Google Doodle for Hertz’s 155th birthday is not a sine wave? They used half circles, some distorted, to create a sine-wave looking thing, but a true sine wave crosses the x axis at a 45 degree angle. I suppose using the half circle is a cheap way of making it look good, but it is not a sine wave, and as a Math Major, I am outraged.
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz’s birthday marked with Google doodle wave – Telegraph.
5 Comments
w0000t? Someone else actually notices something that “advanced”? I’m AMAZED!
Yes, I immediately was outraged too at that “cheapskate” sine wave they tried to create… and nowadays with technologies such as HTML 5/Canvas, it would really be a no-brainer to create the most advanced TRUE sine-wave animation.
But hey… since when can Google code? They’re a search engine after all ;-)
Google’s lame “sine” waves drove me nuts too. Indeed, the google coders must have slept through that part of their high school physics class (and became computer science majors just to avoid physics altogether in college).
Hertz must be turning over in his grave at, um … 60 Hz.
I also noticed the strange wave. But I was not so annoyed by that, as the continuous distracting movement on the screen. I have seen Google Doodles before that chnage when you hover the mouse over them – that’s OK. The human eye is very good at detecting movement, even in peripheral areas of the retina. Having a doodle that keeps moving I found really really distracting.
I thought that was the number one rule of web site design – ie, don’t have movement that is not triggered by the user. Obviously Google do not understand the web.
Any engineer or anyone with a science background knows at a glance that it’s wrong and that it looks just plain weird, and since Google is celebrating a great scientist the least they could do is get the science right. Using sine waves would be no harder than what they did and would look a lot better.
Yup, this lame drawing is terrible. True sine waves have a beautiful shape and there are so many more interesting things to demo. How about a spectral plot where you click on a spectral line and a suitable sine wave is displayed? Or a ray traveling around a circle, tracing out a sine wave, and a user control to change the frequency. I call for a re-do!