On a midday stroll through Park City, Utah, you decide to turn onto the quaint-sounding Deer Valley Drive. You see this:

If you think you should turn back, you are not the intrepid Lauren Rosenberg. Armed with a Blackberry and Google Maps, she marched on, and could not believe when Patrick Harwood struck her with his car. According to Search Engine Land, which first broke the story, Rosenberg is now suing both Harwood and Google.

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Expletives and MIDI music rose from office cubicles this past Friday: Pac-Man had returned.

On May 21, Google replaced its usual blue, yellow, red, and green title with what the company calls a “doodle.”  But unlike previous replacements, which have celebrated everything from Pi day to Norman Rockwell’s birthday, for Pac-Man’s special day (the 30th Anniversary of the game’s Japan release) Google pulled out the big guns, er, ghost-eaters.

This time, the doodle was an animated and playable version of the 1980s Namco video game, complete with our pie-shaped hero and his multicolored ghost foes: Blinky (red), Pinky (pink), Inky (cyan), and Clyde (orange).

But some kill-joys complain that Friday’s Pac-Man play hindered productivity, and set out to determine just how much money had been frittered away as employees avoided their work.

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Just how fast is Google’s Web browser, Chrome? According to a new video from these absurd and talented Google people, this is how fast:

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What’s the best way to get the attention of Google, so that the wonder-company will choose to rig your town for experimental high-speed internet? Some people think that shameless groveling might do the trick.

That must be why Topeka, Kansas changed its name to “Google” for a month; the city hopes it will be chosen as a test site for Google’s new fiber-optic network, which would give Topeka residents Internet speeds 100 times faster than what average Americans have.

On Monday, the Mayor of Topeka announced that the city shall, henceforth, be referred to as Google, Kansas, through the month of March. Google is accepting entries from communities looking for an Internet upgrade till March 26th, after which it will decide which communities will get a bump up.

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In 2008, writer Nicholas Carr worried in The Atlantic that the search engine Google and the easy availability of information on the internet is making our brains lazy–and rendering humans stupid. He wrote that the net was destroying his capacity for concentration and contemplation, adding, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

DISCOVER’s own Carl Zimmer responded by taking the opposite stance, and declaring that Google is making us smarter. He argued that humans are “natural born cyborgs” and the internet is our “giant extended mind.” He wrote that there was “nothing unnatural about relying on the internet—Google and all—for information…. Nor is there anything bad about our brains’ being altered by these new technologies, any more than there is something bad about a monkey’s brain changing as it learns how to play with a rake.”

Now, a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project agrees with Zimmer; it found that Google is indeed making us smarter by allowing us to make better choices. More than 76 percent of the 895 experts polled said Nicholas Carr was wrong in thinking that Google made us stupid.

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As with tracking calories and losing weight, people who track their energy use are the most likely to make changes in their lifestyle and reduce consumption—as we saw with digital wall meters, which helped homeowners dramatically cut their use.

Now you can watch your energy use anywhere you go: All you need to do is purchase the energy monitoring device, TED 5000 for $200 to $300, and then download Google’s PowerMeter for free to start monitoring your progress. Some of Google’s employees have already tested it out and have said good things.

Eweek Europe reports:

According to Energy Inc, the TED 5000 is specifically designed to provide energy information to consumers rather than being a tool for utility to improve their margins. “Smart meters are designed primarily for the electric utility industry so they can better manage the supply-and-demand of electricity. TED is designed specifically for the consumer, so that one can better manage the use and costs of electricity. TED puts you in charge,” the company states.

Users can view their energy use daily on their personal iGoogle homepage or directly on their cell phones, and some people have already reported a 15 percent use reduction. In addition to monitoring, the device offers advice on how to cut carbon use. And, if saving money on energy isn’t enough of a motivator, Google thinks social competition just might be: PowerMeter also allows you to compare your results with your friends’.

Unlike Apple’s relationship with AT&T, Google doesn’t intend to keep the partnership limited to TED. Other utilities may soon roll out energy devices soon.

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Image: Google

There’s no question technology is changing religious practices: You can Twitter prayers from home now, and even have them printed out and posted on Jerusalem’s Western Wall. And in the pre-computer era, it took years to decipher many ancient prayer texts. Leave it to Israeli researchers to create a computer algorithm that can read texts that were once illegible since the words have faded or been written over.

Just as forensic software deciphers fingerprints, this new algorithm pieces together written words—work usually reserved for historians and liturgists. The computer can read individual letters and identify handwriting styles in documents that have faded. Reuters reports:

The computer works with digital copies of the texts, assigning number values to each pixel of writing depending on how dark it is. It separates the writing from the background and then identifies individual lines, letters and words.

It also analyzes the handwriting and writing style, so it can “fill in the blanks” of smeared or faded characters that are otherwise indiscernible, Ben-Gurion of the University of the Negev said.

And the program only gets smarter as it begins to recognize the patterns in the writing and learns to guess what the missing words are.

Although ancient Hebrew texts are the only subjects tested so far, the researchers claim that the software is indeed multilingual.

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Image: flickr/ ramikey

When TMZ broke the news yesterday that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital for cardiac arrest, rumors about the King of Pop’s fate flooded Twitter. Sure enough, the dreaded (and beloved) fail whale soon began to appear, when the 66,500 tweets about Michael crashed the micro-blogging site’s servers.

Millions of people also turned to Google, searching for “Michael Jackson” to find out the latest on the singer’s health. The BBC reported that Google initially thought it was under attack, because the Web slowed down so drastically when the news broke:

Millions of people who Googled the star’s name were greeted with an error page rather than a list of results.

It warned users “your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application”.

Other mainstream media sites including AOL, CBS, and CNN all needed additional time to load as well. As for us here at DISCOVER…well, we’re sworn to secrecy.

Image: flickr/ Jason Edmonds

Talk about sticking to your mantra. Google—overlord of the Internet, juggernaut of all data crunchers, right hand of the god of algorithms—is doing a little digging into human resources. Specifically, the company is worried about brain drain, particularly in the wake of several top executives announcing their departure. And given that the Web giant spends a pretty penny on hiring and training just the right group of geniuses to man its world-controlling desks, a mass exodus could dent its status as the Master of All Web Innovation.

So what did management do to determine which bright minds were most likely to give notice? They created an algorithm. Performance reviews, pay raises, promotion histories, and other data on its 20,000 employees were crunched into yet another mathematical formula, which reportedly spat out the names of who was most likely to quit.

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•Villagers in England chased away a Google car, saying that Google Street View is, yes, an invasion of privacy—and will also facilitate crime in their area.

•Good news for chocolate lovers: Eating it can help your math skills [ed. note: We refute this claim based on personal experience—we couldn't eat more chocolate, and couldn't be worse at math].

•Gals, take pride: sisters bring more happiness (and balance) to a family than do brothers.

•But any mothers out there, you might want to get your baby formula examined: It could contain rocket fuel.

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