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Lantern Festival 2016 (HK)





The Lantern Festival marks the 15th day of the Lunar New Year, the last day of the Spring Festival, and one very bright day for the night sky.

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Draginja Ljočić Milošević’s 161st Birthday



Today marks the 161st birthday of Draginja Ljočić Milošević. Milošević was one of Serbia’s first ever female doctors and the first woman accepted into the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

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Maria Erika Olofsdotter Kruukka’s 150th Birthday



Junosuando, Sweden, where Erika Kruuka was born in 1866, gets cold--really cold. In a region where temperatures regularly dip below 0 degrees fahrenheit, there are few things to give one’s neighbors as sacred as warmth, and Krukka did just that when she knitted her first pair of Lovvika gloves at the request of a local tradesman. Her singularly Swedish mittens soon kept the biting cold at bay all over the small town of Lovvika, and demand quickly grew. Being the enterprising woman that she was, Kruukka taught the craft to several women in her village, whereupon a successful business and beloved symbol of Swedish culture was born.

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Lesya Ukrainka’s 145th Birthday



Today's Doodle celebrates the life and art of Lesya Ukrainka, famed Ukrainian lyric poet. She is known for beautiful poems, stories, and plays about other-worldly forest creatures and nymphs. Guest artist Nata Metlukh, a Ukrainian illustrator and animator living and working in San Francisco, chose to depict a scene from Ukrainka's play Лісова пісня, or "The Forest Song" which she published in 1912, a year before her death.

The play tells the tragic tale of Mavka, a naïve forest rusalka or "water nymph" who falls in love with Lukash, a young man tied to the human world. Ukrainka's characters remind us of the magic and fragility of nature, and the complexity of the human spirit. "The Forest Song" has become a classic piece of Ukrainian literature which is still produced in film and on stage today.

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Leap Year 2016



2016 is very special and not just because it’s 11111100000 in binary. Today's Doodle celebrates a rare day indeed: Leap Day!

The 29th of February only happens every four years. This is to keep our calendar in sync with the rotation of the Earth around the sun. Without Leap Day, we'd be out of sync by about six hours per year.

But wait, there’s more...Leap Day happens every four years unless that year is divisible by 100. If you were around in 1900, you would have missed out on the magic of February 29. For anyone born on Leap Day, that's one less birthday party — we hope today's Doodle illustrated by Olivia Huynh, helps make up for lost time!

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Rukmini Devi’s 112th Birthday

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St. David's Day 2016



Today is St. David’s Day in Wales, commemorating the life and death of Wales’ patron saint. We’re celebrating this important national holiday with today’s Doodle. Each component in the illustration represents a unique aspect of Wales’ culture and national symbology.

The ancient lettering and Celtic knot are a nod to Celtic art’s importance in Welsh culture. The daffodil, Wales’ national flower, features prominently in St. David’s Day celebrations across the world. No St. David’s Day Doodle would be complete without the Welsh dragon, which adorns the national flag. The dragon is quite possibly Wales’ most enduring national symbol.

We’d like to wish a Happy St. David’s Day to everyone celebrating today, throughout Wales and beyond.

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Marija Juric Zagorka’s 143rd Birthday



Today we pay homage to Marija Juríc, the fearless Croatian writer fondly known by her pen name, Zagorka. She first used this name in 1898 when she wrote an article in support of working-class Croatians for the Obzor, an influential daily newspaper. After one of the newspaper's publishers learned Zagorka was actually a woman, he told her in no uncertain terms that journalism wasn't a career for women. "If someone wants to be a writer, this person needs to be a man," she remembered him saying.

Despite the hostility she encountered, Zagorka in time became editor-in-chief of the paper in 1903. Under her direction, the Obzor reached record readership for a Croatian newspaper. In her own writing, Zagorka shed light on the oppression of both women and the peasant class, often uniting the challenges of these groups to deploy a double-barrelled critique of ruling parties. She was also a fierce defender of Croatian culture, avoiding conversation in German among other members of the intelligentsia in order to keep discussion on level ground with the national culture.


Zagorka continues to be one of the most popular writers in Croatia, having written many popular novels in addition to her journalistic work. For today's Google Doodle, artist Kevin Laughlin considered a few ways to commemorate Zagorka's 143rd birthday, the second of which highlights her novel Daughter of Lotrscak (1922), a historical romance.

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42nd Anniversary of Rio-Niteroi Bridge Opening


Completed 42 years ago today, Brazil’s Rio–Niterói Bridge beautifully exemplifies the ingenuity of the human spirit. It met with great international praise when it opened in 1974 as the second-longest bridge in the world, spanning the vast Guanabara Bay. Guest Doodler Patrick Leger has crafted a lovely recreation of the bridge on the bay with the Brazilian coast visible in the background.

At 13.29 km (8.3 mi), it remains the longest bridge in Latin America and one of the longest in the world. On the day it opened it was second only to the near-infinite Lake Pontchartrain Bridge in Louisiana (38.35 km, 28.3 miles long).

But this structure’s greatest accomplishment is connection. Carrying over 100,000 passengers daily, it unites Nieterói and Rio de Janeiro, cities with populations of 487,000 and 6.5 million respectively. With that kind of impact, the Rio–Niterói Bridge reminds us that nothing lies beyond the reaches of the human imagination.

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Clara Rockmore’s 105th Birthday


Clara Rockmore made music from thin air. Trained from a young age as a violinist, Rockmore ultimately gave up the violin due to physical strain. This led her to discover the theremin, a gesture-controlled instrument named after its inventor, Léon Theremin. Not only did Rockmore become the instrument's most well-known performer, she also influenced its development. She convinced Theremin that it should be made more responsive and offer a greater range of notes (5 octaves instead of 3). Though electronic music was uncommon in formal music settings in the 1930s, Rockmore performed as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, and the Toronto Symphony.

Today's interactive Google Doodle was created by artist Robinson Wood, interaction designer Kevin Burke, and engineers Will Knowles and Kris Hom (with support from the larger Doodle engineering team). The team translated the movement used to play the theremin—one hand controlling pitch and the other volume—to an interactive module, where a point of light controls volume and pitch. Sound designer Manuel Clément helped with the button sound effects.

Engineer Will Knowles explained that the first attempt at recreating the theremin sound was fairly straightforward: just a "single oscillator producing a wave at a given frequency." But Knowles and his team wanted to create a sound quality that resembled Rockmore's own playing. "To accomplish this," he said, "we worked with the Chrome WebAudio team and theremin expert Mark Goldstein to create smooth sliding between frequencies and scaling vibrato to simulate her masterful play style." They also used filters to get across a "a softer, more aged feel."

Robinson Wood and Kevin Burke also reflected Rockmore's world in the visual design of the Doodle, with Art Deco-styled imagery and other period details. "We wanted to give the theremin's controls a feel of realism," Burke said, "so the knob textures were rendered to mimic Bakelite, the early plastic. We chose the wood texture for its similarity to the wood of Clara's RCA theremin."

Today's celebration of Clara Rockmore is a natural accompaniment to Google Creative Lab's launch of the Chrome Music Lab. In the words of designer Alex Chen, the Music Lab aims to "create simple ways for anyone, of any age, to explore how music works."

Have fun playing the theremin! Your playing commemorates Rockmore's 105th birthday.

[video]http://www.google.com/logos/2016/rockmore/end.mp4[/video]