What happens when Google fails?

Technology

I had an eye-opening experience tonight. Google isn’t responding on port 80 (basically to Web requests) from any of its core sites, include search, news, maps, and ads. This is pretty bad by itself; I’d guess over half my browsing is to those sites. Even worse is the effect on the rest of the Web, most of which has some Google content on it. When Google goes down, those sites become almost impossible to reach as well because their pages bog down with broken requests.

For instance, I went looking for information about a new local restaurant tonight. My first stop was Google Local, of course, but that wasn’t responding. Google search (to find the restaurant’s own site or Web reviews) was the logical next step, but that was out as well. I went to Yahoo (which responded instantly), but the restaurant was new enough to be missing from their local listings as well as much of the search index. My next thought was to check Yelp, but that was killed because of their reliance on Google maps. Next stop was the San Diego Reader, which came up only after I forced it to ignore the Google ads. Even my own work uses enough Google content on it to make the site difficult to reach right now.

So yeah. What’s up with Google? Normally I’d check the news for a mention of outages or issues, but that would be Google News. RSS reader? Google, of course. Blog search? Technorati actually works, but there’s no mention of a problem. It can’t just be me; I double-checked using other computers around San Diego. I don’t have access to anything outside of the area, but it seems strange that anything outside Google itself could block port 80 for only Google sites.

So what is up with Google? And should I start stocking up supplies?

UPDATE: So almost the exact moment I posted this, all Google sites came back for me. Still, the question remains: do we rely on Google’s stability far more than is actually justified?

Little help, please?

Science

I have never in my life taken a physics course, so this may be obvious to other people who have. Parts of this article explaining relativity using only words with four or fewer words make sense to me and parts don’t. The stuff near the end is really hard for me to understand, but I figure it’s hard for most people to understand. What frustrates me though is the bit about Bert and Dana (when Bert is on the bus). I don’t understand the declaration that, since he’s moving, Bert would see the rocks come down at different times if they appeared to come down at the same time from Dana’s perspective. Maybe it’s true, but I have zero real-world experience of anything like that so I don’t get it. Does that really happen? Is there a way to experience it?

SpaceX rockets update

Space

I’ve been catching up on space things in preparation for the Mars Society Convention next week. Today I ran across an exciting summary of the progress that SpaceX has made toward launching their next Falcon 1 rocket as well as their much larger Falcon 9 rocket. According to the “monster progress update“, the next launch is scheduled for January 2008, with a launch of the Falcon 9 (the one big enough to carry people) in late 2008. They’ve also been doing lots of engine testing and other groundwork, plus they’ve been granted access to Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, bringing their total number of launch sites to 3.

Nicely done all around. I can’t wait to hear what SpaceX founder Elon Musk talks about at the convention.