Google's Finest Easter Eggs

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The quirky developers over at Google headquarters are obsessed with implanting inside jokes or "Easter eggs" in a range of its free software, from Google Earth to Google search to Google Reader. Today, The Daily Beast's Brian Ries tips us off to a gem of an Easter egg hearkening back to the early days of Nintendo 64 when Starfox 64 reigned supreme. Here's the Starfox Easter egg followed by some of our other favorites from the Silicon Valley nerds:

"Do a barrel roll" If you've ever played Starfox 64, you'll recall the near-constant command from Starfox ally Peppy imploring you to "do a barrel roll" in your aircraft. Go ahead and type the command into Google and watch as the Mountain View company rocks your web browsing world:

ASCII Art A hallmark from the days when computers weren't especially adept at graphical processing, typing in ASCII art introduces an ASCII version of Google's logo.

Ninja Reader It's nice to know this one still works. Following Google's controversial overhaul of Google Reader, the RSS service has been on the fritz lately. Thankfully, one of its finest Easter eggs is still in tip top working order. The Ninja Reader. Type in the famous Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A) while Google Reader is open and a darkly-garbed ninja woman will appear over your feeds.

Hidden Steve Irwin Kudos to The Telegraph's Matthew Moore for hunting this one down. Google Earth allows you to view famous building in 3D. But in some cases, independent designers have included hidden jokes. That's the case for Australia's Sydney Opera House. If you tool around the waterfront side, you'll find a comical illustration of the late Steve Irwin wrangling a croc. Crikey!

Askew One of the more subtle Easter eggs. Typing in "askew" tilts your search results just a hair to the right. Did you notice?

Once in a blue moon Google engineers are obsessed with demystifying our natural world with the power of data. As such, not even casual phrases like "once in a blue moon" are left un-computed (well, sort of). Type it in and behold a not-so serious formulation:

Chuck Norris Turn off Google Instant, enter "find Chuck Norris" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky." Poof: an important adage. "Google won't search for Chuck Norris because it knows you don't find Chuck Norris, he finds you."

Recursion Here's one for the math nerds. Recursion. It's the process of repeating items in a similar way Type it into Google and a "Did you mean" suggester pops up dumping you into an infinite loop of recursion.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

The president’s attempt to intimidate James Comey didn’t merely backfire—it may also embolden hostile regimes to conclude his other threats are equally empty.

This is a first for the Trump presidency: the first formal presidential retraction of a presidential untruth.

President Trump tweeted a warning to James Comey: The fired FBI director had better hope that no “tapes” existed that could contradict his account of what happened between the two men. Trump has now confessed that he had no basis for this warning. There were no such tapes, and the president knew it all along.

The tweet was intended to intimidate. It failed, spectacularly: Instead of silencing Comey, it set in motion the special counsel investigation that now haunts Donald Trump’s waking imagination.

But the failed intimidation does have important real world consequences.

First, it confirms America’s adversaries in their intensifying suspicion that the president’s tough words are hollow talk. The rulers of North Korea will remember the menacing April 4 statement from the Department of State that the United States had spoken enough about missile tests, implying that decisive actions lay ahead—and the lack of actions and deluge of further statements that actually followed.