so I googled "Barney"

[hfojvt]

and it took six pages of purple dinosaurs, Solomon Smith Barney, the White House dog, and more purple dinosaurs before I got

http://www.toonopedia.com/google.htm

Then I wondered if the word google came from Barney Google. Oddly enough the word was not in my 1997 Oxford desk dictionary, although the word "goon" was. I thought that word came from Popeye, but my unabridged dictionary says it was from Alice the Goon in the series Thimble Theater.

However, it spells the word as "googol" and says it is a number 1 followed by 100 zeros and expressed as 10 to the 10 to the tenth power (which is wrong since that would be a 1 followed by ten billion zeros) and says it was "fanciful coinage by Edward Kasner (1878 - 1955) American mathematician."

It also has the phrase "goo goo eyes" (but not, thankfully, goo goo dolls) which perhaps comes from "Barney Google with his goo goo googly eyes", but "googly" is listed as a term from the English game Cricket.

Maybe I should just check wikipedia.

[Heidi]

1. "Maybe I should just check wikipedia."

:thumbsup:

From BBC:
Wikipedia survives research test
The free online resource Wikipedia is about as accurate on science as the Encyclopedia Britannica, a study shows.
The British journal Nature examined a range of scientific entries on both works of reference and found few differences in accuracy.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm

[hfojvt]

3. well google lead me to planetmath

before wikipedia. Planetmath said

"The googol was created by the American mathematician Edward Kasner (1878-1955) <4> in <2> to illustrate the difference between an unimaginably large number and infinity. The name 'googol' was supposedly coined by Kasner's nine-year-old nephew Milton Sirotta in 1938 when asked to give a name for a huge number. The name googol was perhaps influenced by the comic strip character Barney Google <1,3>. The name of the search engine google was inspired by the number googol <6>."

Perhaps, they say. Couldn't we ask Milton himself? Well, at least Barney Google predates the number googol by 19 years.

[Oeditpus Rex]

2. Great googly moogly!

:wow: