Daniel and I went to Google today to meet Vaughn for lunch. Google headquarters is in Mountain View, just south of Charleston Slough (where I sometimes go birding) along the shores of San Francisco Bay. Lunch at one of the several Google cafeterias was absolutely fantastic: grilled steak and portobello mushrooms, baked asparagus, and avocado and persimmon salad. The company makes very high-quality meals free to employees (and their friends, evidently), as an incentive for them to get to work early and stay late. Over lunch we talked about the future of Google and of desktop computers. We didn't have time to see the rumored "toy rooms", but Vaughn did take us by this screen which depicts a rotating globe and little colored dots to indicate every time Google is used anywhere in the world. The languages are indicated by different colors (red for English, yellow for Spanish, violet for Japanese) and you can see pretty clearly that most of the traffic is in North America and Europe, with considerably less in Latin America and east Asia (including Japan, which surprised me at first, but there are rival Japanese-language search engines that seem to be pretty popular). You can also see a list of the terms typed into Google in various languages updated in real-time, although it seems like it must be a subset of the traffic Google is receiving. For some reason you can also switch to a view of the moon, where a column of whitish blue dots is hanging over one spot on the surface, for reasons none of us could figure out. (I later realized that I had read about this world map in a Tom Friedman editorial in the New York Times a year or so ago.)