Happy Birthday Giovanni Schiaparelli

You can learn a lot of things if you click on the Google memorial logos. It's a good one today.

In 1890, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli drew this map of Mars. Today, on his 174th birthday, we are excited to include his work with many other new features for Mars in Google Earth.

Granted this is just a promo for their latest gimmick, but I'm knocked out by the fact that in my lifetime we went from orbiting a chimpanzee around the earth to orbiting Mars with a satelite that sends back enough real data to create a virtual replica of the planet.