Freddie Mercury, the voice behind so many Queen classics (Bohemian Rhapsody, Crazy Little Thing Called Love, We Are the Champions), would have turned 65 today, an age that means official retirement for most, but not for rock ‘n roll legends.

Earlier this month Jennifer Egan, the newly-minted Pulitzer Prize winner, paid a visit to Google to talk about A Visit from the Goon Squad, her experimental novel that won the Pulitzer, among many other awards. That’s the ostensible focus.

During the final days of World War II, the United States dropped devastating atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More than 65 years later, Hidenori Watanave, an associate professor of Tokyo Metropolitan University, has created a digital archive to preserve the memory of the Hiroshima bombing.

Earlier this year, Google rolled out “Art Project,” a tool that lets you access 1,000 works of art appearing in 17 great museums across the world, from the Met in New York City to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. (More on that here.

Google celebrated Les Pauls’ 96th birthday today with a playable electric guitar doodle. And, naturally, some tried to make it sing.

To date, Google Books has scanned 50,000 books from the 16th and 17th centuries. And by working with great European libraries (Oxford University Library and the National Libraries of Florence and Rome, to name a few), the Mountain View-based company expects to index hundreds of thousands of pre-1800 titles in the coming years.

Garry Kasparov, still the highest-rated player in the history of chess, pulled through Google late last year and fielded questions from the Googlers. (Don’t miss Conan O’Brien’s hilarious riff on that term.

More goodness out of Googleplex. Today, Google is rolling out a new tool called “Art Project,” which gives you access to more than 1,000 works of art appearing in 17 great museums across the world.

Kevin Kelly, the co-founder of Wired magazine and former editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog (now free online), published a new book this past October: What Technology Wants. Reviewing his own book on BoingBoing, Kelly summarizes a few key points. “Technology is the most powerful force on the planet.

Since 2004, Google has digitized more than 15 million books, mostly to build its Google Books service. But yesterday Google Labs released a nice little spinoff product, the Ngram Viewer, that provides a window into how we have historically used words, and what these usages say about our culture.