I am an enormous fan of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I love pasta, and I am delighted by anything with eyes on stalks. And as a student of literature with more than a passing interest in comparative religion and in medieval art, I cannot help but be delighted by the Spaghetti Universalis.
The inspiration for the form of this piece, itself a reference to an earlier time and aesthetic, is a longtime favorite—ably enhanced by this modern explanation.
I have no opinion on the head-to-head iPhone/Android comparisons, but does Verizon really want to be the company that’s marketing Sidekick right now?
You’ve probably heard either a lot or very little about the Sidekick failure. At the beginning of October, on a Friday, T-Mobile Sidekicks lost contact with the servers that support their data functions, and those services were completely unavailable until Monday morning. During the following week, some improvements were made, but the service was not back to normal. A full week after the initial contact loss, Microsoft acknowledged that personal data had been lost, and the party line was that a hardware switch-out was to blame.
A failed hardware switch-out was always a lunatic story. When hardware fails, you replace the hardware and install any relevant backups. The Sidekick service had run for years without any issues even approaching this, so what happened here? And for that matter, if you but dimly remember hearing about the Sidekick back when it was the It Device, what does Microsoft have to do with it?
This is the cover for Goodnight, Little Bear in Dutch (and Can’t you sleep, Little Bear? in German), by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Barbara Firth.
Look how he grabs his little toes!
7 tonnes 2 by Nicolas Deveaux (Cube)
This is just a tiny part of this enchanting animation. See the whole thing at Cube Creative.
An ecstasy of fumbling at this year’s IgNobel awards:
The Public Health prize went to Dr. Elena Bodnar, who here straps a portion of a bra she designed (it converts into a pair of gas masks) to the face of Wolfgang Ketterle. More
Luke Jerram’s translucent glass artworks were designed with the help of scientific photographs and leading virologists. More