There is a planet, 55 Cancri e, made up of diamonds and a planet, GJ 1214b, made of water.

Please Barbarella, please check them out.

I haven't played with this blog in a while—this must change.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

—Steve Jobs' letter of resignation as a Apple CEO.

I saw that headline and my nervous system took a jolt.

—John Gruber reacting at Steve Jobs' resignation.

I felt the same. An era has ended.

My first wife said to me, ‘It’s me or the guitar,’ and I picked up my guitar and left.

—Buddy Guy.

Via QV.

The permanence of film will make you stop and think before you shoot, though that isn’t always a bad thing.

—Generations Later, Leica’s Iconic Shooter Keeps Clicking in Wired.

If Apple bought Google (it already has a third of its value in cash) and it shut down Android, it could create $300 billion in value. If could even throw away all of Google and still walk out with a profit.

—Horace Dediu in Is Android responsible for Apple’s deep market discount? on his blog, Asymco.

So funny!

From the 29 Things Young Designers Need to Know'29-things-young-designers-need-to-know'-poster poster designed for the January 2011 issue of HOW Magazine by id29 ’s Doug Bartow:

• Sweat
• Play nice
• Don't fear type
• Be yourself
• Learn to say no
• Collect and share
• Observe trends
• Content is still king
• Reject personal style
• Say no to SPEC work
• Become indispensable
• Value your work
• Make mistakes
• Your Mac is a tool
• Respect
• Teach others

See all 29. Unfortunately it only ships to US and Canada.

Gordon Brown refused to knight Steve Jobs as set by the British government and Queen Elizabeth II in 2009 because Apple CEO turned down an invitation to speak at a Labour Party conference.

And because Steve Jobs' birthday was yesterday — he turned 56 — here's an appropriate web site: all about Steve Jobs.com.

Corina Barbu of Friends for Friends Foundation pages all Romanian artists, designers, programmers and content creators: you guys might want to listen to Ana Maria Andronic, Senior Associate at Biris-Goran law firm talking about intellectual property and find out more about your legal rights.

On 23 March 1839, OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.k. (all correct)".

Read How 'OK' took over the world at BBC.

Via DF and Coudal.

Beautiful innovations in HP's TouchPad, announced yesterday:

• URL sharing with other Palm devices (Pre³ or Veer) by "tapping the devices together" and
• Touchstone for wireless charging.

Nice to finally see some solid competition in this space (although no shipping date). Apple, your move.

Nokia, our platform is burning.

—Stephen Elop, recently-appointed Nokia CEO, in a memo posted to an internal Nokia employee system.

Here's a good one: read How Steve Jobs 'out-Japanned' Japan at SFGate.

Note 1: I was an Apple evangelist for a very long time; and while Apple was the underdog, it was fun—supporting a struggling sports team kind of fun. Now Apple is mainstream—I look around in airports and Starbucks cafes around the world and Macs usually outnumber PCs. Almost everybody has an iPhone. Game over. 'We' won. The evangelist can (semi-)retire. Still, Jobs is one of my creative role models and I read avidly about what makes him tick.

Note 2: If you're on a Mac, use Safari's excellent Reader feature to get rid of the annoying sidebar adverts while reading the article.

We are starting a project from our bike shop in North London selling limited edition posters, half of the profits will go to charity.

There are five posters in the first print run and there are lots more beautiful posters to follow when these sell out.

—Peter Carleton, Pushcycles.com via e-mail.

A yearlong look at technology news coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism found that 15.1 of tech articles were primarily about Apple; 11.4 about Google; and a meager 3 % were about Microsoft.

When we run a strong story on Apple, we sell three percent more papers. So we run stories on Apple.

—Anonymous New York Times staffer quoted by Gil Amelio in his book On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple.

Via MacJournals.

The cold of unclaimed luggage, of institutional corridors, of steel lockers scoured to bare metal.

—William Gibson, Spook Country.

Speaking of analogue SFX (only kidding, but not so much) here's another one—Jeremy Messersmith who recreated the The Star Wars trilogy with paper animation.

Doug and his Entertainment Effects Group team created thousands of acid-etched brass miniatures lit from below with hundreds of bundles of fiber-optic lights, shot in forced-perspective through layers of smoke to create layers of light refraction. [...] Explosions were created through massive pyrotechnics shot in the California desert for a discarded sequence for the 1970 Michelangelo Antonioni film Zabriskie Point.

Watch Douglas Trumbull recount the epic creative effort behind Blade Runner's special effects.

Life was spectacular before computers.

The things we create in print and in digital are so completely different from each other that they appeal to fundamentally distinct needs. The war between old and new is a false construct. Nothing goes away.

—David Granger, Esquire’s editor in chief.

Via APhotoEditor.

An arresting vision in this short Kafka-based animation — watch the first part, the second part and the third part — by Koji Yamamura.

Via Dan C.

If you take a good look at older photographs made with that almost forgotten technology (silver halide emulsions and chemical processing), you may note a peculiar characteristic. The classical pictures show an involved interest and a careful way of looking, that is absent from current digital images. When you have only 36 pictures at your disposal, there is an adrenaline rush that forces you to capture the now-or-never moment, as you have only one chance.

—Erwin Puts, Frugality and the art of looking at Tao of Leica.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives recently held a secret meeting with Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen to discuss how the two companies might work together to take on Apple in the mobile industry, as well as a possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft.

Oh, bloatware, your handsome gods (picture) are having sex again!

She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.

—William Gibson, Pattern Recognition.

Old men in old coats, with nothing else to do.

—William Gibson, Spook Country.

Mac OS X Public Beta was released 10 years ago — the word Public signified that the product was for sale to anyone with $29.95. That's right: Apple sold a demo.

I bought it in Singapore for S$50.

Join me and together we can rule the galaxy as father and son.

Via Chishbak.

• Patrick Thomas, the head of the French luxury goods group Hermès is on the Board of Directors of Leica Camera.
• Hermès has a 49% stake in the Japanese subsidiary of Leica.

Via LR.

Enjoy.

We’re Apple. We don’t wear suits. We don’t even own suits.

—One of Jobs’ deputies answer to an AT&T representative suggesting that the Apple CEO wear a suit to meet with AT&T’s board of directors, Wired.

Via DF.

We will be rolling out the fresh features to the entire Flickr audience in the coming weeks, but why wait? The new photo experience is available for signed-in members to preview now. To opt-in, visit any photo page and follow the directions on top of the image.

—Josh Nguyen, A New Photo Experience: Your Photos, Happier on Flickr Blog.

Took them years to add a 'view on black' option — well, better late than never.

Nokia’s CEO calls his new head of mobile devices, Anssi Vanjoki: 'Anssi, we’re hosed.'

A “science fiction” piece from Jean-Louis Gassée.

Via DF.