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.

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.

Mars! Yeah, BP, that looks familiar, doesn't it.

Via KN.

Speaking about Avalanche, here is a fascinating piece on Conficker computer worm.

For the first time ever, the cyber-security elites of the world have joined forces in a high-tech game of cops and robbers, trying to find Conficker’s creators and defeat them. The cops are failing. And now the worm lies there, waiting…

—Mark Bowden, The Enemy Within at The Atlantic.

I'm relieved that the single country named in this one is not Romania.

Hi, I'm Kit and I managed to stay clean for 4 years, from 2002 to 2006. In May 2006 I picked up the sickening habit again and I did it until December 2009, when I quit. I haven't watch TV at all in 2010 and I don't think I will very soon. Television is a drug. Thank you.

And a weekend goodie — Hubble eye candy released to celebrate the space telescope’s 20th anniversary. Awesome.

"From Katong laksa in the east to Indian-Muslim fare in the west, here are 40 foods that define Singapore's culinary character" — 40 Singapore foods we can't live without.

If you love Singapore I'm sure you'll find something familiar on the list, and possible something you didn't know about.

Thank you, George.

The WePad promisses to revolutionize media publishing and consumption:

With our “WeMagazine” ePublishing Open Platform, we give publishers all the tools they need to tell stories in a thousand new ways — and we truly believe that when it’s awe-inspiring enough, people will happily pay for news again.

Really cool. Let's see.

Thanks Cristi, Sorin.

Images taken with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter are way cooler than some science fiction movies.

Look at this one.

"Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB."

—Amazon Announces New 70 Percent Royalty Option for Kindle Digital Text Platform press release.

Interesting. We pay roaming data at $4–$7/MB: that's around 3000% surcharge. Or more.

Ha! See? — not perfectly symmetrical. God is a really sloppy bearded überhobo with bad eyesight.

Speaking of films—now this means to be a real film buff.

In Time.

My favorite: Takuo Toda's Sky King (Toda, 53, is the chairman of the Japan Origami Airplane Association, so please...) paper airplane.

Here. Wired teaches you how to fold one — if you have a sheet of paper and 4:45 to spare. Let me know how it went.

Jason Kottke in What a well-placed $20 gets you:

Tom Chiarella took a stack of $20 bills with him to New York City just to see what he could get by offering them to the right people at the right time. Turns out, quite a bit.

They call it economics (look at the tags), we call it bribery. Congratulations, you invented something beautiful.

Two items for your 09/09/09 calendar:

• Live Webcast at 16:00 (Bucharest time) — The next Generation of Leica Cameras from leica camera on Vimeo.

"Please join us as Leica begins a new chapter in photography and tune in to the live webcast on September 9th to witness the unveiling of the next generation of Leica Cameras," the release says.

• Apple's "It's only rock and roll, but we like it" iPod-centric event at 20:00 (Bucharest time) — probably live-blogged by tech and Apple-related blogs.

Rumors line-up: new versions of its iPod nano and iPod touch with cameras, iTunes 9 with social networking feature, The Beatles' discography on iTunes.

Busy day.

101 Variationen der Mona Lisa, as they say. One from Bucharest, guess which one.

A jet pack is (should be) a device the pilot wears on his back. Or, in this case, a device that has a pilot strapped to its belly.

Read of the day: zero.

Arrived at this looking after how the dotter zero (inspired by the Arabic zero?) and the slashed zero (inspired by the empty set symbol) first appeared.

Histogram + typeface, that is. Craaazy-cool geek-ism!

“Our vision is every book ever printed, in any language, all available in less than 60 seconds.”

Jeff Bezos at Kindle 2 launch. That's a hell of a vision!

Also: the Kindle GUI seems to me very Macintosh-like, with rounded outlined buttons and all. Nice.

That's how 20% of the retail grocery and consumables business in USA looks like: freaky.

Core77 recommends, you pay. Easy.

"While everyone seems to be on the search for the God-Particle I looked for the basic elements of the classic comic characters."

Cartoon Particles.

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's Starship Enterprise or mmm... a pig?

Thanks, VuduCat.

It took us a gazillion years to evolve into this. Just great.

Via Tom Coates.

"The idea that graffiti-spraying and other forms of low-level delinquency promote further bad behaviour has now been tested experimentally." And guess what? Experiments confirmed it.

iPod/iPhone Tip — because you should be following the One True Way Of Headphone Wrapping.

Via DF.

"The presidency could be won with just 22 percent of the electorate’s support, only 16 percent of the entire population’s." NYTimes.

This electoral college voting system still is, probably, more about democracy than political show business, but to an European looks totally counterintuitive.

iPhone-Powered Netbook Concept. That'd be a cool one!

"In the last six months alone, 31,544 mobile phones in New York and 55,843 in London were left behind in taxi cabs" survey says.

At 80 grams (is that fair?) per piece that's around 7 tons. Holy shit, that's a boatload of them[!

Laugh until you cry. And, as my colleague Iancu says, "don't you ever complain again".

Play some Tetris, meet new people.

"The greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate". Read about this and other bizarre findings from dead-serious scientific papers.

"A pirate is somebody who is most comfortable when they’re working outside of the existing structure. And pirates only really shine when they have a deep personal attachment to the work they’re doing".

Tyler Brûlé's upmarket monthly Monocle is available in Bucharest via Inmedio outlets. I suggest that you grab your copy on your way to Carrefour.

Today, the seventh day in the seventh month of the seventh year — yesterday night, a bus with 00777 on the license plate.

Message from the European-Mediterranean Seismological Centre today (it's true):

Earthquake on 04/04/2007 at 11:00 (UTC)
Loyalty Islands
Magnitude: mb 6.2

Loyalty Islands were mildly shaken this morning, the report reads. I wonder if the seismic waves and the tsunami devastated the Friendship archipelagos and reached the Love peninsula already. On the Casual Sex continent the seism was too weak to be felt.