Now, if only we had the space to park, then this car would be a good excuse.

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Pastafarianism is a relatively unknown religion which proposes an alternate theory to the Theory of Evolution and Intelligent Design (ID - the idea that the universe was created by a supreme being that humans refer to as God). The pastafarian theory is that the universe as we know it was created by The Flying Sphagetti Monster (FSM).

An invisible and undetectable Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe, including a mountain, trees and a midget. The beauty of FSM is that it planted the evidence for evolution to fool scientists into thinking that the universe is much older than what it actually is and that life evolved. A commonly cited example is that a scientist may perform a carbon-dating process on an artifact. He finds that approximately 75% of the Carbon-14 has decayed by electron emission to Nitrogen-14, and infers that this artifact is approximately 11,000 years old, as the half-life of Carbon-14 appears to be 5,730 years. Everytime the scientist is taking a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. The FSM is invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.


(Adaptation of Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam depicts the Flying Spaghetti Monster in its typical guise as a clump of tangled spaghetti with two eyestalks, two meatballs, and many "noodly appendages")

In the pastafarian system, pirates are considered to be the "absolute divine beings" and the original Pastafarians. Their image as "thieves and outcasts" is misinformation spread by Christian theologians in the Middle Ages. Pastafarianism says that they were in fact "peace-loving explorers and spreaders of good will" who distributed candy to small children. The production of Pirates of the Carribean was funded by anonymous members of the pastafarian society and Johnny Depp is the current head priest of the system and one of the few known public pastafarians. Pastafarians believe that global warming, earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking numbers of pirates since the 1800s.



The religious text of the Pastafarian religion is called the Loose Canon. In place of the ten commandments, it contains eight "I'd Really Rather You Didn'ts", with a looser moral code. "RAmen" is the official conclusion to prayers, certain sections of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and so on, and is a portmanteau of the Semitic term "Amen" (used in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and Ramen, a noodle. While it is typically spelled with both a capital "R" and "A", it is also acceptable to spell it with only a capital R.

Sounds crazy this far, doesn't it? Well, now for some serious information. This is the theory that Bobby henderson, Oregon State University physics graduate, proposed in 2005 as protest against the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution in school. This change in the system was opposed by many people and Bobby henderson chose to write to the Kansas board about the alternative pastafarian theory. He even went on to threaten the Kansas board with a lawsuit should they not include the teachings of the pastafarian system as a third alternative in schools. The pastafarian system is an obvious parody religion which Henderson proposed to ridicule the decision of the Kansas State board.

The idea of correlating pirate population with global warming was used to explain that statistically significant correlations do not imply a causal relationship. In simpler words, though the Pirate population Vs Global temperature is accurate, simply by plotting them in a graph it doesn't imply that the two are related. This had to be explicitly stated because the grounds for teaching ID in schools were based on statistically significant correlations that did not imply a causal relationship.

This idea of refuting religious claims on the theory of the existence of universe was done once by Bertrand Russell. To quote wikipedia:

Russell's teapot, sometimes called the Celestial Teapot, was an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, intended to refute the idea that the burden of proof lies upon the sceptic to disprove unfalsifiable claims of religions. In an article entitled "Is There a God?", commissioned (but never published) by Illustrated magazine in 1952, Russell said the following:

"If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time."


Find Bobby Henderson's letter to the board here.

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Mobile cameras were the in-thing about 4 years back. Everyone dreamed of one but it remained a distant dream for financial reasons. And then it slowly trickled into the mainstream consumer market. Consumers have been overdosing on mobile phones cameras for a while now. Though the quality of the cameras in mobile phones are nowhere near those of discrete digital cameras, they have managed to find their way even into the low end market. Having become a casual feature, electronic giants are seeking new ways to keep the market alive with niche products and prevent phones from becoming a commodity item.

One such attempt that stands out is the mobile phone sized projection technology from Texas Instruments called the pico-projector. Pico-projector is a miniaturized version of TI's DLP (Digital Light processing) technology which is commonly used in semi-conductor chips that power modern day digital projectors commonly used in home theater setups. For more details on DLP check this Wikipedia article.

You might wonder how a projector on a mobile phone is going to help. Think about it, have you ever wished that the screen on your mobile phone was a little bigger. With new mobile phones capable of storing and playing full-length movies, there is a necessity for bigger screen for an immersive experience. However, there is a limit to how much trade off can be made between the size of the phone and its display capabilities. Here is where the pico-projector helps. Imagine being able to play a movie on your mobile phone and being able to watch it big size on a blank wall in your immediate location. Though there is an obvious disadvantage of having to find a blank wall, this is a really cool feature to have in a mobile phone.



The projector contains three lasers, a DLP chip and a power supply and comes in 1.5 inches length package. The best part is that it can beam a larger than mobile phone screen size DVD-quality video onto a wall, even in a widescreen format. TI demonstrated the technology on a dummy mobile phone enclosure at the CTIA Wireless 2007 show last month. All we have to do now is wait for this technology to show up in production phones and then trickle down to the mainstream market.

I can only imagine how much distraction this is going to be in a public location and probably the government will step in with regulations. But that is quite a distant event while we look forward to using this technology.

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