Everyone has their own opinion when it comes to logos, but the new IE9 logo has really started getting under my skin (in what, a matter of hours?). You see, this "orbital" that has always been in the IE logo is highly eccentric. Assuming that e has a uniform mass distribution, the orbital should be at roughly the same distance from the surface of e at any given point in the orbit. There's some wiggle room here - but 4 pixels is a whole hell of a lot of eccentricity in an orbit that's only 236 pixels in diameter!

There is only one explanation for this. Some time in the distant past, something started tugging at the orbital, pulling it away from its natural orbit. My guess is that this something is the mysterious dead planet IE 5.5 for Mac but other logo scientists have suggested that the near-miss from a strange, Fox-shaped comet may have had something to do with it.

Regardless of its origin, the current path of the orbital can only lead to one thing: its complete destruction when it eventually slows and burns up in the atmosphere of planet e. Poor thing.

They're not all my miles, of course. But it's a milestone!

Re: this post from Gruber, I'm fascinated that Gizmodo has had this model for a week. Did they wait for their "source" to put blurrycam shots out first? Did the same source also try to milk Engadget for cash? Engadget had photos first (AFAIK), but everything else came soon afterwards.

I've always been fascinated by the Apple rumor market, mostly about when people were going to start getting serious about it with cash incentives (and someone did last year, only to be shot down by Apple Legal). Now with Gruber suggesting that Apple considers this unit stolen (which I wouldn't put past apple even if it was, in fact, lost), and the road for mischievous deeds leading to Apple leaks has been set.

Things I still want to know: what did the "finder" get from Gizmodo to turn over this 4g iphone? This probably pushed huge amounts of traffic to Giz this morning so what's it worth to them?