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I found several things interesting about this story.

First, 25 million downloads is a huge number, but given the incredible popularity of Plants vs. Zombies, and the fact that the franchise was purchased by Electronic Arts, that number is not that surprising. What is surprising to me is the fact that that number reflects pure iOS downloads. The game has not yet been released on Android. The original Plants vs Zombies was released on iOS in February 2010, and on Android more than a year later, in May 2011.

I also found the tone of this article amusing.

Without the help of Android, the number one mobile OS in the world with millions of devices activated daily, the extremely popular Plants vs Zombies 2 is still doing great. While we all know these numbers would be substantially higher with a simultaneous release, the developers from PopCap games are already celebrating nearly 25 million downloads.

This is an Android blog, fair enough. But is an article pointing out that one of the biggest mobile games of all time is not yet released on your platform the appropriate place to hammer home the phrase “the number one mobile OS in the world”?

Om Malik:

Microsoft’s legacy as a PC monopoly holder made it incapable of handling the fast changing, rapidly shifting post-mobile world. And now for the next year Microsoft will be distracted by integrating the two companies — all at a time when Samsung will be releasing a barrage of new phones, Google will be improving on Moto X and Android and, lest anyone forget, Apple will have a trick or two up its sleeve. Oh, by the way, there is that other Seattle-based company: Amazon has been quietly working on its own phones and has plans to take on the current smartphone establishment. And they don’t even care about making a profit — they just want marketshare.

That’s probably just how the next year will play out.

It’s a big deal, but I don’t think it will come as much of a surprise to most people.

This is brilliant and a bit mesmerizing. Launch the page, zoom in on your airport of interest, and watch the flights do their thing. Click on one of the icons and detailed information about that particular flight, along with the path from its origin, will appear in a sidebar. Love this.

This Friday (September 6), NASA will launch its Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft. LADEE will be fitted with a sophisticated laser comm device that will significantly speed up communications with Earth. This is a proof-of-concept mission. The biggest hurdle to overcome is relaying the data almost 240,000 miles to ground telescopes on Earth.

“This pointing challenge is the equivalent of a golfer hitting a ‘hole-in-one’ from a distance of almost five miles… Developers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory have designed a sophisticated system to cancel out the slightest spacecraft vibrations. This is in addition to dealing with other challenges of pointing and tracking the system from such a distance. We are excited about these advancements.”

Interesting stuff.

An article I wrote for Fortune on Apple’s motivation for doing the iTunes Festival.

Nice survey of start-ups in the New York Times. Some I knew, some were new to me. Interesting read.

App cloning is a problem that impacts both large and small developers. In a nutshell, a cloner decrypts an app, then sucks out the binary. Once they have the binary, they modify it and resubmit it to the App Store as their own. A difficult problem for Apple to solve. They’d either need to apply significantly more resources to screening submitted apps, or take more time per app with existing resources, which would slow the review process to a crawl.

The app had only been out three months, and already the creators of A Beautiful Mess were scrambling to deal with a big problem: clones, copycats, and rip-offs, as many as seven of them, crowding the search results in the App Store. The clones appeared to be legitimate, affiliated versions, yet as all the developers knew, they were anything but. The CEO of the company that created the original A Beautiful Mess called them “infuriating.”

And getting rid of a clone is no easy task.

A Beautiful Mess developers tried to have the clones removed. “When we reported an IP infringement through Apple’s system, [Apple] would e-mail the company we were accusing and CC us on it,” said Trey George, the business development manager for A Beautiful Mess, in an e-mail to Ars. George believed that most of the clones originated with two operations, which he believed would feign innocence when confronted in a bid to buy time.

Clones and the like have been around the App Store almost since its inception. But this scourge has now become commonplace.

Android’s lack of strong oversight can lead to an even worse problem. Clymer highlighted the recent case of the game Gentlemen!, which was purchased legitimately 144 times and pirated more than 50,000 times.

Glad to see this problem getting the exposure it needs.

Just a reminder, you can watch live streaming of the iTunes Festival starting at 4p EST today by steering your browser to itunes.com/festival. Jim is there and I am jealous!

Damn.

First up, Lady Gaga. Doors open at approximately 6pm London time (1p EST Sunday afternoon). Lady Gaga should hit the stage around 9p (4p EST) Here’s a link to the festival FAQ.

Can’t wait.

Once every eleven years, the sun’s magnetic fields reset. When this happens, it can play havoc with things like wireless communications. Researchers at Stanford have been studying the underlying process and have cracked some of the secrets behind the mechanism that makes this happen.

The mechanism, known as meridional flow, works something like a conveyor belt. Magnetic plasma migrates north to south on the sun’s surface, from the equator to the poles, and then cycles into the sun’s interior on its way back to the equator.

The rate and depth beneath the surface of the sun at which this process occurs is critical for predicting the sun’s magnetic and flare activity, but has remained largely unknown until now.

Interesting article.

Many thanks to Mighty Deals for sponsoring The Loop’s RSS feed this week. There are bundles and there are bundles. And then, well, then there are bundles of bundles.

In this Mighty Deal’s case, however, it feels like we have a bundle that consists of bundles of bundles! Confused yet? Don’t be. Just know that this is one of the biggest bundle deals ever! With literally thousands of high-quality elements for creative designers, this Bundle Storm pretty much has it all!

Stock photos! Vector images! Backgrounds! Patterns! Themes! Gradients! Actions! Icons! Buttons! Infographics! Why, there’s even tools to quickly create your own mascot!

You can also check out the Full Smashing Library Deal.

Looks like this lawsuit is finally wrapping up.

According to the letter, with these additional settlements the fund for payments to customers who purchased qualifying ebooks is now $162.25 million. Anyone who purchased ebooks from the iBookstore between April 1, 2010 and May 21, 2012 is eligible to receive a payment from this fund upon court approval of the settlement. That is, almost anyone: because of the complexity of the case and complex mix of the various parties involved in it, only individuals who are residents of the United States (including five territories and the District of Columbia) are eligible for payments; libraries, government agencies, and corporations, among others, are excluded, as well as those who only obtained free books or gifts from the iBookstore. In addition, residents of Minnesota, while included among those who are eligible, are subject to different terms in the settlement.

There’s a pretty comprehensive FAQ on the settlement here.

The NFL reached a tentative settlement on the brain-injury lawsuit filed on behalf of more than 18,000 former NFL players, including the family of Pro Bowl linebacker Junior Seau, who committed suicide last year. Almost coincidentally, Tim Carmody wrote this intriguing post for Kottke.org about football players and the harm that befalls them.

This is all to say that what offensive linemen do in football is not well understood. When the NFL finally started to act on widespread concussions and the resultant uptick in chronic traumatic encephalopathy — if you never have, please read about the life and death of Dave Duerson — they focused on open-field helmet-to-helmet hits and defensive players targeting quarterbacks, running backs, and receivers (so-called “skill positions”). They ignored the constant battering that offensive linemen take, how repeated brain injury poses the greatest risk for long-term problems, how linemen are rewarded for staying on the field and playing through pain, and the ways in which they’re encouraged to both be more aggressive and prioritize someone else’s safety over their own.

Worthwhile read. I hope the money from the settlement reaches the people who need it. At the very least, I hope it provides health care for all 18,000 of those former players.

The last “soft” landing on the moon was by the Soviet Luna 24, which made its unmanned, non-destructive landing on Augsust 18th, 1976 and returned to Earth four days later. That was 37 years ago.

This week the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced that it has finished construction of its first lunar landing module. It is now ready to move Chang’e 3 to the “launch implementation phase,” and fully expects to launch China’s first moon landing mission by the end of the year. This will be an unmanned mission, but given that China only just launched its first lunar orbiter, Chang’e 1, in 2007, the military-led space agency is making remarkably quick progress.

China, Japan, India, Russia, and the US are currently the only countries to have put objects into a stable lunar orbit, and if Chang’e 3 is a success they will be just the third nation ever to achieve a “soft” landing on the moon — meaning that the lander will not be destroyed in the process.

This is a big deal for China, which will become the third nation (after the US and Russia) to make a successful “soft” landing on the moon.

Moore’s Law is foundational to anything and everything to do with technology. In a nutshell, it states that the number of transistors that can fit on an integrated circuit doubles every two years. A more modern definition says that chip performance doubles every 18-24 months. According to Intel’s former chief architect, Moore’s Law is reaching the end of its life. And this has huge implications for the tech industry, which draws its lifeblood from smaller and faster products.

Moore’s law is headed for a cliff. According to Colwell, the maximum extension of the law, in which transistor densities continue doubling every 18-24 months, will be hit in 2020 or 2022, around 7nm or 5nm.

“For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as the earliest date we could call [Moore’s law] dead,” Colwell said. “You could talk me into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it’s a big deal.”

There are a number of technologies (graphene, III-V semiconductors, carbon nanotubes, etc.) that offer some hope for the continuation of the promise of Moore’s Law, but none has proved practical as of yet.

Interesting comparison on total funds raised:

Indiegogo campaigns were found to have raised far fewer successful dollars than [Kickstarter], with around $98 million total all-time, while Kickstarter had about six times that, or $612 million. Kickstarter has had 40 projects cross the $1 million threshold, with only 3 doing the same on Indiegogo, and Kickstarter’s average success rate is 44 percent, while Indiegogo’s is around 34 percent (which doesn’t take into account the many delisted projects that failed to raise at least $500. Including those delisted efforts, the previously reported 9.3 percent success rate on 142,301 total campaigns matches up nicely.

Much of the data was gathered by scraping the sites, so unsuccessful campaigns that are dropped from the site are not counted, but that shouldn’t make enough of a difference to change the apparent results.

In this issue, Alex Vollmer describes his 20 year obsession with Eddie Van Halen’s famous “Brown Sound” guitar tone; Matt Gemmell reminds us that everything we do online can affect our reputation; Peter Cohen talks about how he got started with the Mac 27 years ago; Steven Aquino is a sports fanatic and technology has made his hobby better; and Dr. Robert Carter tells us how Apple’s commitment to accessibility has changed his life.

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