As well as letters, pasta should be available in various other shapes, for example:

- the boxes and lines used for process maps
- electrical circuit symbols
- clipart

So then the bored electrical engineer might be idly stirring a plate of Diagrammatic Pasta alle Vongole and suddenly leap up in the realisation that they've stumbled across a radical new amplifier design.
-- hippo, Apr 27 2004

Baked for Jello http://www.yankeeha...en.com/qwiggle.html
Would you like some brain, sir? [kbecker, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 21 2004]

Hey, anything that will justify billing for my lunch hour... +
-- Worldgineer, Apr 27 2004


That's using your noodle.
-- FarmerJohn, Apr 27 2004


Top idea, hip. Beats me why no-one's every made pasta in the shape of body parts before (less gruesome than it sounds). Think of the fun kids woud have making little people on their plates. Then eating them.

You could also make animal parts (wings, tails, etc), which kids would then use to make their own mythological meals. Then eat them.
-- lostdog, Apr 27 2004


Or machine parts, so that kids could build small pasta locomotives or printing presses. Then eat them.
-- Worldgineer, Apr 27 2004


Nice. The really clever kid would make a working pasta pasta-making machine. By, the way, who boned this? I say we track them down. Then eat them.
-- lostdog, Apr 27 2004


Any shape can be made with a bit of spaghetti and ALOT of time...
-- MikeOliver, Apr 27 2004


I actually recently saw how they make the shapes. It's really quick. The machine just looks like an enormous mincer but the holes are letter or BTB-character shapes instead of being round. The pasta dough is pressed through and then cut off by a giant whizzing blade about 4 times a second. Neat. I would like to expletive-bleeping symbols included in alphabetti-spa-f§%*"?g-ghetti, too.
-- squeak, Apr 28 2004


I'm surprised that 'speghetti reading' never caught on with psychics.
-- RayfordSteele, May 03 2004


How about a pasta based erector set? Build things with the specially shaped pasta. Then boil the whole thing.

Then eat them.
-- zigness, May 04 2004


[zigness] Yes, I had thought of a sort of pasta welding kit as an extension to this idea. This would be a small gun which could deliver a controlled amount of flour-and-water paste to glue together two bits of spaghetti and then a blast of hot air to cure the joint
-- hippo, May 05 2004


Could we make the pasta conductive, so that we can build working models? Then eat them?
-- BunsenHoneydew, Jun 28 2004


<bad engineering pun> Do I get a breadboard to test my pasta circuits on? </bad engineering pun>
-- evilmathgenius, Jun 28 2004



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