"Terror" alerts intended to bury real headlines? (Rolling Stone)
The real story behind 5 years of high alerts.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Engineers have a "terrorist mindset"? (EE Times)
However, contrary to popular speculation, it's not technical skills that make engineers attractive recruits to radical groups. Rather, the authors pose the hypothesis that "engineers have a 'mindset' that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism," which becomes explosive when fused by the repression and vigorous radicalization triggered by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries.
However, contrary to popular speculation, it's not technical skills that make engineers attractive recruits to radical groups. Rather, the authors pose the hypothesis that "engineers have a 'mindset' that makes them a particularly good match for Islamism," which becomes explosive when fused by the repression and vigorous radicalization triggered by the social conditions they endured in Islamic countries.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Friday, January 25, 2008
100 Best Signs from Roadside Art online
(via GMTPlus9)
Illustrated approximations of the gyro-wad inverted meat-cone thing should never be attempted. Ever. It's not possible to represent in anything that even comes close to a visually appealing way. Plenty of 'em in this gallery.
L'Eau Life: Animating water in motion in watercolor (NYTimes)
Cool effect, but seizure-inducing in its non-fluidity.
Cool effect, but seizure-inducing in its non-fluidity.
Stop the Spying!
Your Congress isn't representing you. Their agenda has been compromised by corporate telecom interests to the point where ignoring or actively circumventing the Constitutional Law they were sworn to uphold and defend is common practice.
Show them that as an American, you're not going to stand for it anymore.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Yet another reason that Fox News hosts should be fried alive in their own rendered jowl-fat. Pure intellectual blight.
Thanks to Tom Tomorrow's blog for pointing this out.
Thanks to Tom Tomorrow's blog for pointing this out.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Bravo! BoingBoing's Joel Johnson uses an AT&T-sponsored gadget talk show to talk about AT&T's evil Internet filtering scheme in light of their shameless and illegal collusion with the NSA to spy on Americans without cause or warrant.
As you can see from the video, the crew ended up scrubbing the interview about half-way through. Figuring that might happen, I asked my steely-nerved friend Richard Blakeley to tape the first take. I wanted to make sure that we had a record of the event, primarily to ensure that AT&T would have no reason to try to bury the interview entirely—the same reason I am running this clip now, while discussion about what to do with my segment in post-production is surely underway.
As you can see from the video, the crew ended up scrubbing the interview about half-way through. Figuring that might happen, I asked my steely-nerved friend Richard Blakeley to tape the first take. I wanted to make sure that we had a record of the event, primarily to ensure that AT&T would have no reason to try to bury the interview entirely—the same reason I am running this clip now, while discussion about what to do with my segment in post-production is surely underway.
PoliticalMarket: CNN has a neat little online app that lets you invest (bet) futures, in play money of course, for or against the political candidates. Granted, the average investor on this site is going to a) be a bit wonkish, and b) bet with their heart rather than their wallet because real money isn't at stake, but I'm curious about how the market's predicted outcome aligns to pollster predictions.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Repress U - College campuses are the new battlefield in the so-called "war on terror"
(The Nation)
(The Nation)
The Last Empire: China's pollution problem goes global
(printable version here)
(Must-read 5-part article in Mother Jones)
So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars' performance on the city's clotted roads. The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace" campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few months.
(printable version here)
(Must-read 5-part article in Mother Jones)
So omnivorous is the Chinese appetite for imports that when the country ran short of scrap metal in early 2004, manhole covers disappeared from cities all over the world—Chicago lost 150 in a month. And the Chinese are not just vast consumers, but conspicuous ones, as evidenced by the presence in Beijing of dealers representing every luxury-car manufacturer in the world. Sales of Porsches, Ferraris, and Maseratis have flourished, even though their owners have no opportunity to test their finely tuned cars' performance on the city's clotted roads. The catch is that China has become not just the world's manufacturer but also its despoiler, on a scale as monumental as its economic expansion. Chinese ecosystems were already dreadfully compromised before the Communist Party took power in 1949, but Mao managed to accelerate their destruction. With one stroke he launched the "backyard furnace" campaign, in which some 90 million peasants became grassroots steel smelters; to fuel the furnaces, villagers cut down a 10th of China's trees in a few months.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
The Jive does not condone smoking, but it does condone making amazing cigarette rolling robots like this one:
Friday, January 18, 2008
Thursday, January 17, 2008
AT&T is looking at a Big Brother play. Disturbing to say the least, given their illegal domestic wiretap scheming on behalf of the Bush administration.
But I.S.P.’s may be about to embrace a new metaphor: traffic cop.
At a small panel discussion about digital piracy at NBC’s booth on the Consumer Electronics Show floor, representatives from NBC, Microsoft, several digital filtering companies and the telecom giant AT&T said discussed whether the time was right to start filtering for copyrighted content at the network level.
Such filtering for pirated material already occurs on sites like YouTube and Microsoft’s Soapbox, and on some university networks.
Network-level filtering means your Internet service provider – Comcast, AT&T, EarthLink, or whoever you send that monthly check to – could soon start sniffing your digital packets, looking for material that infringes on someone’s copyright.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
$500 iShoes. Tool around in no-style.
Because we Americans need to haul our bloated, exercise-bereft carcasses from McDonalds to Burger King and back again while expending the least amount of energy possible. If only the delicious saturated fats would come to us instead of the other way around, we'd be saved the strenuous effort of strapping these things on in the first place.
Because we Americans need to haul our bloated, exercise-bereft carcasses from McDonalds to Burger King and back again while expending the least amount of energy possible. If only the delicious saturated fats would come to us instead of the other way around, we'd be saved the strenuous effort of strapping these things on in the first place.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
[Songs to say "a neewwwwww CAAARRRRR!" by]
There's a ton of things that you probably don't need to do today, but what you do need to do is to download The Price is Right 70's theme music batch, courtesy of Egg City Radio
There's a ton of things that you probably don't need to do today, but what you do need to do is to download The Price is Right 70's theme music batch, courtesy of Egg City Radio
Friday, January 11, 2008
In the 'Not This Shit Again' category...
A really scary electronic voting video where a miscount is caught on film (youtube) at 5:25. This certainly justifies Kucinich's recount demand.
A really scary electronic voting video where a miscount is caught on film (youtube) at 5:25. This certainly justifies Kucinich's recount demand.
Thursday, January 10, 2008
Jean-Marie Massaud's 'Manned Cloud' looks more like Manned Whale
Manned Cloud will have a cruising speed of 130 km/h and a top speed of 170 km/h. Two two-deck cabin will contain amenities including a restaurant, a library, a fitness suite and a spa. There will also be a sun deck on top of the double helium-filled envelopes.
(via dezeen)
The Whale Hunt - A Story in 3214 Photos
From May 1 to May 7, Jonathan Harris took a photo every 5 minutes of an Inupiat Whale Hunt near Barrow Alaska.
From May 1 to May 7, Jonathan Harris took a photo every 5 minutes of an Inupiat Whale Hunt near Barrow Alaska.
Wednesday, January 09, 2008
A nice video on what it takes to move one of the Musee D'Orsee's large paintings
(w/ some French narration)
(w/ some French narration)
Tech: Coming soon, the Lego of gadgets from BugLabs (via /.)
Say you want to make some sort of gizmo for your car that records location and acceleration and displays stats on a screen. You could try to write a program for an existing GPS gadget, or you could snap together the necessary Bug Labs modules, write your own code in the Bug Labs system for your device, and go from there.
Bug Labs' system is meant for prototyping, and all the pieces of it are open-source. This means that once you've got your gadget working, you can use the Bug Labs hardware schematics as the basis for your own mass-produced version of the gadget in question. (You can also use the actual Bug circuit boards in your products, since they screw together nicely even when liberated from their plastic snap cases. However, this would be an expensive way to produce hardware.) The development environment is Eclipse. I'm not familiar with it, but it's open-source and looks to be philosophically similar to the Bug hardware--that is, highly modular.
All input/output to the modules is done via Internet protocols, and each hardware component has its own URL. This will make building mesh or networked devices that aren't physically connected to each other relatively easy, and it also means that all Bug-based gizmos are, by default, Web appliances.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
The Jive is tied up in all of the excitement surrounding the primaries. Here's how Obama is branding himself in graphic design. You'll be seeing much more of these.
Monday, January 07, 2008
Sunday, January 06, 2008
Punk Rock Bonanza!
Operation Phoenix's Punk Zine Achive is a massive archive of digitized 80's punk rock zines: Maximumrocknroll, Flipside, and others in full PDF, republished with permission from the original publishers. Dig in, rockers.
(Operation Phoenix Records)
Operation Phoenix's Punk Zine Achive is a massive archive of digitized 80's punk rock zines: Maximumrocknroll, Flipside, and others in full PDF, republished with permission from the original publishers. Dig in, rockers.
(Operation Phoenix Records)
Friday, January 04, 2008
Sean Ohlenkamp of Chiat Day recorded his desktop every day for a year. See what the man was up to during 07.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
"You Don't Understand Our Audience" (MIT Tech Review)
What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, by John Hockenberry
What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, by John Hockenberry