Fun with Tesla coils

The Jive does not condone smoking, but it does condone making amazing cigarette rolling robots like this one:

Electric Light Shoe

The White Folks Guide to the NYC Subway system (gothamist)

A nice little article on early jet cars in the Jalopy Journal

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.

$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.

[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

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.

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)

Historical Sounds in MP3 Format

Body-modding a Civic to 90 MPG. (ecomodder)

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.

OMFG

A nice video on what it takes to move one of the Musee D'Orsee's large paintings
(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.

A very cool video of lightning striking the John Hancock tower in Chicago

A really cool flickr set of paper miniature gadgets. Thanks, designobserver

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.

I think there may be something to bibliotherapy (via metafilter)

Artists against the war slideshow

10 Most Laughably Misleading Ads (Cracked, via Coudal)

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

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)

Pictograms: The Band Logo Blog

Mouthbreather School of Design: The 50 Ugliest Guitars of 2007.
[50-30] [29-10] [9-1]
Totally guitarded.

Psychedelic Milk Effects

Perfectly Descriptive URLs XXIV: fork-art.com

Sean Ohlenkamp of Chiat Day recorded his desktop every day for a year. See what the man was up to during 07.

11 Megs of random animated gifs via wfmu's blog

101 Manhole covers (flickr, courtesy of designobserver)

Pirate Bay wants to buy the micronation SeaLand

Fimo Fractals (via makeblog)

Campaigning in Style: Fashion choices of the front runners (Washington Post)

The importance of fictional products (Adobe Design Center)

$361,000 teapot (dezeen)

A monstrous paper-cut by Ed Pien.
More work.

"You Don't Understand Our Audience" (MIT Tech Review)
What I learned about network television at Dateline NBC, by John Hockenberry

Happy New Year from the Jive!

Terminus. Anyone who's ever been hassled by concrete creatures should appreciate this.

Subhuman filth at the RIAA apparently experience quantum law, whereby customer actions are both justified and legal and totally illegal at the same time. Nice!

"If you choose to take your own CDs and make copies for yourself on your computer or portable music player, that's great. It's your music and we want you to enjoy it at home, at work, in the car and on the jogging trail."
-- Quote recently removed from the RIAA Website

Now they're saying....
Sony BMG's chief of litigation, Jennifer Pariser, testified that "when an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song." Copying a song you bought is "a nice way of saying 'steals just one copy,'" she said.

The Airport Security Follies (NYTimes) by pilot Patrick Smith
In the end, I’m not sure which is more troubling, the inanity of the existing regulations, or the average American’s acceptance of them and willingness to be humiliated. These wasteful and tedious protocols have solidified into what appears to be indefinite policy, with little or no opposition. There ought to be a tide of protest rising up against this mania. Where is it? At its loudest, the voice of the traveling public is one of grumbled resignation. The op-ed pages are silent, the pundits have nothing meaningful to say.

and here are 07's most loathesome

Road Trip is a short film composed of 12,397 pictures taken automatically from the back seat of a car while driving accross America from Portland, Oregon to New Hampshire.

One cold hand?

The Most Hated Holiday Song in the World (designobserver)
The most hated holiday song in the world is 21 minutes, 59 seconds long. It features the accordion and bagpipe, an operatic soprano rapping and singing atonal music, and the exhortation of a grating children's chorus: "Christmas time! Christmas time! / Jesus, Mary and the manger / Christmas time, family time / Do all your shopping at Wal-Mart!" Its creators calculate that it will be disliked by all but a few hundred of the world's population.
Hear it here (mp3)

Chris Hedges, author of "American Fascism" interviewed on CBC's The Hour
Extremist Dominionist ideology and influence in American politics. Well worth watching.
(via metafilter)

SATs are about to get more competitive: LA Times article on Brain Doping
"If there were drugs that actually made you smarter, good Lord, I have no doubt that their use would become epidemic," Yesalis said. "Just think what it would do to anybody's career in about any area. There are not too many occupations where it's really good to be dumb."

3 of the best diagrams in history (according to the Economist)

How walkable is your neighborhood?

Worst Films of 2007 (Avclub)
Worst Gadgets of 2007 (Pop Mech)
Worst Games of 2007 (gemega)
Worst Album Covers of 2007 (pitchfork)
Worst Albums of 2007 (someblog)
Worst Dictators of 2007 (Parade)
Worst Fashion Trends of 2007 (People)

Top 10 Vaporware "products" of 2007 (Wired)

Nano-Nukes: Toshiba is developing a 6x20 foot self-contained reactor.

Our Decrepit Food Factories - on food, microbes, and sustainability.
(NYTimes)
Public-health experts have been warning us for years that this situation is a public-health disaster waiting to happen. Sooner or later, the profligate use of these antibiotics — in many cases the very same ones we depend on when we’re sick — would lead to the evolution of bacteria that could shake them off like a spring shower. It appears that “sooner or later” may be now. Recent studies in Europe and Canada found that confinement pig operations have become reservoirs of MRSA. A European study found that 60 percent of pig farms that routinely used antibiotics had MRSA-positive pigs (compared with 5 percent of farms that did not feed pigs antibiotics).

Rubiks Cube on plexiglass
from the Streets of Europe show at Jonathan Levine gallery

How to build an igloo (via coudal)

I bet you know someone with tattoos and breast implants. Meet a guy who got his tattoo some breast implants.

Take action at stopthespying and prevent Bush's ridiculous plan to let giant telecoms off the hook for illegally spying on their customers.

Huge Vintage Board Game box gallery!

Typical Republican behavior

12,000 Old Time Radio shows for instant listening or download

Amanda Visell has some very cool cartoon-pop artwork.

What do you get a geek who has everything? How about an interactive wall of CPU fans?

Chair pR0N: 100 Chairs in 100 days

Vintage Christmas Wax
mp3s from Edison Cylinders via metafilter

NYTimes 53 places to go in 08. I'll take Prague, Oslo, and Tuscany

[Photography] Camille Seaman's The Last Iceberg

Blues for Otis (popmatters)
But the reason Redding stands out as an immortal soul icon is rooted in much more than his broad musical palette. Intensely emotional on record and on stage, Redding unhesitatingly bore witness to pain, exposed his own vulnerabilities, and expressed emotions at odds with conventional and emergent notions of black masculinity. Tearjerkers like his “Pain in My Heart”, “Try a Little Tenderness”, “My Lover’s Prayer”, and the criminally underrated “You’re Still My Baby” spoke honestly and profoundly on the power of love, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

New Yorker's Emoticons during wartime
*:o)

GWEI - Google will eat itself

e
(youtube)

The Dillards (Darlins) on A.G.S.

Kidnapping! It's not just for extraordinary rendition anymore!
(Sunday Times, UK)

AMERICA has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States. A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

FMU's Country Fuzz Spectacular!

Frank Sinatra: A Voice in Time (1939-1952) (popmatters)
In the 1940s Sinatra was the original template for the phenomena of the teen idol. After the war’s end and a brief creative recession in which he heroically did battle against the forces of stultifying novelty recordings which had infiltrated postwar American record stores (those with strong constitutions should track down “Mama Will Bark”, his sole concession to this fashion), he returned to the spotlight with one of the most amazing second acts in American history. Along the way he established a template for sophisticated adult musicianship within a pop context, which has rarely if ever been matched in the many decades since.

A nice vid of the new GTA IV Box Art unveiling

Free and Uneasy: the First Year Out
Jeffery Deskovic on his wrongful conviction (nytimes)

NYTimes audio slideshow of factory in India where NYC manhole covers are made.

Photo of photographers photographing the most photographed barn in America

Posterizing the GOP

New Yorkers: Don't touch that bag! (nytimes)
One purse was found just sitting on a display shelf in the shoe department at Macy’s. Another one turned up downstairs, in Macy’s Cellar. Yet another rested on a chair in a Midtown McDonald’s, left by a woman who had stepped into the restroom.

In fact, all three items had been planted by police officers in plainclothes during the previous six weeks. And the three people who picked them up were arrested, and now face indictment on charges that could land them in state prison.

Another great holiday logic puzzle from coudal. I've got my answer in, and I'm keeping fingers crossed for the Chicago deep dish prize...

Ahmad Jamal - Darn that Dream

A great story tracing Pixar's history from a lab project at Xerox PARC
(via metafilter)

Magic Baseball Bat (youtube)

Meat Products (designboom)

X

Grim Natwick's scrapbook at Animation Archive

Linzie Hunter's One-Liner Spam Art

Eine's Victorian Graffiti Alphabet. Nice work!

var'aq: the Klingon programming language. This page will have to do until O'Reilly title on this prints.

A great monowheels site with tons of pics and diagrams from the museum of retro technology. Want one!

Microslop strikes again! The biggest BSOD of all time.

Octofungi at living sculpture

The Economic Consequences of Mr. Bush (Vanity Fair)
When we look back someday at the catastrophe that was the Bush administration, we will think of many things: the tragedy of the Iraq war, the shame of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, the erosion of civil liberties. The damage done to the American economy does not make front-page headlines every day, but the repercussions will be felt beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this page.

Ted Staunton's excellent 78 RPM label gallery

Wind Dam

Olbermann: required viewing on the Bush Administration's Criminal advocacy of torture

George Seurat drawings slideshow (via NYTimes)

CNet's 10 Most Addictive Flash Games of All Time