Moses high?

The National Academy of Engineering has released their "Grand Challenges in Engineering" list (see sidebar)
Clean water and affordable solar are great... but Enhancing VR?

I found the NYTimes Migraine Art slideshow today as I coincidentally have a pounding headache that won't go away. Images like this definitely don't help.

Joyrider bike wheel lights

This is the best way to get your monitor screen clean

Proposals for the George W. Bush Library

Crazy

Fun with hex (via coudal)

Right now, deep in the GOP dungeons, they're planning their racist, disgraceful assault. Whatever will it be? (sfgate)

It won't be easy. Because at the same time, they must make their own unlikely candidate, a feisty but fuzzy 71-year-old war hawk whose entire campaign is apparently now being fueled by a giant hunk of Cold War phlegm, the nauseating notion that not only is a perpetual state of war and aggression desirable for America, but is actually essential to a healthy and functioning nation, they must make John McCain's musty, patriarchal brand of regurgitated Republicanism seem fresh and visionary and not horribly regressive and embarrassing.

Wish them luck. Or, you know, don't.

So then, here's the fun little game all progressives can play until the election itself. Assuming Obama gets the nod, just how will they attack him, smear him, paint him as an evil and untrustworthy force for the nation, the way they did Al Gore and John Kerry? How nefarious, racist, draconian will they get?

Crayon Physics looks amazing

The Blue Frog Lounge looks very cool but I won't be out in Mumbai anytime soon.

Garfield minus Garfield = cartoon mental ward

The Department of Pre-Crime (Mother Jones)
New dangers of non-mainstream political thought

pwned

Wanda Jackson - Cool Love

The Iraq war has cost the US 50-60 times more than the Bush administration predicted and was a central cause of the sub-prime banking crisis threatening the world economy, according to Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

Whaaat?!! Free Star Trek episodes (TOS) online?

The entire contents of Design Magazine (1965-1974)
(via coudal)

Audio-tooth implant

LP Cover Lover
(Thanks, Chris!)

Killing Joke (New Yorker on the Coen Brothers)

Inside the world of war profiteers. (Chicago Tribune)
U.S. soldiers are fighting only for the sustainability of lucrative back-room deals for Republican-connected war contractors.

Download Phun (physics game)
Great video of the capabilities here

ThingsIHaveLearnedInMyLife
contribute your own.

Boy, George Bush sure does hate Europeans

The US Transport Security Administration has also asked the European airlines to supply personal data on "certain non-travelling members of the public requesting access to areas beyond the screening checkpoint".

The AEA said this was "absurd" because the airlines neither obtain nor can obtain such information. The request was "fully unjustified".

If the Americans persevere in the proposed security crackdown, Brussels is likely to respond with tit-for-tat action, such as calling for visas for some Americans.

Castro retires.

The 25 Greatest Duets of all time, courtesy of RetroCrush

George Bush is a liar and a fascist (crooksandliars)
A brilliant piece by Olbermann

It is bad enough, sir, that you were demanding an Ex Post Facto law, which could still clear the AT&Ts and the Verizons from responsibility for their systematic, aggressive, and blatant collaboration with your illegal and unjustified spying on Americans under this flimsy guise of looking for any terrorists who are stupid enough to make a collect call or send a mass e-mail.

But when you demanded it again during the State of the Union address, you wouldn’t even confirm that they actually did anything for which they deserved to be cleared.

“The Congress must pass liability protection for companies believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend America.” Believed?

Don’t you know?

Don’t you even have the guts Dick Cheney showed in admitting they did collaborate with you?
Does this endless presidency of loopholes and fine print extend even here?
If you believe in the seamless mutuality of government and big business — come out and say it!
There is a dictionary definition, one word that describes that toxic blend.
You’re a fascist — get them to print you a t-shirt with “fascist” on it!
What else is this but fascism?

Daniel Clowes' Mister Wonderful (full run, pdf)

Like Google Earth, but pointed directly at your head and with cops, the government, and their wrongdoing-immune private security firms watching your every move.

A plan to use U.S. spy satellites for domestic security and law-enforcement missions is moving forward after being delayed for months because of privacy and civil liberties concerns.

The charter and legal framework for an office within the Homeland Security Department that would use overhead and mapping imagery from existing satellites is in the final stage of completion, according to a department official who requested anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about it.

Desperate Man Blues
A story of the mania of the king of 78RPM record collectors, Joe Bussard, subject of a documentary film of the same name.

Twenty miles later and deeper into the mountains, Bussard pulled up to the old man's house, and from the first glance he knew he'd hit pay dirt. It was a little shotgun shack, no paint on the faded wood, junk scattered all over the yard, with a broken-toothed fence that remained standing through sheer stubbornness. A little ramshackle, but not too. Lived in. Perfect. He could almost smell the old records waiting for him inside.

In his years of canvassing for 78s, Bussard had learned the myriad signs‹old lace curtains, flowerpots on the porch, smoke snaking from the chimney‹that meant a home's current residents had been there for decades. These were the people who had long ago bought the records that Bussard was now after. And they would still have them, because mountain folks never throw anything away, whether it be a broken refrigerator, a tin coffee can, or old Victrola records they haven't played in years.

R. Crumb record covers

10 Most Asinine Movie Twist Endings

Giant pianos wash up on beach. People ogle.

80% of cartoons deal directly with the occult!
I'm more scared of Phil and his Plasti-Koat hairdo than the occult. What were you doing in the toystores, Phil?

Thunderbird has a great theme for his youtube gallery: He's got a huge collection of 60's/70's pop 45's. He spins and films. Ton's of forgotten favorites in here, like this.

Aesop teaches the art of voter suppression (McSweeneys)

Forgive the drummer some
(from the non-expert archives)

Some great old movie lobby cards

A pretty cool $1 string tripod for your digital camera.

The Jive is back after much travel.

The Secret Life of a blog post (Wired)

"Terror" alerts intended to bury real headlines? (Rolling Stone)
The real story behind 5 years of high alerts.

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.

Documentary on the Northern Soul years in Greater Manchester's Wigan Casino

Zoomquilt has the deepest art you'll ever see.
(Thanks, Ron)

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.

Car on a stick

L'Eau Life: Animating water in motion in watercolor (NYTimes)
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.

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.

The Library of Congress is going long on flickr

A visual dictionary of curves (via designobserver)

Nice article on making a block printing letterblock
(via metafilter)

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.

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.

The Masters of War are at it again "Pre-emptive nuclear strike must remain an option"

So the Federal Corporate Welfare Bureau issued a .75% BandAid. (nytimes)

Repress U - College campuses are the new battlefield in the so-called "war on terror"
(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.

A rabbit that didn't make it.

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!