Thursday, January 31, 2008

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

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.

Saturday, January 26, 2008


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

Friday, January 25, 2008

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!
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.

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

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"

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

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.

Saturday, January 19, 2008

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:

Friday, January 18, 2008

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

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.

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

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.

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)
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

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)


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

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

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)

Monday, January 07, 2008

5 dangerous things you should let your kids do

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)

Friday, January 04, 2008

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

Thursday, January 03, 2008

101 Manhole covers (flickr, courtesy of designobserver)
Pirate Bay wants to buy the micronation SeaLand

Wednesday, January 02, 2008



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)

Tuesday, January 01, 2008


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!