Educate and excite, inform and infuriate.

New York University’s GreenDot Project attempts to computerize the identification of individuals on the basis of unique, unconscious movements and gestures as exclusive to each person as their fingerprints.

The goal of the project is to train a computer to recognize a person based on his or her motions, and to identify the person’s emotional state, cultural background, and other attributes.

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Sike. They’re actually just clay molds for Madam Tussauds Wax Museum‘s upcoming sculpts of the two politicos. Relax.

Is it me, or were the director of The Fly’s 1986 remake, David Cronenberg, above left, and Vincent Price, above right, star of the 1958 Fly original…separated at birth?

[via WorldOfWonder]

Going to school for the very first time can be hell for kids, and, after leaving home, itself, the hardest part is definitely fitting it.

So, the sight of these three munchkins, above, power-sliding to Parliament’s “Tear the Roof off the Sucker (Give Up the Funk)” tells me that, even without mom, they’re gonna be all right.

It almost goes without saying that Shepard Fairey’s posterized image of Barack Obama, below right, is the definitive graphic of the candidate’s campaign. This is saying a lot, in a contest long overflowing with visual irony, metaphor, allusion, and symbology.

This hasn’t, in any way, however, halted the creation of—as I write this—dozens upon dozens of parody poster images. There are at least eighty-nine (89!) at Rene Wanner’s Poster Page, including the Bob Hope jab, above. Plus, many more can be found elsewhere on the web; for example, the slightly creepy, They Live!-ish Believe poster, below, and a sampling of others, beneath.

Enjoy, and don’t forget to vote!

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Director Charles Stone III’s original 2000 “Wassup!” commercial for Anheuser-Busch may be one of the best-known TV ads ever made. It’s easily the most parodied. Not only did it inspire take-offs, and some of the internet’s first viral videos, twisting the bit’s tagline around everything from Transformers to a Jewish brit milah, but Anheuser-Busch even followed up with their own riffs, like this yuppie-themed one.

That was right before Bush trashed America, though, and in “Wassup 2008,” above, Stone and his boys, having suffered the last eight years’ untrammeled evil, return jobless, absent health insurance, mired in Iraq, grasping at vanishing 401Ks, and helplessly battling what looks like Hurricane Katrina’s big sister—until, at the piece’s end, they get a glimpse of the dawning Obama Age.

It’s probably the best satire of the original ad yet. I don’t know what’s cooler: The way Stone densely packs each escalating moment of the new work with biting commentary, or that, effectively, he’s doing this on Budweiser heiress Cindy McCain’s dime.

It’s getting tight out there on the campaign trail, with Obama and McCain fighting it out for every single vote. But when it comes down to it, there’s really only one way to settle a campaign so harshly contested: A dance-off, plus an extra-special tie-breaker!

In this clip from a 1966 Batman episode, “Dizzonner the Penguin,” the tuxedoed terror begins his election petition by promising “no mudslinging in this campaign”….only to immediately start tossing wet dirt at his opponent!

Sound familiar? No wonder this old, wrinkled white guy is doing horribly in the polls against…heh heh, the Caped Crusader.

[via BoingBoing]

FRONTLINE turns out expertly-researched, -written , -shot, and -edited news documentaries with startling consistency. But whether or not you’ve ever seen one of their incredible pieces—my favorite to date: House of Saud, on the Arabian monarchy—make absolutely sure you check out The Choice 2008.

The 2-hour work, which debuted October 14th, but I saw last night, deeply covers the rise of John McCain and Barack Obama, above, as the 2008 Republican and Democratic party nominees, respectively, noting the varied paths both men have run.

However, even with McCain’s long career in Congress, the portions on Obama are what will most captivate. Whether it’s footage of him at Harvard Law School in his late 20s; Obama, the Chicago activist, debating the then seemingly all-powerful Rep. Bobby Rush; or details of his party’s vision of him as its heir apparent and golden child, The Choice 2008 powerfully helps fill in blanks on a man who, for all of his immense and mounting visibility, still arguably remains a profound enigma. Buy the DVD, or watch it online, right now, via iTunes, YouTube, or directly on the web site. Great stuff.

Richard Noble OBE, project director of the October 1997 ThrustSSC land speed run which still holds the world record—763 mph—has announced his intent to break the 1,000 mph mark in 2011 with a new, yet-to-be-built car called the Bloodhound SSC, depicted in the computer rendering, above.

Requiring only 40 seconds to reach its top speed of 1,050 mph, the planned 42-foot-long, 7-ton vehicle will be blazing past onlookers at more than a mile every four seconds, faster than a handgun bullet. At that point, downward air pressure alone on the car will be higher than one ton per square foot.

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