Today the design firm Cuban Council launched Aliens Vote. Whether you're a native-born American or fresh off the boat, check it out:

at least one out of every ten people living in the U.S. today is an alien. That’s approximately 29.1 million people; equal to the entire population of New York & New Jersey combined. They own homes & businesses, pay taxes and go to public schools. While these people play a huge role in the U.S., they can’t voice their opinion in government elections.

Because of this we decided to create Aliens Vote to see how this silent minority could sway the upcoming presidential election.

Alien visitors to the site are then asked which way they'd vote if they were, in fact, allowed to vote. A pretty nifty little project. Still, although the Cuban Council folks have effectively blocked people from voting multiple times, they have no way of verifying that the people taking the poll on the site are actual aliens (they would have had to ask for visa numbers, etc).

Be that as it may, it'll be interesting to watch how things go. As one person affiliated with the site tells me, "this is about raising the issue considering the government holds all this info, takes their money and then ignores them when it comes time to have a voice."

True story: One time a friend and neighbor of mine who worked for the World Bank was slated to go to Africa on some big fancy World Bank trip to Africa. In order to go on this fancy World Bank trip to Africa he was prescribed a potent batch of anti-malaria pills. As you may or may not have heard about anti-malaria pills, they can sometimes have adverse effects on the person taking them. Like hallucinations. This poor guy, for reasons he never fully explained, decided to check his e-mail--deep in the throes of medicinally-induced hallucinations and night-terrors. Long story short: he called one of his clients a terrible, terrible name. And to facilitate his hasty retirement from the World Bank, copied his entire department on the e-mail, boss and all.

If only he had Mail Goggles. 

What, you may be asking, are Mail Goggles? Simply put, Google's latest offering is raddest thing to ever arrive in Rad Town: a filter that strives to keep you from sending e-mail that, deep down, you don't really mean to send. You know, like when it's 3 AM and you've just emptied your cabinets of Johnny Walker and Ben AND Jerry before settling in to check your Gmail--and maybe ping that ex you've been thinking about stalking--before hitting the sack (a little moment I like to call "Wednesday").

Google wants to help you NOT send that e-mail! Behold:

The way it works, I gather from the official Gmail blog, is that you can choose when it's active. If you're routinely prone to, say, judgment-debilitating weekend behavior, then just have your Gmail account give you a little Mail Goggle quiz wduring certain judgment-debilitated hours. Presto! You can't send that e-mail unless you really want to.

Of course, if your will to self-sabotage is as strong as mine, you can always give up on the e-mail and send a really incriminating text message. Complete with photo.

Technically, the shelf-life for the video I'm about to post is incredibly short (at least the registering-to-vote part of it is) but it's still worth a watch. Google apparently corralled a bunch of high-wattage star types to put this PSA together urging people to vote. It's good enough, I guess. I'm probably not the target audience here seeing as I, like, vote and stuff. It also walks right up to the preaching-in-your-face line, and then takes one step across it.

The San Jose-based Magnetic Air Cars Inc. claims that it is working on the world’s first fuel-less car. The folks at Clean Technica have seen a non-working prototype of the bad boy and they like what they see:

The Magnetic Air Car uses three on-board substations to harness compressed air. The resulting airflow is channeled, modulated, and converted to torque that propels the car.

According to company representative Paul Donovan, the car uses a silicon salt battery that has 30% more mass power than a lead acid storage battery and can charge completely within an hour. The 95 percent recyclable battery can also can be used in a temperature range from -40 degrees Celsius to 50 degrees Celsius.

The vehicle should be ready for production by 2010. Wouldn't it be awesome if it came in the BMW GINA Light Visionary Model skin?

Related: The world's most fuel-efficient car? Hint: It's not a hybrid.

I found out that Barack Obama had chosen Joe Biden as his running mate from the big O's Twitter stream (Full disclosure: I am a registered Independent, and I also subscribe to the RNC's feed, which has a MUCH better avatar than Obama anyway).

All of this is to say that it's well understood that Obama is one of the more tech-savvy presidential candidates ever (or at least has a more tech savvy team). (John McCain, to his credit, is aware of the Internet). He's a social organizing and networking whiz. Now his campaign has gone a step further and released a volunteer-created iPhone application that works as a campaign tool. Obama's camp describes it as "a great volunteering tool that lets you make a difference any time you want by talking to people you already know."

The app organizes your contacts by state in order of electoral priority--it's your job to call through your buddies based on how strategic they are to an Obama win. It gives you news feeds and you can give the campaign money through the application. The folks at techPresident appear to like it. Now, if only Newsweek would buy me an iPhone. You know, so I could take it for a spin. In the name of journalism.

This doesn't look like it feels too good: people getting punched in the face in ultra-slow motion. Yeowch. I guess in slow motion that would be yyyeeeeooowwwwwwwwcccchhhhhhh!

When Woody Guthrie was singing hillbilly songs on a little Los Angeles radio station in the late 1930s, he used to mail out a small mimeographed songbook to listeners who wanted the words to his songs, On the bottom of one page appeared the following:

"This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare “some rights reserved.”

Whoa. And here I thought the facial animation work the folks at Pendulum are doing is interesting. The team at Image Metrics--which produced the animation for Grand Theft Auto--analyzes facial movements at the level of individual pixels in a video (as opposed to putting dots on a face and recording the way the dots move). The result? "Emily." She's so real, it's unreal.