New York's Funky New Cabs; A Robo White House Tour

This article is from the archive of our partner .

We realize there's only so much time one can spend in a day watching new trailers, viral video clips, and shaky cell phone footage of people arguing on live television. This is why every day The Atlantic Wire highlights the videos that truly earn your five minutes (or less) of attention. Today: New York's amorphous cab of the future, a robot-guided White House tour, and Fender guitars throughout the years.

You know those taxis you see around New York these days that are car-shaped, proper-looking and above all, car-shaped? Forget about them. The taxis of tomorrow -- courtesy of the fine folks at Nissan -- will be amorphous blobs, not quite vans, and certainly not quite sedans. So, what do you guys think. Again, we're not thrilled -- because the cabs look like blobs of something -- but the fuel-efficiency number certainly is right. Still: they look like amoeba! In conclusion, we're really not sure what to think. [via ABC News]

Too busy to wait in line for a White House tour? Thanks to a robot, you can now now get (almost) the entire experience for free and without the line waiting. Admittedly, the effect isn't complete -- you can't get the musty, definitively lived-in smell from a robot-guided tour -- but the time investment figure certainly can't be beat. [Whitehouse]

Rear Window: good movie. Also, a disconcerting movie, what with the forced perspective and suffocating shots of Jimmy Stewart in a wheelchair and all. Also, if you believe the Internet's new supercut, it's a movie that can be distilled down to three minutes without losing any impact, save for the acute (and swingin') sense of parnaoia. The Hungarian dance music only heightens the effect. Trippy, to say the least.  [Jeff Desom via LAObserved]

This is neat: Fender -- the nifty guitar-maker -- has released a promotional video showing how exactly the manufacturing-process for those nifty guitars has changed over the past 50 years. We can't even play guitar, because of the double-jointed thumbs, but this makes us want to learn how. [via The Atlantic]

Ho boy, remember when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, and everyone (four years later) was all like, "John McCain what were you thinking" even though at the time it didn't feel anything like the crapshoot Steve Schmidt et. al. have tried made it out to be. Well, John McCain joked about that on CBS This Morning. Hilarious. (He also mentioned Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels and Bobby Jindal.) [via Think Progress]

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.