ARTIVIST : MayDay Demonstrations / Action /  by JoFF Rae

mayday mayday...

ARTIVIST : creative by any means necessary! <<< setting up social networking resources for the nationwide MayDay Demonstrations as part of international protest action... issues ranging from the copyright amendment bill to "Idiots in Power" are motivating peeps from all sorts of hoods to gather in protest.

ARTIVIST : creative have developed a simple social networking desemination system that allows communication to flow from a Posterous post (by email) to auto post on several other social networks including Tumblr. , Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot & youtube with RSS & email notifications available anywhere down the line...

The aim is to coordinate informed action.

Greg "Batman" Davis << CRIP /  by JoFF Rae

The Crips are the largest and most notorious black gang. Now with an estimated 250 sets nationwide, the Crips started in 1969 with just 10 members in South Central Los Angeles. Gregory “Batman” Davis was one of these founding members.

Since its inception, the Crips have been the subject of countless newspaper articles, news specials and documentaries. Some have interviewed Batman, many have used one of the few images he released to the press, but none have told his story from start to finish.

No ordinary tale from the streets, Batman’s story also includes a host of unlikely characters — Field Marshal Cinque and Patty Hearst of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), cult leader Jim Jones, serial killers the Skid Row Stabber and Charles Manson, ex-football player Jim Brown and rapper Ice-T, to name a few.

This is the true story of an original gangster.

Gregory Davis was born in South Central Los Angeles. The eldest of five children, he lived in a one-story house with his father, an upholsterer, and stay-at-home mother. After seeing the new TV show Batman, 9-year-old Greg fashioned himself after the main character, tying a towel around his neck in the form of a cape. He refused to remove the cape even at school, and kept it underneath his shirt, tucked into the back of his pants. At recess, he would run into the bathroom, pull the cape out, and hang upside down from the stalls. This earned him the permanent nickname “Batman.”

South Central, at the time, was a hotbed of racial tension. In the 1940s, a post-war boom in jobs caused the black population in L.A. to double. Restrictive housing covenants kept the black and white communities segregated. When blacks challenged the covenants, it angered whites, and racist groups such as the Spook Hunters attacked black residents. To protect themselves, blacks formed their own clubs.

In the ’50s and ’60s, a large number of white residents moved out of South Central. The dwindling white population led black clubs to turn against one another. With older cousins in the Businessmen and Slausons, Batman started hanging around both clubs, trying to emulate their tough behavior. When the Watts Riots erupted on August 11, 1965, Batman followed looters into a store, and loaded up his little, red wagon with candy and bottles of Silver Satin wine.

After the riots, rivalry between clubs was replaced by social awareness and political activity. One of the members of the Slausons, Bunchy Carter, founded the Los Angeles chapter of the political organization the Black Panthers. Too young to join, Batman sold copies of The Black Panther newspapers with pride. However, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover targeted groups deemed subversive with his Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO), destroying the Panther’s leadership. Batman says, “They should have let the Black Panthers go on because there probably wouldn’t be no Crips.”

In the summer of 1969, 15-year-old Raymond Lee Washington founded the Baby Avenue Cribs. Raymond modeled the Cribs after the Avenues gang and the Black Panthers, incorporating leather coats into their dress code. A friend from the neighborhood, Batman was one of the original 10 members.

Shortly after joining the Cribs, Batman found a gun in a neighbor’s tool cabinet and was caught shooting at the dogs. Despite the punishment he received from his father, this incident sparked Batman’s lifelong fascination with guns. Using a BB gun, pipe and some rubber bands, he made his first zip gun, a .38 pistol. But, when his friend tested it, the gun malfunctioned, and split his ear in half. Batman went back to the drawing board, and made a longer-barreled .410 design. This time it worked. He continued to make the .410 model and, after getting caught by the sheriff’s department twice was given the nickname “Crazy .410.” “I liked it when they used to holler, ‘Crazy .410, come here!’” Batman says in his deep, smoky voice. “I thought it was kind of cool.”

By 1971, the Cribs no longer resembled a political group, and were a full-fledged gang involved in fights and robberies. Looking to expand, Raymond approached Stanley “Tookie” Williams to found the Westside set of the Cribs, and also added a Compton set. Besides the leather jackets, which were often obtained through robberies, their dress code included ace deuce hats, earrings in their left ears, suspenders, gloves on their left hands and canes. In 1972, a newspaper article described several members involved in an assault as young cripples. The description caught on, and the Cribs became the Crips.

The Crips also had an all-female set known as the Criplettes. The Criplettes followed the same dress code as their male counterparts—with the addition of bleached blond hair—and were just as bad. “They took whatever they could too—leather coats, Cleopatra Jones coats,” Batman explains. “If we ran across another gang and they had girls with them, our girls would fight their girls and we would fight the dudes.”

After he was expelled from numerous schools for fighting, 16-year-old Batman was sent to Job Corps in Salt Lake City, Utah. Although he previously had no interest in sports—“I didn’t want to play that stuff. Shit, I was a gangster”—while in Job Corps, he took up boxing and karate. He also took up breaking into the soda machines. After getting caught by a counselor, he was given two options: to go to the on-site jail or take a bus back to L.A. Batman chose to go back home, where he started “Crippin’ to the fullest.”

By this time, the Crips were notorious on the streets and in newspapers, and additional sets had branched off of Eastside, Westside and Compton. The sets used unifying sayings like, Batman’s favorite, “Chitty chitty bang bang, ain’t nothin’ but a Crip thang. Crips don’t die we multiply. Three up, two down, all Crips from the underground. We don’t jive, we don’t joke, we smoke dope and take a big motherfucker’s leather coat.”

In response to their growing numbers, the Pirus—a former Crip set from Compton—organized groups against the Crips. These groups became the Bloods, the Crips’ archenemy. Batman was jumped for the first time by a group of Bloods: After being picked up by the police, he was dropped off in a rival neighborhood, surrounded by 15 Bloods, and hit in the mouth with the butt of a shotgun. Some 37 years later, Batman still has that scar in his mouth.

The violence between Bloods and Crips continued to increase. One day, while Batman and his homeboy were driving around in a looking for people to rob, they came across a group of Bloods. Out of the window of the red, ’66 Chevy, Batman yelled, “Fuck your set!” The Bloods returned the insult with a spray of gunfire. “I was like, Oh shit!” Batman recalls. “You could hear it hitting the car. We ducked, and then all of a sudden, bang! The car hit a tree. They were still shooting, and the electric doors wouldn’t work, so we bailed out of the window, hauling ass.”

At the 1973 Watts Festival, a fight broke out between the Crips and Bloods. The police arrested Batman, and took him to jail. After pleading guilty, he was let go. Batman went home and grabbed a zip gun. On the way back to the festival, he saw the police and threw the gun under a parked car. The police found it, but Batman denied it was his. In the station, the officers discovered the shells for the gun in a Red Hot box stuffed in Batman’s pocket, and he was sent to juvenile hall.

At the trade school Step, the last place that would accept him, Batman met Field Marshal Cinque and Patty Hearst of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). After meeting them, Batman started his own set called the SLA Crips, spray-painting the name on walls. Two months later, on May 17, 1974, Batman watched a shootout between the police and the SLA on TV. The shootout and house fire killed six, including Cinque. That was the end of the short-lived SLA Crips.

When he started attending cult-leader Jim Jones’ church with a friend and his friend’s family, Batman listened carefully as Jones spoke about the Promised Land. Thinking it meant an end to getting in trouble, he wanted to go. But, on the way to that year’s Watts Festival, Batman saw a three of his homeboys driving nice cars—a ’63 Impala, ’50 Chevy lowrider and a Lincoln Continental with suicide doors. Batman asked how they got the cars, and they told him they had robbed people. Batman wanted a car too, and they told him he could go with them. “On Sunday, we went on a robbing spree,” he says. “The last person we robbed, the police came out of nowhere. They made us get out of the car, and told us to lie down in the dirt. I had on a brand new khaki suit, so I was in the pushup position. One of the police came and put his foot on my back, making me lay down in the dirt. They arrested us, and that was my first time going to Youth Authority. The Promised Land was over.”

In the summer of 1976, Batman was released. “If I knew what I know now, I would have never got myself caught up like that,” he says. “I would have did like some of them other guys did and left it alone before they got too deep. Some left it alone after they went to YA; me—I carried on.” Having spent most of his time lifting weights, Batman emerged from YA bigger and more menacing than ever.

Shortly after getting out, Batman met up with Raymond, who had also just returned after serving a three-year sentence for robbery. On a walk, Batman brought a sawed-off shotgun hidden in his pants. When Batman showed it to Raymond, he grabbed the gun and threw it. Raymond, unaware of how violent the streets had become, did not understand why Batman needed a gun. Raymond said, “We can fight, man.” Batman responded, “Fool, don’t nobody fight no more!”

The police also recognized the need for guns. When Batman saw the police approaching, he threw his nickel-plated .38 in the bushes. The officer pulled up and asked what he threw, and Batman said nothing. The officer said if he had to get out of the car and go get it, he would take Batman to jail. Batman went and retrieved the gun, carefully picking it up from the tip of its barrel. The officer told him to put it back in his pocket. “You know they got a hit on you,” the officer said to Batman. “You’re gonna need that gun.”

But Batman did not always get off so easy. In 1978, he was charged with assault with a deadly weapon, a crime he did not commit. The jury returned with a not guilty verdict on the assault charge, but because he was an ex-convict in possession of a concealable weapon when he was arrested, Batman, now 18, was sentenced to two years in state prison.

On August 9, 1979, while Batman was serving his sentence, Raymond Washington was shot and killed at the intersection of 64th and San Pedro streets in L.A. “I would have been right there with him, but I was locked up,” Batman says. “God works in his own ways.” Raymond’s murder marked the end of an era, and the start of more violence and drugs.

After being released from prison in 1980, Batman ran into one of his homeboys on the street. While he was talking to him, Batman watched as cars pulled up to his homeboy, who dipped a stick into a bottle of clear liquid, gave it to the person in the car, and was handed cash in return. Batman asked what he was selling, and his homeboy told him “water.” “I’m like, ‘I’ll be right back,’” Batman recalls. “So I went and found a bottle, and turned the water on. He asked, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m going to sell me some water too.’ And he started laughing, ‘Nah, it ain’t that kind of water, man. This is PCP.’” And with that, Batman entered the drug trade.

Batman sold PCP until he was charged with murder in 1983. When the police attempted to execute the warrant at his parent’s house, Batman was not there. The police seized items belonging to Batman, including handguns, shotguns, rifles, shells, cartridges, magazines, stereo equipment, a radio scanner, scale, three photo albums and a blue bandana. Facing life in prison, Batman prayed to God. “I got down on my knees in front of all these Crips, and asked God to help me. I said, ‘I know I got to go back to prison, but please don’t let me do all that time.’ And the homeboys looked at me and said, ‘Cuz, why you down there praying to that white God? Nigga, you goin’ to the pen.’ I said, ‘I’m going, but I ain’t gonna be there as long as you.’” Batman’s prayers were answered, and he was found not guilty on the murder charge, and given just two years for the weapons.

Upon entering prison, Batman met an old friend, Bobby Joe Maxwell. While he was talking to Bobby, a group of Bloods started threatening Batman, who was still shackled at the hands and feet. Bobby stood up and told the Bloods, “This is my homeboy, we from the same neighborhood,” and the Bloods backed down. Batman asked, “Why are they scared of you? You ain’t a gangster!” Bobby replied, “Boy, I’m the Skid Row Stabber”—a serial killer who targeted homeless people in Los Angeles. It was also during this prison stint that Batman befriended serial killer Charles Manson. “They say he’s racist, but he didn’t seem racist,” Batman says. “I used to sit on the bench down low and he’d sit up high and we used to just talk.”

Pressed for cash after his release in 1985, Batman took and Uzi and planned to rob some high rollers. He was stopped by one of them whose life he had unknowingly saved in a gang shootout. To thank him, the high roller gave Batman $2,500, a brand new .357 magnum and a half ki of cocaine. Off to a good start, Batman re-entered the drug game.

A year later, Batman met Fast Eddie, the owner of a local restaurant known as The Steakhouse, who encouraged Batman to change his life around. Shortly after, Batman stopped selling drugs and started hanging out at Fast Eddie’s restaurant. It was at The Steakhouse that Karen Stewart, his future wife, finally gave him her number. They had met a few times before, once at a gas station when Karen was having a bad day. “I was telling him, ‘You’re Crippin’ and you’re 30 years old, you don’t need to be doing this.’ He was wearing a big coat, and I pushed him, and his chest was so big, his arms were gigantic, he was huge! I touched his chest, and I was like, Oh Jesus, I’m gonna die right now. I just hit this man they call Batman. They already say he’s a killer, a kidnapper, a murderer and a dope dealer. He’s gonna kill me.”

The Steakhouse often had live performances by blues acts, which drew an older crowd. Through spending time there, Batman realized he needed to grow up. He met with a bishop, and started attending church. “I started seeing things change from me being violent to something positive,” he says. In 1991, a neighbor gave Batman ex-football player and actor Jim Brown’s number. Batman met with Brown, and subsequently started working with his Amer-I-Can Program. Batman felt he had found his calling, and dedicated himself to helping others.

Batman and Karen were married in ’94. The wedding, which took place at Jim Brown’s house in the Hollywood Hills, was attended by rapper Ice-T, and received coverage in The New York Times and international newspapers. Throughout the late ’90s, Batman continued to work with Amer-I-Can, as well as with Project Corner Stone, Family Helpline and Jeopardy, the LAPD’s gang intervention program, and spoke in schools and prisons around the country. In 2000, Batman established Let’s Save the Babies, a non-profit organization that provides counseling to at-risk youth, promotes education and implements community programs. He has received countless awards and trophies for his work.

Forty years after the Crips were founded, Batman, now 52, resides in a Southern California suburb. Except for tattoos of three teardrops under his left eye and “Original Crip” on his neck, Batman hardly resembles the bandana wearing, gun-slinging man he once was. His story almost sounds like an urban legend—but he has the photos and police record to prove it.

While his life sounds exciting, Batman is careful not to glorify it. Through telling his story, he hopes to prevent others from following the same path. He realizes that it is a miracle he made it out alive and is here to tell his story today. Of the original 10 members of the Crips, seven are dead. The other two retreated from the streets long ago. Batman is the only one left who can tell the true story of the Crips from start to finish.

Batman with Pam Anderson...

The Singularity <<< the foreground to a new project /  by JoFF Rae

Robots constantly are being hired in various areas such as space exploration, health, public safety, recreation, protection, and many others. These machines, some fully autonomous and some depending on the human input, expand our capabilities, improve our skills and go for us in places where we tread dangerous. In this issue we are presenting pictures of robots and those who work with them.

[ please see references for images below ]

Technological singularity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A technological singularity is a hypothetical event occurring when technological progress becomes so rapid and the growth of artificial intelligence is so great that the future after the singularity becomes qualitatively different and harder to predict.

Basic concept

Vernor Vinge originally defined the concept in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, and argued that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what a post-singularity world would be like, due to the difficulty of imagining the intentions and capabilities of superintelligent entities.[1]. Some writers use "the singularity" in a broader way to refer to any radical changes in our society brought about by new technologies such as molecular nanotechnology,[2][3][4] although Vinge and other prominent writers specifically state that without superintelligence, such changes would not qualify as a true singularity.[1] Many writers also tie the singularity to observations of exponential growth in various technologies (with Moore's Law being the most prominent example), using such observations as a basis for predicting that the singularity is likely to happen sometime within the 21st century.[3][5]

Vernor Vinge proposed that the creation of superhuman intelligence would represent a breakdown in the ability of humans to model the future thereafter. He was the first to use the term "singularity" for this notion, in a 1983 article, and a later 1993 article entitled "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" was widely disseminated on the World Wide Web and helped to popularize the idea.[6] Vinge also compared the event of a technological singularity to the breakdown of the predictive ability of physics at the space-time singularity beyond the event horizon of a black hole.[7]

A technological singularity includes the concept of an intelligence explosion, a term coined in 1965 by I. J. Good.[8] Although technological progress has been accelerating, it has been limited by the basic intelligence of the human brain, which has not, according to Paul R. Ehrlich, changed significantly for millennia.[9] However with the increasing power of computers and other technologies, it might eventually be possible to build a machine that is more intelligent than humanity.[10] If superhuman intelligences were invented, either through the amplification of human intelligence or artificial intelligence, it would bring to bear greater problem-solving and inventive skills than humans, then it could design a yet more capable machine, or re-write its source code to become more intelligent. This more capable machine then could design a machine of even greater capability. These iterations could accelerate, leading to recursive self improvement, potentially allowing enormous qualitative change before any upper limits imposed by the laws of physics or theoretical computation set in.[11][12][13]

In his 1988 book Mind Children, computer scientist and futurist Hans Moravec generalizes Moore's law to make predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard,[14][15] in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.[16] In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, published in 1998, Moravec further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence, generalizing Moore's law to technologies predating the integrated circuit, and speculating about a coming "mind fire" of rapidly expanding superintelligence, similar to Vinge's ideas.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil also rephrases Vinge's concept of exponentially accelerating technological change in his law of accelerating returns, and includes material technology (especially as applied to nanotechnology), medical technology and others.[17] Like other authors, though, he reserves the term "Singularity" for a rapid increase in intelligence (as opposed to other technologies), writing for example that "The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains ... There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine".[18] He also defines his predicted date of the singularity (2045) in terms of when he expects computer-based intelligences to significantly exceed the sum total of human brainpower, writing that advances in computing before that date "will not represent the Singularity" because they do "not yet correspond to a profound expansion of our intelligence."[19]

The term "technological singularity" reflects the idea that such change may happen suddenly, and that it is difficult to predict how such a new world would operate.[20][21] It is unclear whether an intelligence explosion of this kind would be beneficial or harmful, or even an existential threat,[22][23] as the issue has not been dealt with by most artificial general intelligence researchers, although the topic of friendly artificial intelligence is investigated by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Humanity Institute.[20]

Many prominent technologists and academics dispute the plausibility of a technological singularity, including Jeff Hawkins, John Holland, Jaron Lanier, and Gordon Moore, whose Moore's Law is often cited in support of the concept.[24][25]

1. At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA's Robonaut R2A waves goodbye as fellow Robonaut R2B launches into space aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on February 24, 2011. (NASA/Joe Bibby)

2. Workers assemble a robotic King Kong creature in preparation for the show "King Kong: Live on Stage" at the Creature Theatre Company workshop in Melbourne, Australia. (AP Photo/Boneau/Bryan-Brown, Simon Schluter)

3. An unmanned U.S. Army vehicle developed by the Croatian company DOK-ING searches for IEDs set by insurgents in
Banadar Corridor, Garmsher District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, on April 20, 2011. (Bay Ismoyo/AFP/Getty Images)

4. Technicians monitor the MIS (Inspection Machine in Service) robot, which inspects the inside of the reactor's tank during programmed servicing and maintenance at the Bugey nuclear power plant in Saint-Vulbas, near Lyon, France, on April 19, 2011. (Reuters/Benoit Tessier)

5. U.S. President Barack Obama steps in to prevent a small robot from falling off a table during a demonstration of robotics at Miami Central Senior High School on March 4, 2011. Obama visited the school with former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Education Secretary Arne Duncan for an event on the future of education funding. (Reuters/Jason Reed)

6. HRP-4C, a five-foot humanoid robot developed at Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, sings and dances with performers at the Digital Contents Expo in Tokyo on October 17, 2010. The robot runs entertainment software called Choreonoid, a name formed from the words "choreograph" and "humanoid." (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images) 

7. An unmanned vehicle helps secure the runway at Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv, Israel on Tuesday, November 2, 2010. (AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)

8. Professor Cesare Santanini from the engineering high school Sant'Anna in Pontedera, Italy, displays a lamprey-like robot at the Engineering-Ecole des Mines in Nantes, France, during a bionic robots workshop on April 7, 2011. (Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images)

9. Children manipulate robotic arms during the Science and Engineering Expo on the National Mall in Washington on Saturday, October 23, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

10. An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator completes its first flight at Edwards Air Force Base, California, in this U.S. Navy photo dated February 4, 2011. The demonstration program will establish the capability of an autonomous, low-observable unmanned aircraft to perform aircraft carrier launches and recoveries. (Reuters/US Navy/Northrop Grumman/LTJG Shawn P. Eklund)

11. A robot produced by the electrical engineering department of the National Taiwan University mimics human facial expressions at the Taipei International Robot Show on October 19, 2010. The yet-to-be-named robot, which consists of a life-sized head and torso, was designed to show basic emotions for a more interactive experience. (Reuters/Nicky Loh)

12. A remote-controlled robot called Packbot opens a door inside the crippled Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima, Japan, on April 17, 2011. The robot's capabilities include maneuvering through buildings, taking images, and measuring radiation levels. (Reuters/Tokyo Electric Power Co)

13. An unmanned transporter carries debris through the tsunami-crippled Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima, Japan, on April 6, 2011. (AP Photo/Tokyo Electric Power Co.)

14. When Israeli entrepreneur Amit Goffer was paralyzed in a car crash in 1997, he began a quest to help other victims walk again. He invented an alternative to the wheelchair: robotic "pants" that use sensors and motors to allow paralyzed patients to stand, walk and even climb stairs. "ReWalk," a device that helps paralyzed patients stand and walk, is displayed on an office chair in the northern Israeli town of Yokneam on November 18, 2010. (AP Photo/Oded Balilty)

15. The fingers of Hao Liu, Professor of Biomechanical Engineering at Japan's Chiba University, hold a bionic hummingbird at the International Workshop on Bio-Inspired Robots in Nantes, France, on April 7, 2011. Some 200 bio-robot technicians from 17 countries participated in the three-day event, displaying robots inspired by the animal world. (Reuters/Stephane Mahe)

16. A robotic dinosaur is put through its paces as Nick Snyder, left, and Michael Olson, right, observe its movements on August 19, 2010. The dinosaur is part of a stage show called Walking With Dinosaurs at the Sullivan Arena in Anchorage, Alaska. (AP Photo/Anchorage Daily News, Erik Hill)

17. The "face" (or Mast Camera) of Curiosity, NASA's newest Mars rover, is seen at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on Monday, April 4, 2011. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

18. NASA engineers display the Mars rover Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on April 4, 2011. Curiosity is scheduled to be launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in the fall of 2011, and land on Mars in August 2012. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

19. A hand lens imager is mounted on the arm of NASA's Mars rover Curiosity at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, on April 4, 2011. The imager will take extreme close-up pictures of the planet's rocks and soil, as well as any ice it may find there. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

20. A mannequin's dilated eye is revealed during a demonstration at the Clinical Simulation Lab at Ivy Tech Community College in Columbus, Indiana, on February 23, 2011. Computerized mannequins are being used more and more often to augment training with live subjects in medicine and safety-related education. (AP Photo/The Republic, Joe Harpring)

21. At the Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis on September 1, 2010, physical therapist Ryan Cardinal watches six-year-old Anna Good walk in a Hocoma Lokomat lower-extremity robot. The hospital's Robotic Rehabilitation Center is using robots to help youngsters with cerebral palsy and other movement disorders improve the use of their arms and legs. (AP Photo/The Indianapolis Star, Joe Vitti)

22. A bi-rotor micro helicopter from the Marseille National Center for Scientific Research is displayed at the Bionic Robots Workshop at the Engineering-Ecole des Mines in Nantes, France, on April 7, 2011. (Damien Meyer/AFP/Getty Images)

23. Computer scientist Sebastian Bartsch directs a Space Climber -- a free-climbing robot designed to scale the inclines of extraterrestrial craters -- at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Bremen on November 22, 2010. (DAPD/Joerg Sarbach)

24. A man watches a piano-playing robot in action during the Taipei International Robot Show on October 19, 2010. Some 300 exhibitors from 66 companies took part in the four-day exhibition.(Sam Yeh/AFP/Getty Images)

25. The robot AILA (Artificial Intelligence Lightweight Android) is featured at the CeBIT IT fair on March 3, 2011, in Hanover, Germany. (Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)

26. A bomb-disposal robot inspects a jacket containing a pipe bomb near the Al-Hamra checkpoint in the northern Jordan Valley on March 25, 2011. An Israeli army spokesperson said soldiers discovered four pipe bombs on two Palestinian men, both of whom were arrested. (Reuters/Abed Omar Qusini)

27. At the NTT Research and Development Forum in Tokyo on February 22, 2011, a staff member tickles the ear of a robot to demonstrate "tactile illusions" -- simulations of ticklishness relayed by sound signals. (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

28. A bomb squad robot in Huron, Ohio, carries a suspicious object through the Kalahari Resort parking lot on April 14, 2011. Authorities later concluded that the item was a child's abandoned science project. (AP Photo/The Sandusky Register, Luke Wark)

29. Hailey Daniswicz, a sophomore at Northwestern University in Chicago, flexes muscles in her thigh as electrodes instruct a computer avatar to flex its knee and ankle on April 13, 2011. Daniswicz, who her lost her lower leg to bone cancer 12 years ago, is training the computer to recognize slight movements in her thigh so she can eventually be fitted with a bionic leg: a robotic prosthesis she can control with her own nerves and muscles. (Reuters/John Gress)

30. In this U.S. Air Force photo dated March 30, 2010, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle taxis on the flightline during testing. The X-37B is a 29-foot unmanned robotic spacecraft designed to reenter Earth's atmosphere intact. The vehicle spent 220 days in orbit during its first mission, returning on December 3, 2010. (Reuters/U.S. Air Force)

31. A robot is piloted off the field after throwing out a ceremonial first pitch before a baseball game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Milwaukee Brewers on Wednesday, April 20, 2011, in Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)

32. Student Jeremy Schafer takes part in a Lego robot competition at the Lincoln Community Center in Mankato, Minnesota on December 4, 2010. Students used laptops to program wheeled robots to complete scored objectives. (AP Photo/Mankato Free Press, Pat Christman)

33. On February 26, 2011, in Osaka, Japan, a humanoid robot called Robovie PC-Lite takes the lead in a 42.195 km endurance competition -- the world's first full-length marathon for two-legged robots. (Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images)

 

Starwars in Iconoscope /  by JoFF Rae

NEW: Episode IV & V - The Empire Strikes Back... 

from the graphic artist:

Have you ever wondered how Star Wars might be viewed in hieroglyphics? Or what if the movie was remade by IKEA? Well, wonder no more - I've sorted it out for you.

This Illustration shows how the story we all know and love can be distilled down into icons - no words are used (apart from the "SOS" icon).
I know I've missed a few scenes from this - but I had to cut it down somewhere or it would have gone on for another 20 steps. And I was getting tired.
I'm fragile: I work in the Creative Industry.
Enjoy.

Epilogue:

After posting this illustration to a few blogs it went hyper-viral. Our paid hosting account got hit by a whopping extra 70 gigs of bandwidth in around four days - which was great apart from we had to pay extra for it and it seemed to show no signs of slowing. So, that ended my old site and blog. But hey, every cloud.



About the designer

He's six foot-three slightly overweight ginger-bearded four-eyed socially awkward senior digital designer & illustrator Wayne Dorrington.
Designer and illustrator. living and working in London, 3 cats and a girlfriend called Anna (but not necessarily in that order). Work at Beyond http://www.bynd.com/ in Central London working with some cool clients like Google, Youtube, Sony Ericsson, Ebay, Paypal and more.

1968... Mexico Olympics /  by JoFF Rae

Watching the doco SALUTE - the story of Peter Norman, the white Australian who won the silver for the 200m at the Mexico Olympics... it's a story about Tommy Smith &amp; John Carlos making one of the most memorable statements of the decade I was bo…

Watching the doco SALUTE - the story of Peter Norman, the white Australian who won the silver for the 200m at the Mexico Olympics... it's a story about Tommy Smith & John Carlos making one of the most memorable statements of the decade I was born in!

The protest

On the morning of October 16, 1968,[2] U.S. athlete Tommie Smith won the 200 meter race in a world-record time of 19.83 seconds, with Australia's Peter Norman second with a time of 20.07 seconds, and the U.S.'s John Carlos in third place with a time of 20.10 seconds. After the race was completed, the three went to collect their medals at the podium. The two U.S. athletes received their medals shoeless, but wearing black socks, to represent black poverty.[3] Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to represent black pride, Carlos had his tracksuit top unzipped to show solidarity with all blue collar workers in the U.S. and wore a necklace of beads which he described "were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the middle passage."[4] All three athletes wore Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) badges after Norman, a critic of Australia's White Australia Policy, expressed empathy with their ideals.[5] Sociologist Harry Edwards, the founder of the OPHR, had urged black athletes to boycott the games; reportedly, the actions of Smith and Carlos on October 16, 1968[2] were inspired by Edwards' arguments.[6]

Both U.S. athletes intended on bringing black gloves to the event, but Carlos forgot his, leaving them in the Olympic Village. It was the Australian, Peter Norman, who suggested Carlos wear Smith's left-handed glove, this being the reason behind him raising his left hand, as opposed to his right, differing from the traditional Black Power salute.[7] When "The Star-Spangled Banner" played, Smith and Carlos delivered the salute with heads bowed, a gesture which became front page news around the world. As they left the podium they were booed by the crowd.[8] Smith later said "If I win, I am American, not a black American. But if I did something bad, then they would say I am a Negro. We are black and we are proud of being black. Black America will understand what we did tonight."[3]

 International Olympic Committee response

International Olympic Committee (IOC) president, Avery Brundage, deemed it to be a domestic political statement, unfit for the apolitical, international forum the Olympic Games were supposed to be. In an immediate response to their actions, he ordered Smith and Carlos suspended from the U.S. team and banned from the Olympic Village. When the US Olympic Committee refused, Brundage threatened to ban the entire US track team. This threat led to the two athletes being expelled from the Games.

A spokesman for the IOC said it was "a deliberate and violent breach of the fundamental principles of the Olympic spirit."[3] Brundage, who was president of the United States Olympic Committee in 1936, had made no objections against Nazi salutes during the Berlin Olympics. The Nazi salute, being a national salute at the time, was accepted in a competition of nations, while the athletes' salute was not of a nation and so was considered unacceptable.[9]

The official IOC website states that "Over and above winning medals, the black American athletes made names for themselves by an act of racial protest."[10]