The annual Robogames expo took place this weekend in San Francisco. Scott Beale shot some great photos here. And here’s an interesting GETV video clip in which Violet Blue interviews Monty Reed, who built a robotic exoskeleton to help disabled people walk. Mr. Reed was inspired to design the “They Shall Walk” robo-suit after he became paralyzed in a parachute accident.
Snip from CNET story:
Google has made child pornography an “obscenely profitable and integral part” of its business and must be stopped, a new lawsuit claims. Jeffrey Toback, a Democratic representative in New York’s Nassau County Legislature, charged in a complaint filed Thursday that Google has been taking in billions of dollars by allowing child pornography and “other obscene content” operators to advertise their sites through sponsored links, which are tailored to a user’s search terms and automatically accompany search results. The suit was filed in the New York Supreme Court. (…)
A Google representative said Friday that the company prohibits child pornography in its products and removes all such content whenever the company finds or is made aware of it. “We also report it to the appropriate law enforcement officials and fully cooperate with the law enforcement community to combat child pornography,” spokesman Steve Langdon said in an e-mail.
Langdon pointed to the content policy for Google’s AdWords sponsored links service, which broadly prohibits “promotion of child pornography or other non-consensual material.” Langdon also noted that Google offers a filtering tool called SafeSearch that aims to block offensive content in search results.
Link (Thanks, violet blue)
A new documentary about heavy metal music history explores the musical phenomenon known as “The Devil’s Interval,” which was suppressed by church authorities during the Middle Ages. Snip:
On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner’s Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons. But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil’s Interval by medieval musicians.
A rich mythology has grown up around it. Many believe that the Church wanted to eradicate the sounds from its music because it invoked sexual feelings, or that it was genuinely the work of the Devil. It is a mythology much beloved of long-haired guitar wizards.
Link to BBC News story with audio examples. Link to movie website for “Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey.” (Thanks, Coop!)
Reader comment: Judson says,
Here’s a song my band did in the early eighties called ‘fucker’s concert’ based on the evil tritone: MP3 Link
Reader comment: Dave Hoffman says,
I thought I’d throw in this song I wrote and performed with a band called I Need Sleep based on the tritone. It’s about Oliver Cromwell. You can find it at this address.
Reader comment:
fuutott says,
The sound which the Tripods in the movie “war of the worlds” (2005) emit to signal each other and induce fear in the humans is actually, in musical terms, a tritone – also known as a diminished fifth. The tritone was used because it is known for causing distress to the human ear, being only a half-step away from a perfect fifth chord. Link
Reader comment: Violet Blue says,
It is also called ‘Diabolus in Musica’ and
was used in a song of the very same name by Jim Thirlwell, aka Foetus.
I own the CD, it’s an awesome piece of music. Jim is also a longtime
friend around the SRL shop.Here’s an interview with him: Link.
And
on his site, the album with Diabolus song, with notes from Thirlwell: Link.
Excerpt follows, after the jump.
More…
BoingBoing pal Todd “Telstar Logistics” Lappin shot photos of demonstrations in San Francisco today, including this one, a skyscraper’s-eye view of the crowd moving down Market street. Link to Todd’s photos from today’s SF protests.
At left, another photo of SF “Day without an Immigrant” protests from above, this in the opposite direction. Via Violet Blue on sf.metblogs.com. Link to full-size.
BoingBoing reader Julie Ruvolo in San Francisco says, “I posted some photos and short videos on my blog this morning — our office overlooks Market Street.” Link
Related BoingBoing posts about the May 1 marches: Tampa, Los Angeles part 1, New York City, Tijuana, Portland, Chicago, Seattle, Los Angeles part 2, Los Angeles part 3. An update on reports that police used excessive force on protesters in MacArthur park is here.
HOWTO embroider this frisky little content status indicator for your dishwashing machine: Link (thanks, Violet Blue!)
A cerebral meditation on why deathmotifs in clothing look badass: “Ever since pirates first sailed under the skull and crossbones, it has been associated with death. Now, this morbid symbol flies again in the upcoming fashion season.” Link to Sleek Magazine item. Image: a model shows off a design from Gori de Palma’s 2006-2007 collection. (Thanks, Susannah Breslin!)
Update: Whoah, there’s a weird story behind the t-shirt design shown here. That thing inside the rib cage is a fetus, made for a princess. Link (Thanks, Violet Blue!)
Found on YouTube, this trailer for a 1970s female yakuzasploitation film: live action sequences interspersed with beautifully stylized line drawings. Warning: contains exposed boobs, a “heinous crotch-gouge” episode, and hot babes with swords (all in less than 30 seconds!)
Link to “Female Yakuza Tale.”(Thanks, Reverse Cowgirl!)
Update: Whups, looks like this was blogged a couple of days ago by Violet Blue here on tinynibbles, and also over at Fleshbot. Interesting background at both.
Violet Blue has posted an extensive tutorial on surfing web porn safely. It’s full of pragmatic tips on how to avoid popups, virii, and bad link hygeine, and includes helpful privacy pointers, too. Snip (links mine):
I list the bad things that porn (and travel and pharmaceutical) sites do, things you can do to avoid them, how to clean up your computer when you’re done, and I offer basic tips on foiling stalkers and sites that cache your history. Not to mention basics, like not using your real name in fetish forums and marking your Amazon wishlist as private, should you decide to stash some sexy books for later that you don’t want *just anyone* to see.
On top of all that, I suggest a handful of ethical porn link sites (like Fleshbot) and give practical advice for parents who’d rather not trust their kids’ surfing to ethically questionable censorware (for instance, Secure Computing’s “SmartFilter” has the awesome teen advice site gurl.com in the same category classification as “escort services”, which should turn anyone’s stomach).
It’s written from the POV of a porn-lovin’ girl — me. I’ve been working on it all weekend and I hope it makes wanking online better for all of us; finding good porn is difficult enough as it is. It’s a work in progress that I’m inviting everyone to contribute to, in the spirit of Tiny Nibbles’ open source sex mission.
Link to Violet’s intro, and here’s the HOWTO. Image photoshopped by “Food_Motivated” on SomethingAwful (Link to thread, thanks Rich Dubielzig)
I’m several days late getting to this one, but better late than never: Violet Blue tells BoingBoing,
The Blank Noise Project is a blog-a-thon that Indian women did on March 7 to raise awareness about “eve teasing.” This extreme form of public sexual harassment happens to women in India all the time — from horrifically early ages, onward. Women and young girls are threatened for wearing jeans and t-shirts, their tits are grabbed and pinched by any man who wants to, and more. The list of female Indian bloggers is really amazing to look at and their blogs are fascinating, from their excellence in English to the frightening stories of harassment they tell, and the other details of their lives, like trying to decide daily fact from fiction with bird flu hysteria.
Link (via Mark Pritchard)
Girls, don’t you hate it when your tool bag doesn’t match the hot pink mini and gogo boot set you happen to be wearing when you find yourself suddenly stranded on the highway? God I hate it when that happens. No more: this Barbie-colored bag contains everything from ice scrapers to jump leads. Link, and dig the general-purpose toolkit in the same color, Link. (Thanks, Violet Blue!)