BB reader Hagrid says, "I just blogged this stunning 1943 colour photo, released by the Library of Congress on Flickr. It turns that WWII icon, 'Rosie the Riveter,' on her head, by presenting her as she really was: African-American. Love the nails and ring, incidentally."

(Editor's note: there were surely many shades of "Rosie," but that diversity is often overlooked.)

Previously: Library of Congress uses Flickr to crowdsource tagging and organizing its photo archive

Here's episode three of the delightfully demented video tutorial, You Suck at Photoshop.

Previously on Boing Boing:
• You Suck at Photoshop #2
• Funny tutorial: "You Sucjk at Photoshop"

Here's a list of words that (mostly) describe sexual behavior.

Faunoiphilia (FAW-nay-FIL-ee-uh) - An abnormal desire to watch animals copulate.

Brassirothesauriast (bruh-zeer-oh-thuh-SAW-ree-ast) - A person who collects brassieres or pictures of women wearing them.

Eunoterpsia (YOO-noh-TURP-see-uh) - The doctrine that pursuing sexual pleasure is the goal of life.

Typhlobasia (TIF-luh-BAY-zee-uh) - Kissing with the eyes closed.

Amychesis (AM-i-KEE-sis) - The involuntary act of scratching or clawing your partner in the heat of passion.

Mammaquatia (MAM-uh-KWAY-shee-uh) - The bobbing or jiggling of a woman's breasts when she walks, dances, or exercises.

Ozoamblyrosis (OH-zoh-AM-bli-ROH-sis) - Loss of sexual apetite because your partner has wicked B.O.

Amomaxia (AM-uh-MAX-see-uh) - Love-making in a parked car.

Colpocoquette (KAHL-puh-koh-KET) - A woman who knows she has an attractive bosom, and who makes good use of its allure.

Melolagnia (MEL-uh-LAG-nee-uh) - Amorous feelings inspired by music.

Link (Via sexoteric NSFW)

Google invited me to create an example theme for its new iGoogle Themes API. The theme changes throughout the day to tell a little story.

I also worked on a gadget with RSS feeds for the different blogs, videos, and podcasts I contribute to. You can add the theme and gadget to your iGoogle page here.

The iGoogle Themes API allows you to personalize iGoogle by modifying the page's design. Your theme can modify the header and footer images, text colors, link colors, gadget frames, and more. Your theme can also update the page's design based on time of day. This makes it easy to create a story that unfolds throughout the day, landscapes that change as the sun rises and sets, and abstract images that become more complex. Creating a dynamic theme is as simple as specifying a time with a theme's visual attributes.

You can see other example themes by Yves Behar/fuseproject, John Maeda, and Troy Lee here.

Link

Noah Shachtman at Wired's DANGER ROOM blog says:

This is beyond ridiculous. The federal government is now going to track every farm animal across the country, from birth to death, because it wants to watch out for the extremely faint possibility of a bioterrorist attacking the food chain.

Snip from LA Times article:

A Bush administration initiative, the National Animal Identification System is meant to provide a modern tool for tracking disease outbreaks within 48 hours, whether natural or the work of a bioterrorist. Most farm animals, even exotic ones such as llamas, will eventually be registered. Information will be kept on every farm, ranch or stable. And databases will record every animal movement from birth to slaughterhouse, including trips to the vet and county fairs. But the system is spawning a grass-roots revolt.

Link to DANGER ROOM post.

Image: "Three Pigs," from Xirzon's photostream.

This looks like an illustration, but it's a photo by Masato Ohta from the Japan HDR Flickr Photo Pool. Link

Previously on Boing Boing:
• Flickr group produces astonishing color pix with new plugin
• Introduction to HDR (high dynamic range) photography
• Stunning HDR shot of Tokyo skyline

The proprietor of the "I am Not Lying" blog took these photos of a smashed up Sharper Image karaoke Elvis-bot his friend found in Brooklyn.

It looks much better this way than it does out of the box, don't you think? Link

Sean T. Collins of Attention Deficit Disorder has created a presidential milkshake list that tells you all you need to know about the candidates. Here are a few:

I drink your milkshake, even though I opposed drinking your milkshake four years ago. -- Mitt Romney

I drink your milkshake, but only if the Bible says it's allowed. -- Mike Huckabee

I may drink your milkshake for another 100 years, if that's what it takes. -- John McCain

I drank a milkshake on 9/11. -- Rudy Giuliani

I drink your milkshake, but I'm paying for it with gold. -- Ron Paul

I will fight the corporations so that you can drink your own milkshake. -- John Edwards

I have 35 years of milkshake-drinking experience. *sob* -- Hillary Clinton

I peacefully drink your milkshake. -- Dennis Kucinich

Link

Brian Hughes of "Again With the Comics" has an advice column called "Ask Golden Age Wonder Woman," in which questions from the lovelorn are answered using actual panels from old issues of Wonder Woman, surely one of the most crypto-fetishistic comics of the Golden Age.

I hope Brian makes this a regular feature of his excellent blog. Here's one of four Q&A's on his blog:

Dear Golden Age Wonder Woman -

I’ve known my best friend since second grade, but things have been strained between us ever since I got married. Carol has remained single, and I can hardly speak to her anymore without hearing mean remarks about marriage or my husband! She seems jealous and resentful of my marriage, and angry that she’s still single. Recently, she told me that she saw my husband at a bar kissing another woman, and has demanded that I confront him about it. I don’t believe her, but she says that if I don’t talk to him about it, she’ll break off our friendship! What should I do?

-Conflicted in Cleveland

Link

Why are these men smiling? Because they are about to launch a bunch of Bert dolls into the sky. Enjoy this short video. Link (Via Otomano)

bart van de vel
pixelgirl presents
imaginary world
chickenhead
adult swim
maxalot
chaoskitty
k10k on display exhibit
desktop

Web Zen Home and Archives, Store (Thanks Frank!)

Image: wallpapers at maxalot.com, this one is "MXL_Inka" by eBoy.

Rebecca sez, "One lawyer is threatening another over the use of the term "cyberlaw," which he says he's trademarked. As the post (by EFF's Corynne McSherry) says, that's like a soda company trying to trademark the word soda."

Eric Menhart may call himself a cyberlawyer, but we think he has a lot of learn about cyberlaw -- and common sense. Menhart is the author of a blog about cyberlaw issues called, logically if not innovatively, "Cyberlawg." (As he says in the top right corner, "Cyberlawg = Cyberlaw + blog.") And he is "principal attorney" in a firm called "CyberLaw P.C." OK, OK, we get it, he practices technology law. Based on this, he's applied for a trademark on the use of the term "cyberlaw" in connection with the practice of, um, cyberlaw. That's like a soda company claiming a trademark in the use of the word soda in connection with the sale of soda. Or an apple farmer claiming a trademark in the use of the term apple in connection with the sale of apples. Or ... well, you get the picture.

Link (Thanks, Rebecca!)

Life After People is a new TV documentary airing on the History Channel that attempts to forecast what our planet would be like if we were gone. It premieres this coming Monday, January 21. Looks like a lot of post-apocapalyptic fun! From the show's mini site:

Abandoned skyscrapers would, after hundreds of years, become "vertical ecosystems" complete with birds, rodents and even plant life. One small animal might be responsible for bringing down the Hoover Dam hydroelectric plant. Swelled rivers, crumbling bridges and buildings, grizzly bears in California and herds of buffalo returning to the Great Western Plains: In a world without humans, these would be the visual hallmarks. Our cars would shrivel to piles of dust, our house pets would be overtaken by flourishing wildlife and most of the records of our human story -- books, photos, records -- would fade quickly, leaving little evidence that we ever existed.

Using feature film quality visual effects and top experts in the fields of engineering, botany, ecology, biology, geology, climatology and archeology, Life After People provides an amazing visual journey through the ultimately hypothetical.

The 1986 nuclear power plant accident at Chernobyl and its aftermath provides a riveting and emotional case study of what can happen after humans have moved on. Life After People goes to remote islands off the coast of Maine to search for traces of abandoned towns, beneath the streets of New York to see how subway tunnels may become watery canals, to the Montana wilderness to divine the destiny of the bears and wolves.

Link (Thanks, Jason Tester!)

Here's a 1994 video from Charile Rose of famed animator Chuck Jones drawing Wile E. Coyote.
Link to Coyote sketch video, Link to full interview (via Drawn!)

Researchers at Stemagen claim that they used skin cells from two men to create human embryos. The embryos did not develop past around 100 cells, the blastocyst stage, but that wasn't the point, said Stemagen CEO Samuel H. Wood. The aim, he said, is to derive stem cell lines from cloned embryos. From the new York Times:

It is not clear whether the embryos would have been viable if implanted into a womb. Stemagen did not test whether the embryos had the correct number of chromosomes. But Dr. Wood, who also is a fertility doctor, said, “We’ve seen reproductive blastocysts that look like this or worse and they implant.”

He said Stemagen, which he started with a wealthy friend in 2005, was not interested in creating cloned babies, something that is illegal in places and morally repugnant to many people. Rather it wants to make stem cell lines for research and medical treatments.

Link

Common Space designer Jon Santos created this handsome Houndstooth Dogtent for the first annual Freemans Sporting Club design/build camping trip. Jon says:

The design initiative called for a homemade primitive luxury commodity, "taking the rough out of roughing it." I reached out to my good friend Matt Penrose who works for Cereplast, a small company which distributes (yet to be properly termed) bio-degradeable plastic. We made a Dogtent for Louie, his boxer. One that can be rolled up and put into its own bag. Early design ideas were very ambitious but ultimately we were at the mercy of working with a material that was only available to us in sheet form, rolled up. Loomstate was nice enough to donate some organic cotton for the tent lining.

Link

Honey bees are dying in vast numbers and nobody knows exactly why. As honey bees are responsible for pollinating a third of the crop species in the US alone, this phenomena, called Colony Collapse Disorder, is potentially very bad news for everyone. "Vanishing of the Bees" is an independent documentary currently in production about this ecological nightmare and its potential impact. The trailer is beautiful, provocative, and deeply moving. I hope the filmmakers gather the funds to complete the full movie. Link (Thanks, Kelly Sparks!)

Robots are used on battlefields to fight wars, but today on BBtv -- an infomercial for robotic revolution from the Institute for Applied Autonomy. Founded in 1988, the group describes themselves as:

... a technological research and development organization dedicated to the cause of individual and collective self-determination. Our mission is to study the forces and structures which affect self-determination and to provide technologies which extend the autonomy of human activists.

Those technologies include a grafitti-spraying robot to denounce The Man, a cute and seductive pamphleteer, and a txt app for your phone, so you can invite all your pals to come riot.

Next in today's episode: animated square-headed beings from the beautiful genius minds behind Peppermelon.tv.

Link to BBtv episode with video and comments.

Love this August, 1935 article from Science and Mechanics magazine about the hulking, three-ton ballistic computers -- reminds me a lot of the way that Asimov and Heinlein both wrote about "big brains" in their fiction over the next couple decades:

The "fire, control" machines, now used to plot the flight of shells from modern guns in moving ships, against moving targets, deal with practical conditions like this; and the machine pictured could answer a question of this nature, as well as a good many others less specialized. For instance, three or more heavenly bodies (like Earth, Sun, and Moon) are moving in their orbits at different rates of speed and varying distances, attracting each other. What will be the combined result of their forces, in changing the positions of each, in a given period? It is an enormously difficult proposition for the best mathematician in the world. With this machine, its ten "integrators" would be adjusted (by setting dials) to represent the varying factors of the problem, and then started turning. The friction discs and gears of the machine would operate on each other, each of them with an effect proportioned to the energy and speed it represented; and, on the final chart at the "answer table" of the machine (see illustration) a curve would be drawn by a metal pen, representing the formula desired (not necessarily a physical picture of the motion of one of the heavenly bodies, but a mathematical picture of it).

Link

Grimur sez, "This is a video of a robot performing a Nativity play. This was the contribution of the robotics department of deCODE genetics to the annual company-wide Christmas decoration competition. The lyrics are in Icelandic, by the comedy group Baggalútur." Link (Thanks, Grimur!)