Voluptuous Mad Men star Christina Hendricks has been moonlighting as an Etsy model. As a male friend noted, this may be the first time the website, known for offbeat crafts and lumpy hand-crocheted scarves, has managed to give so many men a boner.

Remember the fantastic video I posted in April of a robot folding laundry? The UC Berkeley researchers behind that breakthrough are now attempting to teach a robot a new chore: pairing socks. "The PR2 is presented with two socks. It then classifies each sock as either "inside" or "outside" and flips accordingly. — Read the rest

Italian mobsters are allegedly sending messages to their bosses in prison via the ticker of text messages streaming during a popular soccer TV talk show. From ANSA.it:

"The messages often seem ordinary but in reality they hide important service notes to the bosses" (said prosecutor Enzo Macri reporting to the parliament's anti-Mafia commission.)

The US Department of Justice is looking to hire (and I quote), Ebonics experts, to help monitor, translate, and transcribe the secretly recorded conversations of persons who are the subject of narcotics investigations. The Smoking Gun has details, and scans of the original documents (a detail is shown above). — Read the rest

[ Update: Since this post was originally published, Facebook has responded to Boing Boing with further clarification on their existing ad policies. A Facebook rep tells us the ad in dispute crossed the line because it contained an image of a pot leaf, which current policy prohibits. — Read the rest

Video link. These beautifully composed and lit motion portraits are kind of a mashup between our recent 1906 color photo feature and Flickr long portraits. (Thanks, Gwen Smith!) — Read the rest

Pleasant dreams!

This NSFW photo brought to you by Liz McLellan, aka "hyperlocavore." (via @Ethicurean.)

Technology shaped the evolution of our big brains, not the other way around, says archaeologist Timothy Taylor. In an interview on Gizmodo he explains his evidence that technology came before big brains, and why tools were so important to our ancestors' development. — Read the rest

When it launches for a sub-orbital jaunt into the heavens on Aug. 31, the Danish-built HEAT1X-TYCHO BRAHE will carry a crash-test dummy. Eventually, though, the team behind the rocket—all volunteers, and led by Something Awful forum members—hope to put an in-real-life person inside. — Read the rest

On the Submitterator, tcd004 points us to Israeli director Yael Hersonski's "A Film Unfinished." It's about found footage from a Nazi documentary rough cut, produced by the Goebbels Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Goebbels had a two-fold urgency to his work: short-term use as war propaganda, but also long-term use as historical propaganda of a race of people he thought would soon be extinct. — Read the rest

Photo © Bruno Broomfield, courtesy National Geographic

In the photograph above, 6-month old Jennifer, an albino girl, plays with beads outside her home in Tanzania. This African country has the world's largest proportion of albinos, but discrimination and violence against this population run high: in the past 20 months, 57 people with albinism have been hunted and their bodies butchered for parts used in ceremonies. — Read the rest

[photo: Glen E. Friedman, click for larger size.]

Earlier this morning Glen E Friedman got a call from pal Russell Simmons asking for help on a new project to send a message about the current Ground Zero Mosque hullabaloo. — Read the rest

Over at Credit.com I reviewed one of my favorite books, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini.

How is it that door-to-door salespeople, marketers, car dealers, politicians, strangers, con artists, and cult leaders are able to persuade people to do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do?

Over the weekend, the staff of Longshot Magazine (previously known as 48 Hour Magazine) hid $750 somewhere in San Francisco. Now they've revealed four clues on their web site — including this treasure map by Wendy MacNaughton — to help you find it. — Read the rest

Please don't tell anyone that this is, in fact, a completely fake "e-liquid" review for the electronic cigarette/vaping community created by prolific video-lulz creator Liam Lynch. It would be better for the internet if everyone believes it's real.

RavenVapes5v510 does yet another e-liquid review for a rare Mega-level nicotine RY4 by Vapor Station.

Tara McGinley at Dangerous Minds spotted this terrific gallery of nice large images from 2001: A Space Odyssey. "High-resolution" is an awfully subjective term, and I'm not sure if these qualify… but let's just say I've never run across such an extensive collection of reasonably large JPEGs from the film, all in one place. — Read the rest

It takes a filming speed of 200-to-500 frames per second to capture the fast-moving world of the hummingbird at a level where we can really see what's going on. So what are hummingbirds up to? Videographers for a Nature documentary caught hummingbirds foraging for insects, bonking each other on the head in order to get access to a tasty flower, and living happily in high mountains where they hop along the ground to feed off plants growing close to the soil. — Read the rest

Photo: Dan Cole

In 2007 I reported that Eberhard Faber Blackwing 602 pencils were selling for $30 each on eBay. The manufacturer stopped making them in 1998 (the retail price at that time was 50 cents). Since then, the price has gone up to about $40 per unsharpened pencil. — Read the rest

As a Midwesterner who didn't get a chance to fall in love with New York City subways until 2002, it's fascinating to take a trip back to the system's not-so-glory days, courtesy a collection of 1980s-era photos on Sean Kernick's 2 4 Flinching blog. — Read the rest