Keep on Keepin' on
I'm at work. Watching a little line creep up with one dot a minute as the temperature goes up. Just waiting until it flattens out. Then, I get to do something exciting- turn up the voltage and go back to watching. Yeah, about as fun as watching paint dry. I'm hoping to get out of here by 6 so I have a good cushion to get home before SN and can catch the train wreck that is Smallville or part of the Lost recap episode.
In the mean time, I've found something addictive to play with online today. I heard about this a couple months ago on WiredScience on PBS, but just came across it in use today. You know those annoying scrambled looking letters you sometimes have to decode to register at a webpage? They are called Captchas and a group at Carnegie Mellon has decided to put all that decoding work you do to good use. Captchas are designed to prove you are a real human, not a bot, by showing you letters that a computer can't read. The guy who invented them thought it was awful wasteful to make people decode these things without getting anything out of it. So he came up with this cool idea, why not use text from scanned books that the computers are not able to read and have people decode that instead of randomness. That way, when you are decoding the captcha, you are actually helping to digitize books. They've even got a webpage set up so that you can just play with it, digitizing books. (It also has a lot of details about how it all works).
See ya on the flipside!
ETA: I'm not getting out of here until 7 probably. :(
In the mean time, I've found something addictive to play with online today. I heard about this a couple months ago on WiredScience on PBS, but just came across it in use today. You know those annoying scrambled looking letters you sometimes have to decode to register at a webpage? They are called Captchas and a group at Carnegie Mellon has decided to put all that decoding work you do to good use. Captchas are designed to prove you are a real human, not a bot, by showing you letters that a computer can't read. The guy who invented them thought it was awful wasteful to make people decode these things without getting anything out of it. So he came up with this cool idea, why not use text from scanned books that the computers are not able to read and have people decode that instead of randomness. That way, when you are decoding the captcha, you are actually helping to digitize books. They've even got a webpage set up so that you can just play with it, digitizing books. (It also has a lot of details about how it all works).
See ya on the flipside!
ETA: I'm not getting out of here until 7 probably. :(