Captcha

I was reading my soup of internet randomness the other day and came across an article about CAPTCHA - the little squiggly letters that help websites determine your humanness. Like pretty much everyone else in the world, I assumed them to be a necessary evil - leaning a little more to evil. But, I had no idea the real purpose and benefit.

As someone who really marvels at magnitude of human creative and intellectual production, that someone (or ones) had the idea for this is pretty freakin' awesome. The squiggly letters used in reCAPTCHA are actually contributing to the betterment of the whole human race. All those annoyingly difficult to decipher letters are really parts of old manuscripts that you are helping to digitize. 200 million of these are solved each day contributing way more man hours than any organization could conceivably as they attempt to digitize and preserve books that were written before the digital era. Computers often have difficulty discerning old typefaces and handwriting while your human eye does not. Two birds, one stone and preservation for posterity!