captcha this.

captcha, and more specifically, re-captcha, is a pretty neat idea. if you're not familiar with it, it was originally designed as a system for verifying that person on the other end of a web browser is in fact a person, and and not a 'bot. re-captcha steps it up by not only verifying that people are human, but uses them at the same time to perform a task that computers are not good at. in the case of re-captcha, it shows you images two words, one of which it knows and one which it does not and asks the reader to type them in. the assumption is that if you type in the one it knows correctly, you probably also typed in the one it does NOT know correctly. this way, the re-captcha system can identify the text in images. they use it for digitizing books where the optical character recognition software has trouble.

try it out!

long story short, i get a kick out of it every time i'm presented with one because i know what's going on behind the scenes. and today was no different, except i was presented with this image, which i wasn't quite sure how to type: