I learned an interesting factoid that I thought I’d pass on. You know those annoying little captcha that you have to fill out to prove that you aren’t a robot?

Well, it seems those buggers are doing more than just annoying the snot out of people. Those double word recaptchas are helping to translate digitalized books.

You read that right.

You see most of the words that are scanned from a print book end up being nonsense words, so the designers of captcha decided to use the collective human need for social interaction to help translate those untranslatable words.

But there’s a catch. Since the computer doesn’t know what the scanned word is supposed to say, it must include a word that it does understand. So one word is the test and the other words helps to translate books.

Pretty cool, huh?

Okay, maybe I’m still going to be annoyed at those prove you’re not a robot tests, but at least I can try to remember that I’m helping to translate books.

And I love books.

Until next time.