1) reCAPTCHA

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

[…]

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

This is such a neat idea. It really is a great example of that most clever type of design that draws on people’s self-interest to contribute to a greater good.

2. The Brick Testament

Someone has a) a good knowledge of the Bible, b) a weird sense of humor, and c) waaaay too much time on his hands.

3. My newest favorite XKCD comic

Is it weird that I’ve actually wanted to rappel down the outside of my office building for the longest time?

(Yes, I admit it: This post is a cop-out because I don’t have any original content right now.)