Only vaguely related

One of the joys of the weekend is catching up on some reading. Although I'm a great fan of the internet I also love magazines. An article in Wired magazine (also available online here) on the advantages humans still hold over computers made me smile. Sometimes people are real smart. You know those little distorted strings of numbers and letters you have to type in on some sites to prove you aren't a robot? Well apparently they are called captchas (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart). But the next generation of them will be in two parts. The first will be the actual test (which the computer knows the answer to) but the second will be something that couldn't be deciphered by the Internet Archive's project to scan public domain books (a smudged or faded word perhaps). So in the course of everyday transactions millions of people will be helping to correct machine read text. Cool.

Also, in The Week magazine, a weekly compendium of the best US and International journalism, I came across this quote by John Kenneth Galbraith:
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

This time last year: Family History