CAPTCHA, “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, are the funny words websites sometimes use to make users prove that they are human. In the test, the user types out the letters in a word that is so messy and distorted that no computer can read it.

The words that come up in CAPTCHA tests are normally randomly generated, BUT, in a stroke of crowdsourcing brilliance, scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have found a better source. They have started a service called reCAPTCHA that crops words from old documents, which need to be digitalized but are too badly damaged to be read by computers, and uses them in CAPTCHA tests.

Websites get a test to prove that users are human, and users unwittingly digitalize the equivalent of 160 books a day…brilliant.

Something everyone should scope out, and take minute to see how they feel about it.

Lets say Montreal made graffiti legal tomorrow… what are the odds that every blank piece of pavement or brick or concrete ends up looking like the walls of a bathroom stall.

Leaving it illegal after seeing what Peter Gibson (aka Roadsworth) was doing in the streets seems unsatisfactory as well.

I can’t help but think the only way forward is for artists to make known what they can do, and just maybe stir up a a demand to actually generate some grants and commissions to do this kind of work legitimately. Or rewrite the laws to define graffiti as marks made on public surfaces which are non-rad. But graffiti is a great word. Perhaps we call the sort of stuff Roadsworth puts out graffiti, and rename the bad stuff.

Shittiti.

Which would not include this.

Now that you’re all caught up in Röyksopp’s latest jams, you can appreciate this post even more. The duo have posted a top 5 “leave it to the pros” to make sure you don’t look like a fool out there in this dreamer’s world of ours.

Coming in at number 5 we’ve got my favourite: Pillow Fights.

5. Pillowfights (as foreplay) – “Fun for 5 seconds (just enough time to get in one punch each) then the novelty wears off. Only works in movies – ´cause getting a few kilos of goose-feathers in your nose isn´t really sexy nor fun, now is it? Although the idea of a pillowfight between two playful lovers might seem attractive, it doesn´t really work in real life. We say leave it to the pros, namely actors in Romcoms & other places of make believe.”

From there on out we have:

4. Stardom
3. Beatboxing (I hear the folks over at RAD have their beats extra tight)
2. Wine Expertise
1. Racial Jokes

Check out the post to see what they’ve got to say about each, and keep it in mind next time your at a wine tasting and want to show your boss your vocal percussion skills.

Aaron Koblin is creating art for the information age.  The image above, a portion of the piece Ten Thousand Cents, is really ten thousand tiny images drawn by different people and stitched together.  Each person was shown a tiny slice of a hundred dollar bill, and asked to recreate what they saw, without knowing what the end result would be.  Recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labour tool, a project of this magnitude would have been almost impossible without the internet.  These “mass collaborations” are a frequent medium for Koblin; check out the Sheep Market and Bicyclce Built for Two Thousand.

Anika Engelbrecht’s got to have something going for her, because she’s officially blown my mind. Her swell vasen is something to behold. The vases themselves would never hold water, but hold the shape of a balloon of your choosing. The practiacally comes from the availability to change the balloons to a color of your choosing. Tie-die anyone?

What’s better than solid gold bling? Solid edible gold bling, of course. Mike Clare has managed to break the ground of fashion with his ripe project.

Hungry? Just unclip the foil banana from your gold chain and chow down. Better yet, take the foil off the peel and make yourself instant grillz.

Here’s something to make up for the lack papercraft that we’ve been featuring lately, something to get involved in. Artist Horrorwood has put out an open invitation to all papercraft artists and designers, to modify his original design.

Tougui has stepped up to the challenge with his character on the right and as more designers up the ante Horrorwood is posting them as they pile in.

Think you’ve got the chops to create your own racer? Take the challenge, but don’t forget to send it our way as well, we’d love to see what our readers can do.

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I think that just by nature of being old, designs can become more interesting.  These Fortune magazine covers have stood the test of time and have the water stains, yellowed paper, and creases to prove it.  The imperfections create some tangibility in the image; the give it realness and character.  Of course the designs themselves are simple and classic, and that certainly helps.  But if you were to recreate these images in Illustrator, like I did here, they lose a lot of their appeal.

A design doesn’t have to actually be old, I suppose.  It just has to look the part.

They may have just about the ugliest website on the internet, at least by 2009 standards, but what they lack in aesthetic they make up for in pure content.  With literally tens of thousands of vintage magazine covers and movie posters up on display, the Ad Art Gallery over at Nostalgiaville can be forgiven for their crimes against web standards.

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A – Appendages
B – Bioengineering
C – Caffeine
D – Dirigible
E – Experiment
F – Freeze ray
G – Goggles
H – Henchmen
I – Invention
J – Jargon
K – Potassium
L – Laser
M – Maniacal
N – Nanotechnology
O – Organs
P – Peasants (with Pitchforks)
Q – Quantum physics
R – Robot
S – Self-experimentation
T – Tentacles
U – Underground Lair
V – Virus
W – Wrench
X – X-Ray
Y – You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow
Z – Zombies

I can only imagine how my career in science would have flourished if I played with A Young Mad Scientist’s First Alphabet blocks as a child instead of lego.  Not only do these ingrain typical science jargon into our tykes (G is for Goggles), but they foster that inner Dr. Frankenstein by introducing a strictly Mad Scientist lexicon (H is for Henchmen, U is for Underground Lair).

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go contain my fissile plutonium isotopes.

I always knew this day would come.  The day when tiny, featureless, golden robots reveal themselves from their hiding spaces beneath our bookshelves and appliances and assert their superiority with a tiny, cold, fist.  It was only a matter of time, really.

I, for one, welcome our new tiny robot overlords, and their creator Daniel loves Objects.

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