Today's Mighty Oak


Alright, let’s see what’s going on today.  First up, in case you didn’t hear, from the lips of Mitt Romney and Lucille Bluth:

And on that note, the Million Muppet March.

And in case you forgot, the testimony from Mr. Rogers in front of the US Senate that saved PBS:

And lastly on the subject, from my favorite astro-physicist:

In more political news, the PA voter ID requirement has been delayed, but the state is lagging behind getting that information out here.  Rachel Maddow’s show had some fun with it:

As a complete and total no-brainer, access to contraception reduces the abortion rate.  Thankfully, Obamacare does just that, provides free and available contraception options to women.

And lastly in politics today, this is floating around, but give it a watch, it’s great:

There is a new captcha system, that brings light to human rights abuses.  Pretty awesome if you ask me:

And leaving politics for a little bit, for those of you eager to celebrate Halloween, check out how to make this awesome pumpkin keg.

Or even better for Halloween, printable poison labels:

That’s it for now, have a great one!



One of the blogs I read all the time is JOHO (Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization).  He was live-blogging a talk given by a CMU professor, and I was drawn into this awesome use of Captchas:

He says that about 200M captchas are typed every day. He was proud of that until he realized it takes about 10 seconds to type them, so his invention is wasting 500,000 hours per day. So, he wondered if there was a way to use captchas to solve some humungous problem ten seconds at a time. result: ReCAPTCHA. For books written before 1900, the type is weak and about 30% of the text cannot be recognized by OCR. So, now many captchas ask you to type in a word unrecognized when OCR’ing a book. (The system knows which words are unrecognized by running multiple OCR programs; ReCAPTCHA uses those words.) To make sure that it’s not a software program typing in random words, ReCAPTCHA shows the user two words, one of which is known to be right. The user has to type in both, but doesn’t know which is which. If the user types in the known word correctly, the system knows it’s not dealing with a robot, and that the user probably got the unknown word right.

Pretty cool use of everyone’s time!  Check out the entire article here

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