let us go: stumbling about

Four things I’ve stumbled upon lately:

• reCAPTCHA: this is an interesting twist on the “CAPTCHA” (”Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart”) tools that ask people to enter a distorted, digitized word to prove they’re not a spam-bot. It asks people to enter two words: one is a known entity, like the standard CAPTCHA key, but the other is a word that a book-scanning computer wasn’t able to convert from an image to text. By entering the second word, you’re helping the Internet Archive digitize texts that might otherwise be lost to the vagaries of time and dampness and bookworms (of the silverfish variety, of course; the human kinds tend to treat books a little better when digesting them). I heard about this on the Book Show from Australia’s Radio National, and just had to give it a whirl; not that I have a big problem with spam, and not that I have a whole lot of comments pouring in, but if you do leave a note and have to enter two CAPTCHA words, know that you’re doing your small part for the digital library.
• Mixed Emotions: I stumbled on this short-lived visual blog on the New York Times site while reading the book review section. Israeli illustrator Rutu Modan marries words and pictures in a series of wonderfully evocative “comics” (seems the wrong word entirely for the likes of Modan, Jules Pfeiffer, Lynda Barry, and Jean-Jacques Sempé, but “sequential art” seems so stilted). This a great series to lose yourself in for a little rainy-day browsing.
• Tom Hunter: photographer Tom Hunter captures the light and shadows most often associated with figurative painting in a series of interpretations (not stagings) of Vermeer and the pre-Raphaelites. He has a stunning control in these photographs, which appear to use available light; most are noted as being “Cibachrome prints”, which means they probably began as touchy slide film in the camera. I’m jealous.
• To catch a (butterfly) thief: a fascinating Midmorning broadcast from MPR on the subject of smuggling endangered species.