iRape

Stamp Out Violence Against Women and Girls of the Congo
by omnipeace

The dirty little secret of the consumer electronics boom is that a lot of the sexy little gadgets you use every day are made from minerals that help fund what this video says is “the deadliest conflict in the world since the holocaust.”

Sometimes, I Just Have to Wonder

What exactly is wrong with our society that we would need televisions embedded in our bathtubs and medicine cabinets? More on this “Dr. Seuss-on-acid” designer here.

What Would John Quincy Adams Tweet?

Apparently, his diary while minister to Russia–or, at least, that’s what the Massachusetts Historical Society is doing for him, two-hundred years later.

This just goes to show that, sometimes, visitors to archives and museums can spark innovative ideas, like the high schooler who commented that Adams’ diary entries were so short, they looked like Twitter updates. More here.

What If Every Time You Turned on the Lights, a Child Was Harmed?

It happens every day in Appalachia. Due to our dependence on coal produced by mountaintop removal mining, communities are poisoned, mountains are blown up, and the people that have lived in these areas for generations are sickened. How do you feel about this being done in your name?

Wind energy would provide more jobs for more people, wouldn’t poison the people, or blow up the mountains.

Stop Spammers! Digitize Books! Why reCAPTCHA Is reALLY Cool.

You know those annoying, hard to read images you have to decode before signing for accounts like Myspace and Facebook, or before making a comment on Blogger posts? Those are the work of one single man, Professor Luis von Ahn, created in 2000 to stop spammers from generating millions of new email accounts daily. Computers can’t read the codes, so this slows the spread of spam throughout the internetz. This completely unintelligable mixture of wavy letters and numbers is called CAPTCHA, or Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart. But it doesn’t stop just there. One day, Dr. Luis von Ahn thought–you know, while humans are wasting their time figuring out these codes, why not put them to work? Why not have something good come out of this otherwise completely wasted time?

That’s when he created reCAPTCHA, which takes words and numbers from historic books and newspapers that the computers couldn’t read, and allows people to digitize them for groups like Google Books and the Internet Archive. To provide even more security, the words that the computer couldn’t read are distorted even more to stop spammers. This was combined with a traditional CAPTCHA, so that there were now two different puzzles for users to solve. It is estimated that between 125-150 books per day are being digitized as a result of reCAPTCHA. It is also estimated that the back issues of The New York Times will be finished being digitized in the next year with the help of reCAPTCHA.

See? And you just thought it was annoying and hard to read. For more information, click here.

Actually, Stalkerbook Isn’t All That Into You

I just read this article about what happens when Facebook suggests exes of yours to be friends. Apparently, I’m supposed to be fearing some Big Brother-esque action that suggests exes, just to mess with me. Uh?

Okay, that’s just stupid, I’m sorry. I’ve actually had exes of mine show up as suggested friends, and, while I didn’t want to see their faces, I simply clicked the button to never, ever show her face again to me, thanks. Drama over.

So why is there is long dissertation fretting over what the Facebook Gods really want with your love life? Seriously, lady? Do you go shake your Magic 8 ball before making all important decisions, too? This isn’t complicated. Facebook has no way of knowing what happened between you and another person. It can’t read your mind. It’s just a website. So, I’m sorry to be the one to inform you of this, but, oh, how do I put this? It just isn’t all that into you. I’m sorry. Also, the Earth orbits the sun, not you.

It had to be said.