Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So what did he do? With the advent of reCAPTCHA, every time you solve one of those annoying verification puzzles you are helping to decipher and digitize some of the 150+ years of non-digital, non-computer recognizable NY Times archives that exist as scans or microfilm. Keep in mind, this started last year and Ahn expects to be done by the end of 2009.

Some other interesting notes:

The Empire State Building took 7 million human-hours to build.

The Panama Canal took 20 million human-hours to build.

9 Billion Human-Hours of solitaire were played in 2003.

Granted, the energy output of a game of solitaire is not equal to one of manual labor, but think about the scale of this. Thanks to Nova Science Now for bringing this up.

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