Stop spam! Read books! Woo hoo!

I think most everyone on the web these days is familiar with the captcha, a mechanism for proving that you are a human. The word captcha actually an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart", and they manifest themselves in the form of tests that require you to read the text in an image that has been distorted in a way that fools OCR, but doesn't fool humans. You know, these things:

It's a good idea, even if they can be annoying. (Particularly if the captcha is difficult even for a human to read).

Enter recaptcha.net. The creators of the captcha have teamed up with the Internet Archive to digitize public domain books. If you have a website, you can sign up on their website to use captchas provided by recaptcha.net. That way, when your users verify their humanness, they are also typing in a couple of words from an actual book in the Internet Archive. A few thousand users later, and you've digitized the whole book, two words at a time. To prevent error, they have words digitized more than once by different people.

It looks like this:


That is a pretty good idea. Pretty, pretty good.

Zohar

I'm sure I'm not the only one that was fascinated by our discussion of the Zohar today (we're not trying to exclude anyone, but there was an offline discussion about Zohar today). I thought I would gather some links to share with everyone. Let's continue our discussion, or rather, begin further discussion in the comments. Here you go:
http://www.kabbalah.com/11.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohar
Extensive Public Domain Translation of Zohar

Sorted Books Project

Excerpt from http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/:

The Sorted Books project began in 1993 years ago and is ongoing. The project has taken place in many different places over the years, ranging form private homes to specialized public book collections. The process is the same in every case: culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from. Taken as a whole, the clusters from each sorting aim to examine that particular library's focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies — a cross-section of that library's holdings. At present, the Sorted Books project comprises more than 130 book clusters.

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