Commenters here might have noticed that, this week, PooterGeek acquired a new CAPTCHA, that is a test to check that you are, er, “human” before your comment is accepted by the system. It’s to discourage spammers from clogging up this blog with links to their poker, porn, and Viagra sites. The PooterGeek CAPTCHA is basic: you are merely asked to provide a one- or two-character answer to a very simple question in English.

Will the Vulgarian sent me a link yesterday evening to a very interesting and entertaining lecture. Speaker and CAPTCHA inventor, Luis von Ahn starts with an explanation of what a CAPTCHA is and then goes on to outline the fascinating business of what the calls “human computation”. Like Blaise, Luis is witty, a freakin’ genius, and certain to become absurdly rich. This is why I enjoyed noting that he doesn’t know what “statistically significant” means.