Todd Stadler's blog

A farewell to 2006

Allow me to be the first to note that 2006 (the year, not the integer) has come to an end. And to be the first to bid it a fond farewell. It was a fine year. Hopefully, we'll see it hanging around here and there, perhaps on radio stations or whatever.

It was Julia's and my first full year of marriage. If our relationship keeps up like it has this year, we'll go to Scotland a lot. And that's what true love is about. Well, that and lots of hugs.

We started 2006 in Hawaii, in a small houselet that we shared with several geckos on the isolated eastern end of Molokai. As I remember, we went to bed early since Molokai isn't known for its nightlife. Or, for that matter, its traffic lights. The only indication I remember that 2006 had started was the sporadic noise of small fireworks, followed some time later by a siren — presumably of an ambulance or fire engine. Someone's new year was much more eventful than ours!

That wasn't the last ambulance that 2006 would bring — I left work in one a few weeks ago after experiencing the thrill that is "benign heart palpitations" (a question for whoever named it that: if they're so benign, why did I freak out? Huh? Huh?). But I hadn't mentioned this medical excitement to you, dear Blog Reader, because it ultimately amounted to nothing except for a very dramatic ending to my work week. And a few oddly shaped hairless patches on my chest. So it goes.

Let's see, what else to toss into this year-end review? There was the aforementioned trip to Scotland. And ... um ... that one brunch was pretty tasty ... I had a nice walk one day ... hm.

And that was the year that was.

I am a robot

Are you familiar with CAPTCHAs?

They're those computer-generated images of letters or numbers, whose alphanumeric contents you're required to key in in order to prove that you're a human and not a machine.

Well, it turns out I'm a machine (or at least "more machine now than man"). Won't my mom be surprised.

Fig. A: I failed this Turing test

I know that because today I failed the Turing test (those words — yes, both of them — are the "T" in "CAPTCHA") required in order to send an e-mail to an Earthlink account.

I realize that simple CAPTCHAs, such as a black-and-white number sequence in a single font, can be hacked pretty easily. Which has led some people, such as Earthlink, to devise ever more complicated images full of various colors, fonts, and other psychadelia. It's like trying to read a MySpace page.

But I think this particular front of the war may have to be ceded to the machines and the spammers who program them. Because I'm not sure what the actual letters are in the CAPTCHA presented to me (Fig. A).

I know this much: it's not "TNPDNnH". My next guess would have been "TNFDNnH", but I was instead presented with a different CAPTCHA, the contents of which were slightly more readable.

Or am I being too narrow in only considering the Latin alphabet? Is that third character actually a Cyrillic Њ or Ю? It bears some resemblance to ట (the Telugu letter tta, I'm told), but it could be one of those ણ (the Gujarati letter nna) I'm always hearing about. I'm not sure how artistic the Telugu or Gujarati get with their serifs. Look, my point here is this: I am capable of wasting a lot of time looking at Unicode characters, if not perhaps capable of measuring the similarity of glyphs.

(And yes, they did provide an audio option for visually impaired users, although it didn't work in Firefox. Nice. And when I got the sound to work in Internet Explorer, I heard an (intentionally?) computer-mangled voice that, frankly, scared me with its robot-in-distress-error-error-I'm-dying qualities.)

Still, I went to college, people! If I can't read the contents of your 60s-flashback image, then lots of other people can't, either. To say nothing of the children — oh, won't someone please think of the children!

That said, I've devised a few tests I think could do a better job of separating the humans from the robots (I'm not sure how cyborgs would fare, though). You'll need to have Javascript turned on for them to work:

The first test relies on humans' ability to grasp abstract concepts:

The second test relies on humans' logic-processing abilities:

The third test relies on computers' inability to understand basic literary concepts:

This final test has the added benefit of not only screening out spammers, but also keeping Alanis Morrisette from e-mailing you.