RTFA: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/235

Leonardo Da Vinci’s life and work is well known — but his own face is not. Illustrator and activist Siegfried Woldhek used some thoughtful image-analysis techniques to find what he believes is the true face of Leonardo. Here, he walks viewers through exactly how he did it.

Siegfried Woldhek knows faces — he’s drawn more than 1,100 of them. Using sophisticated image…

Wow! This 4-minute video packs an amazing punch: the identity of Da Vinci. It’s a wonderful story that ties together several historic images, of and by Da Vinci. In the end of the day, of course, it’s a matter of choosing to believe Woldhek’s analysis or not…

But if Woldhek is right, then this constitutes astonishing reality-hacking. Da Vinci made himself into THE symbol of all humanity through his most famous self-portrait: The Vitruvian Man. The image perfectly and implicitly contains critical information about the proportions of the human body (ensuring its lasting utility in understanding humans), while simultaneously being conspicuously tagged in the most identifying way possible.

The Vitruvian Man isn’t just “some dude.” It’s Da Vinco, himself! It’s such an epic hack by virtue of lurking in obscurity for so many centuries, and by virtue of how deeply the image embedded itself into our culture. WOW.

Via boingboing.

RTFA: http://www.cnn.com/2007/HEALTH/10/05/appendix.purp…

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut. That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week. For generations the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors figured it had no function. Surgeons removed them routinely. People live fine without them. And when infected the appendix can turn deadly. It gets inflamed quickly and some people die if it isn’t removed in time. Two years ago, 321,000 Americans were hospitalized with appendicitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Interesting.

RTFA: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7023627.stm

Many websites use an automated test to tell computers and humans apart when signing up to an account or logging in.

The test consists of typing in a few random letters in an image and is designed to fight spammers.

Carnegie Mellon is using this test to help decipher words in books that machines cannot read by letting sites use them to authenticate log-ins.

The test, known as a CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Turing Test To Tell Computers and Humans Apart), was originally designed at Carnegie Mellon to help to keep out automated programs known as “bots.”

Can a million monkeys sitting at a million computers even READ Shakespeare?