Creepy cartoons and CS researchers

I have fallen for the charms of The Comics Curmudgeon, a blog by a man with a keen eye for the underlying pathos and deeply disturbing dark innards of your newspaper's comics section.

Whoa ... creepy. I was just watching UWTV, and saw myself in the audience of a seminar on quantum computation - our department's seminars are routinely featured there. A couple weeks ago my advisor said to me "Hey, I saw you asking a question on TV last night!" (he was watching a talk by Luis von Ahn, who has earned my envy by winning a MacArthur grant).

Speaking of Luis von Ahn, his research is interesting stuff. What he's done is take a lot of tedious, repetitive tasks of collecting information - for example, labeling all the images on the Web - and solve them by designing online games which are fun to play, but, as a side effect, actually have the users indirectly solving these problems. The game Peekaboom is an example of this - it seems like a straightfoward two-player game, but the resulting gameplay is used to collect keywords relevant to a particular digital image.