Technology Ramblings

Letters and numbers are the two eyes of man. - Thirukkural (392) Numbers, the oldest and greatest invention by the man kind, are the base for measurements, without which no useful inventions could ever be made. The objective of this post is to think through the representation of measurements, particularly the counting, in ancient tamil culture. Ancient tamil culture : Measurements are broadly classified into 7 parts. Counting ( எண்ணல்) Weight ( நிறுத்தல்) Liter for liquid ( முகத்தல்) Volume for solid ( பெய்தல் ) Length ( நீட்டல்) Time ( தெறிப்பு) Comparison ( சார்த்தல்) Let's limit the scope only to counting for this post. Counting are generally classified into two parts Chitrilakkam - Fractions. Perilakkam - Whole Numbers. The following shows the names given for the fractions: The following shows the names given for the whole numbers: Other measurements include 100 crores is Kumbam ( கும்பம் ) 1 lakh crores is Sangam ( சங்கம் ) 1 ...

After nearly two and half years of inactiveness, I'm reloaded back to throw more ramblings in the open space of internet. The plan is to have a weekly journal on an idea or a product, that I understand or learnt that week. Let's get started and this week's cynosure is "reCAPTCHA" We, often, see sites that ask us to enter the content of a distorted or skewed image of letters or numbers, that is known as CAPTCHA. The widely known fact is that it enables the site to distinguish a human from any automated bots or scripts. It is so reliable, that vast number of sites are using it, and about 200 million captchas are answered by humans in a day. Roughly it takes about 10 seconds per person to answer a captcha. In summation, each day more than 150,000 hours of human effort is consumed by these Captchas, which does nothing more than confirming that the detail is entered by a human. Could this human effort be used for a higher purpose? Yes. The answer...