Killing Two Birds With One Watermelon | Salvation Is A Pop Song

Killing Two Birds With One Watermelon
23rd
December

Posted by Brennan Novak on Dec 23, 2008 in

I always say that "killing two birds with one watermelon." People rarely acknowledge it and even more rarely laugh. I'm not sure why that is. My intention is to simultaneously reanimate a dead metaphor and elicit a chuckle- as a high school chess club friend of mine once said "every move must have more than one purpose" I try to apply that principle to my life and humor. It kinda makes sense right? I'm starting to see that sorta thinking in the world around me and it is awesome.

The first instance of a dual-process system like this that I have encountered was when I learned about the web technology company ReCAPTCHA. I'm sure you've seen one of their CAPTCHA's before if you've filled out enough website registration forms- it's one of those annoying little boxes with the scrambled letters that you must enter the correct letters before you may proceed. Ok so you have. So what? Those annoying things are everywhere. What's so special about that one?

CAPTCHA an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart were created to do just that. The goal is to generate a word that only a human can identify, because computers nowadays can analyze image data and decipher letters and numbers, because we've designed them that way. It's called Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and it used for great things like the digital archiving or books and bad things like harvesting email address & data for internet spam. But often times the OCR can't decipher certain words.

The special thing about ReCAPTCHA is that they saw a human problem (verifying a human user) and a computer problem (not being able to identify certain words scanned by an OCR) and devised a brilliant solution to solve both problems at the same time.

The next company I came across that does this, albeit in a very different context and through different means, is TOMS Shoes.

TOMS' mission is to provide 1st world customers (who can afford a $42 - $68 designer slippers) and 3rd world children (who badly need of footwear but can't afford anything) a decent slipper. One could look at this as a sort of transparent form of Robbin Hoodery or as a responsible type of dual-process capitalism.

As the world shifts to a new economic and political paradigm perhaps we should look to cultivate this way of thinking with how we create and how we do business. Imagine fast food deep fryers that output biodiesel, garment companies that recycle used fabrics, passenger trains that act as mobile office buildings, and childhood education that merges two subjects into one.