idea dump

idea: commission someone to take a foreign language youtube song and create a version with subtitles in both that language and english, as a language learning tool.

idea: mturk app for sorting photos — you point it at picassa or dropbox, and it tells you which photos are worth showing your friends.

idea: create heroku app that serves random numbers with json-p. it can initialize a mersenne twister from random.org as often as their api allows, and serve pretty-darn-random numbers without rate limiting issues.

cool thing a friend made where people improve on each other's sketches: http://sketchabit.adamsmith.as/ and http://sketchabit.adamsmith.as/master.php

a couple notes about humanscript:

• I original thought the "big idea" was writing instructions in an imperative way, but I think the real insight is writing instructions in such a way as to never need to communicate with the person doing the work — the real power comes from just getting a result, with no management.
• humanscripting requires architecting a project differently — more UNIXy — since it's easier to specify a self-contained module than to specify how to mess with the "glue" code at the core of a project. this seems like a skill that people will need to learn, like learning to program.