If You Care About Using Your "People Cycles" Effectively ...

... then don't read blogs. Otherwise ...

The precocious Luis von Ahn, assistant professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University, created ReCaptcha http://m.news.com/2166-12_3-9989480-93.html and other computer tools to harness wasted "people cycles". Here is a quote from the article:

By the time the average American has turned 21, researchers estimate that he or she has spent about 10,000 hours playing video games--that's the equivalent of holding down a full-time job for five years. In 2003, players collectively spent 9 billion human hours on the game Solitaire. In contrast, building the Empire State Building took only 7 million human hours, or the equivalent of a collective 6.8 Solitaire hours.