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Updated 53 Days ago
R.I.P. Circus Animal Cookies
The Dow just closed at its lowest amount in 5 years. The average 401K is valued at slightly less than an Atari 2600. And now the axe of recession has swung once more. This time the victim is…Circus Animal Cookies. Their parent company, Mother’s Cookies closed its doors on Monday with no advance notice. That’s right, the economy is so bad that Mothers are going out of business.
Good God! What has this world come to when a short, fat dude can’t Circus Animal Cookies. These were the only animals you could eat without Peta kicking in your door. How’s a guy supposed to get diabetes now?
Won’t someone think of the children? How do you explain this to a 5-year old?
“Well Bobby, the housing bubble combined with Sub Prime mortgage abuse has caused money markets to break a buck. And I don’t have to tell you that money markets fund commercial paper. Once commercial paper stopped flowing, business-to-business transactions came to a screeching halt.”
See how easy that is? Sheesh! It’d be easier to tell a kid that Santa Claus has AIDS. I think I’m just going to tell my kids they can’t have Circus Animal Cookies because we don’t love them anymore.
Maybe the lazy kids should just make their own cookies.
RIP Circus Animal Cookies. You will be missed.
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(looks like a good recipe though, thanx. Tough times require tough measures, BYO...bake your own :)
Hurry before it's too late...I just might get there before you!
I told him the Easter Bunny had "been around." He never listens.
What is reCAPTCHA?
reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You've probably seen them Ñ colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from "bots," or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.
About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.
To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.
reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.
Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.