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Updated 89 Days ago
Rockin' You Like a St. Louis Hurricane
Hurricane Gustav is on its way to the 'Lou, but they aren't going to call it a hurricane by the time it reaches us. It's just the "remnants" of the hurricane. Too bad they don't call them hurricanes when the storms are around these parts; if they did we would have scientific grounds upon which we could truly call our weather the worst in the nation. Still, technically, we have thunderstorms, humidity, snow storms, tornados AND hurricanes coming through our lovely city.
Though we may not be allowed to scientifically claim hurricane weather, St. Louis will get a different weather honor during this year's hurricane season: the next two named hurricanes (or tropical storms) will share a name with two famous St. Louis singers: Ike (as in Ike and Tina Turner) and Josephine (as in Josephine Baker). It would only get better if Nelly was on the list, but Hurricane Nellie came through in '85 so that won't be happening.
I propose that St. Louis should be able to have hurricane parties anyway, if only this year to honor Ike and Josephine. I have heard, "there ain't no party like a hurricane party," and to get uninitiated St. Louisans started - here is an article on "how-to" throw a hurricane party.
About The Author:
Got a story you want to share, or just need someone to talk to? Email Me! melody@toastedrav.comI have a penchant for pizza, a love of books, and a strong cup of coffee always makes me smile. When I'm not writing for ToastedRav I like long walks on concrete sidewalks, hanging-lamp lit dinners, and a good bottle of Shiraz.
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If the parties good, who cares about the weather, right! I'm sure the Scorpions would agree. (Do you think they know Nellie?)
http://www.weather.com/outlook/recreation/boatandbeach/map/interactive/63141?from=36hr_maps&zoom=8&interactiveMapLayer=radar
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.