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Updated 161 Days ago
The cost of eating and drinking
Is all this talk of rising costs, inflation, interest rates, and such really impacting your life?
This morning we awoke to headlines about rising food prices and easing inflation. If prices are going up, isn't that inflation?
OK. That aside, have you noticed a change in prices at the grocery store? They say food prices went up .9% in March. That's a big number according to these economy guys. Everybody likes to wave their arms and act like we're falling into the second great depression every time numbers like these come out.
But what is .9% anyway? Every time you blow a hundred bucks at Sam's, it costs an extra dollar? So if you spend $100 a week at the store, you spent $4 more last month. Not a huge deal, though it becomes more worrisome if we see jumps like that several months in a row.
It's costing a lot more to buy corn these days. There are two reasons for that: a weak dollar causing people around the world to buy all their grain from us, and this whole ethanol thing. There's plenty of debate as to whether making gas out of corn is just a way to line the pockets of farmers in states with powerful congressmen. 
(And farm owners everywhere. Did you hear David Letterman is getting a government farm subsidy?)
The biggest price increase I've noticed, (other than gas) has been beer. A twelve pack of many brands has gone up two bucks or more since I moved here in October. Now that's serious!
What's my point? The economy being "good" or "bad" is all a matter of perspective. If a couple of bucks at the grocery doesn't bother you, then the economy is fine. If you're on a tight income or you're trying to sell a house, there's a problem.
The thing I've noticed most is how all the politicians want to tell you how bad things are. They preach it to voters and the media, and it ends up being written about twice as much. That way we'll vote for said politicians to fix all that's wrong. Hmm. Are people benefiting from all this panic?
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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.
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Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.