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Updated 101 Days ago
Mystery Science Theater 3000 Is Back...kind of
If you’re like me (aka “a dork”) then you love Mystery Science Theater 3000. It ran for 10 seasons (7 seasons on Comedy Central and 3 seasons on Sci-Fi). In case you’re unaware, MST3K (as the fans called) was about a man shot into space by mad scientists and forced to watch bad movies. He then built robots to watch the movies with and, much to the consternation of the mad scientists, had great fun mocking the movies with his new friends.
The viewers would watch the movies along with silhouetted versions of our heroes along the bottom of the screen. We were then treated to their running commentary throughout the film. It’s the sort of thing you’ve probably done with your friends on more than one occasion: sit and make fun of lousy movies. Except these guys were way funnier than your friends. (Sorry, but it’s true.)
Well, now the creator of the show, Joel Hodgson, is getting the original cast back together for a new venture called Cinematic Titanic. While the back-story hasn’t been entirely revealed, the basic premise is the same: watch bad movies and make fun of them.
The cast includes Joel Hodgson (Joel Robinson), Trace Beaulieu (Crow, Dr. Forrester) and J. Elvis Weinstein (Tom Servo, Dr. Ehrhardt) along with longtime writers and co-stars from the show’s 10 year run, Frank Conniff (TV’s Frank) and Mary Jo Pehl (Pearl Forrester). It’s a straight-to-dvd venture but don’t let that deter you. So far they’ve released three DVDs to much critical acclaim.
If you want to see some footage click the Video tab.
Well now you can see Cinematic Titanic LIVE. They’ll be at The Family Arena on Saturday, November 1. No word yet on what movie they’ll be riffing on but rumor is that it will be a horror movie to celebrate Halloween. If you’re an MST3K fan, this is probably the closest you’ll ever get to an MST3K live show. So don’t miss out.
Tickets are on sale now at metrotix.com.
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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.
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.