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Updated 103 Days ago
Showbiz Pizza Band Rock-AFire Explosion : Documentary Coming This Fall
Independent film company Window Pictures, is releasing a documentary this fall about the animatronics band you may remember from your Showbiz Pizza days - The Rock-AFire Explosion. Creepy or nostalgic? You decide. Click the Video tab to check out the trailer.
You can visit the film's Facebook page and MySpace page to stay up to date on the pending announcement of the documentary's release date. But wait, there is more. You can cruise over to ShowbizPizza.com and join the legions of fans (yes, they really do exist) as the talk about the yearly convention on the message boards (there is a rumor that next year's convention may be very close to St. Louis), you can learn about the history of the ShowBiz and Chuck E Cheese chains at ShowBiz Pizza University (did you know the first ShowBiz was opened in Kansas City, MO in 1980), and you can buy collectibles through the site as too. It's a whole subculture.
There are ShowBiz and Rock-AFire explosion fans out there who have collected the old animatronics to preserve them in all their creepiness glory. So good are these preservation efforts that the band is now making appearances all over You Tube covering songs like Usher's "Love in This Club," Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," and No Doubt's "Spiderwebs."
I wonder if the band is available for weddings and corporate events...?
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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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.