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Updated 69 Days ago
St. Louis Wine Festival: Tasting for A Good Cause
This Saturday and Sunday there will be a gathering of St. Louisans sporting purple lips and teeth at the Grand Basin in Forest Park for the St. Louis Wine Festival. There will be more than 200 wines for tasting, live music, wine seminars, and cooking demonstrations. A portion of the proceeds from the event will benefit The Flora Conservancy of Forest Park (the group implementing the Forest Park Master Plan).
To get you ready for the event and to help you narrow down which wines to choose from the more than 200 tasting options you can take the "What Kind of Wine Are You Quiz." Here are my results:
| You Are Chardonnay |
 Fresh, spirited, and classic - you have many facets to your personality.You can be sweet and light. Or deep and complex. You have a little bit of something to offer everyone... no wonder you're so popular. Approachable and never smug, you are easy to get to know (and love!). Deep down you are: Dependable and modest Your partying style: Understated and polite Your company is enjoyed best with: Cold or wild meat |
While Chardonnay is all cool and stuff, I was kind of hoping I would be a Shiraz... The St. Louis Wine Festival is this Saturday from noon until 7pm and Sunday from noon until 6pm. The cost for the event is $25 per taster (which gets you a wine glass, 10 tasting coupons, a program, admission to all seminars, and discounted wine purchase prices) and $10 for a designated driver (which gets you two non-alcoholic drink tickets, admission to seminars, a program, and a tasting glass when you leave).
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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Goes great with Lion's Choice!
Says I go Great w/ greasy pizza, Arby's & Good Friends! (yes, Arby's)
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.