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Updated 96 Days ago
Whether You Scrabble, Collect Coins or Just Want to Go Fly a Kite, St. Louis Has a Club for You
by Audrey Holaday in "Quirky St. Louis"
Whether you're new to the area or just looking for something to do, joining a club or organization is a good way to become more involved in what's going on around you in The Lou. It's pretty easy to find a soccer club or a community service club, but here are a few other options for those who choose the road less traveled.
- Have you ever wanted to fabricate a bicycle that was as light as air? Or finagle a daisy out of an inflated, flexible material? Fortunately, you can learn to make that and more at the Balloon Twisting Club. Silly Jilly, a St. Louis-based clown, encourages any would-be rubber artists to attend.
- If you would rather spend an afternoon in the park on a windy day holding a string, there is a club for that, too. The Gateway Kite Club flies their kites all over St. Louis and its surrounding areas, and you don't even have to be a member of the club to join them in flight. Summertime pizza socials and a scary-kite Halloween activity offer fun for all ages.
- Are you a "W-I-Z-Z-A-R-D" with words? St. Louis' chapter of the National Scrabble Association, Club #610, claims that "There is no membership fee, but we encourage you to patronize our hosts." The club meets week at Schlafly Bottleworks, and if you prove yourself to be good enough, you might make the club's Top 10 Ranking.
- The closest coin club, aka the St. Louis Numismatic Association, is more about showing off and trading coins than it is about learning to flip them. It has 350 members and holds two shows each year. Meetings are held on the last Friday of each month and are followed by an auction. Don't worry, you don't have to correctly pronounce "numismatic" in order to participate.
- Dust off that pink corvette and its passengers, because all dolls are welcome at the St. Louis Fashion Doll Collector's Club. Although the many fashionable varieties of Barbie are preferred, this club doesn't discriminate. Tickets are only $3 for the club's upcoming doll show, and for a price that small, all doll enthusiasts should jump at the opportunity.
That's only a handful of the under-the-radar clubs that St. Louis has to offer. What other lesser-known clubs are you attending?
About The Author:
I just moved back to The Lou from CoMo and I'd love to hear from you. Shoot me an idea/comment/bored rambling at audrey@toastedrav.com.I am also an expert at the Chicken Dance, and I am willing to give lessons for a small fee.
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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.