How Fast Are You?

Katz Deli: Corned Beef, Mustard, on Rye

And you thought I was wasting valuable bits on the intarweebs. There’s a tumblelog called Scanwiches that appears to contain nothing but scans of someone’s sammiches.

Actually, the more I look at them, the hungrier I’m getting. Mmmm, sammiches!

Tip o’ the Blue Plate to El.

Hildegard

Our new secretary, Hildegard, has laid down the law regarding the filing situation around here. From now on, categories will be categorized in the following manner, categorically, says she:

Art and Design — Dance, Design, Pin-up, Advertising, Sculpture

Books — Stuff We’ve Read, Writers

Culture — Atheism, Copyleft, Cosplay, Events, Men, Religion, Sex, Women

Commentary — Feature Articles, Opinion, Rants

Epicureanism — Food, Drink, all manner of sybaritic delights

Film and Video — Movies, Television, Short Films, Online, Broadcast

Music — Listening to Music, Making Music

News — Real News, Fake News, Site News, Newsie News, Infoporn

Photography — Taking Photos, Admiring Photos, Manipulating Photos

Ping — Location, Microblogging, Status Updates

Public Interest — Ecology, Law, Politics, Privacy and Security, Public Interest

Science — Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Cognition, Health, Inventions, Mind Hacks, Physics

Technomancy — Internet, Inventions, Toys and Gadgets, Privacy and Security

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make her a fresh pot of coffee. Hildie spank when we serve her burnt coffee.

UPDATED to add Epicureanism

You know those little boxes of warped letters and numbers that you see on web forms? Where your job is to type in the characters in the box? That’s part of something called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart), and their purpose is to make sure your a human, and not some horrible little SPAM bot.

It turns out that all the people on all the interwebs solve a whole bunch of CAPTCHA puzzles each day, and the good people at Carnegie Mellon University have figured out a way to put those human computing cycles to work digitizing books, newspapers and old timey radio shows. They call it reCAPTCHA.

About 200 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.

You can add reCAPTCHA to your site for free, and put your readers to work for the common good. They have plugins and code for blogging software like WordPress and Movable Type, CMS packages like Drupal and Joomla, as well as modules for PHP, Ruby, Python, JSP, and a whole mess of other platforms and languages.

They don’t have a Flash version yet, but I wouldn’t be suprised if some clever code monkey contributes one of thoes too.

Bindi loves her bat

Oh bother. Someone pointed me to Anamigo, a blogging site for pets. Now The Precious Puppy Princess will want her own blog. Not that she doesn’t deserve one, but I have my hands full with paying clients. Web work for family members is more than I can bare.

Plus, I find Anamigo’s language more then a little creepy:

And then there’s the name. You usually only see that caliber of word play in hair salon names.

Via Neatorama.

Quick blog and run stats:

• Opened May 14, 1935
• Closed for renovations January 2002
• Renovation funded in part by a donation of $1 million from Leonard and Susan Nimoy “which led FOTO and the City to name the new lecture hall in the renovated and expanded Observatory the ‘Leonard Nimoy Event Horizon’ in honor of their contributions.”
• Reopening “late-fall” or “end of” 2006, depending on the source

Can’t wait for the reopening. Gonna take The Bad Kitty and Miss Ivy (who’s never been!) and her hubby, who’s a science geek, and a swell time will be had by all.

Via Caryn Coleman over at Metroblogging Los Angeles.

Boringly formatted but somewhat extensive listing of, public art in Los Angeles, just like the title says. Most of the photos are only so-so, but it still makes for a long list of possible places to visit on a lazy weekend.

Via Art.Blogging.LA.

In what may be best use of technology ever, the Van Nuys Iceland icerink has bumber cars on ice! Now I know where to take the Bad Kitty for our next anniversary!

Wait, what’s this? A video!

Via Metroblogging Los Angeles

Here’s a recap of the email link buffet from the last few weeks:

» Where the Trolls come from
» Sweet little duckies
» Winter is coming (hint, hint)
» DIY Lip Balm
» DIY Extension Art
» Recycling Meme
» Now that’s a thrift store
» An interesting, longish essay by David Brin
» Oh fishy, fishy, fish! Now you fish really can
» Bollywood Comic?
» Outdoor Art
» Feet Art
» More Feet Art (they’re local!)
» Oh Man! If only it wasn’t a Mac! (’cause friends don’t let friends join cults)
» Just for our favorite cultist
» Knitted Knucks
» Now _that’s_ art
» Work less, it’s good for you
» All times and music eastern
» Pillow threat
» Plate-mail is making a comeback?
» Avast
» On Thunderbirds and Stringrays
» Weren’t you at Target yesterday?
» Paintings executed in the dust on a Mini’s windscreen
» BBWW: The Fat Wonder Woman Blog
» Richards Confirmed For Pirates 3