Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[Machka]

i am constantly getting those things wrong

As long as you get the "known" word right you'll be fine.  Knowing which is the "known" word then becomes your only problem!

[Tal]

You can usually click an icon with these for the word to be spelt out orally (I assume for the blind/visually impaired). Helps negotiate the neck-bending awkwardness associated with trying to work the wonky letters out!

That's seriously interesting tho. Consider it pilfered as I shall be dropping that bad boy in at some opportune moment with the lads.

[TightEnd]

Mick Jagger is 69 today

In 1962, 18yo Keith Richards wrote to his Aunt about meeting Jagger for the first time since childhood

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/he-is-called-mick-jagger.html

[hector62]

For the benefit of anyone who looks at that letter Shane Fenton went on to achieve fame when he became Alvin Stardust.

[tikay]

I will try & answer a few of the comments questions today.

I think some of the stuff Posted on here on Wednesday was the best stuff ever, thank you.

Just so busy here, & was rapt with excitement yesterday, reading the mowning about whether lawn mowers should be pushed or pulled in Tom's Diary. Incredible stuff.

[TightEnd]

"what will be the next most watched event of 2012? It might be the closing ceremony. It won’t necessarily be the men’s 100m final, which many people would expect.

‘In China, the biggest audience for actual sport was a women’s volleyball preliminary between China and Cuba,’ Alavy says.

That match drew a global audience of  184m who watched the whole thing, and 450m people who watched part of it. The vast, vast majority of those people were in China, and many of those who weren’t were in Cuba."


Corruscating commentary,a must read, here:

http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2012/07/26/london-2012-beware-billions-bollocks-ceremony-to-be-huge-tv-hit-but-not-that-huge260701/

[DaveShoelace]

This must be the right place for this.  Truly inspiring.

Back in 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, Gunther Holtorf and his wife Christine set out on what was meant to be an 18-month tour of Africa in their Mercedes Benz G Wagen. Now, with more than 800,000km (500,000 miles) on the clock, Gunther is still going.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18910560

Keep going Gunther

Incredible story.

Hands up if you read this and thought of these guys...


Be honest...

Badadaba!

I thought of these guys actually

[tikay]

Mick Jagger is 69 today

In 1962, 18yo Keith Richards wrote to his Aunt about meeting Jagger for the first time since childhood

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/he-is-called-mick-jagger.html

69, good grief. Scary to think I'm, not far behind him, where did my life go?

I recently read Keith Richards Bio, which greatly surprised & pleased, he's quite deep. He & Mick seemed to have a life long love-hate thing going.

Those "letters to Auntie" feature regularly in his Bio, & I strongly recommend reading it, it's the best "rockstar" bio I have read since "Scar Tissue" by Anthony Keidis, which was absolutely different class to any of that ilk I'd read before. Read that too, you'll be well amazed. 

[Tal]

This must be the right place for this.  Truly inspiring.

Back in 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell, Gunther Holtorf and his wife Christine set out on what was meant to be an 18-month tour of Africa in their Mercedes Benz G Wagen. Now, with more than 800,000km (500,000 miles) on the clock, Gunther is still going.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18910560

Keep going Gunther

Incredible story.

Hands up if you read this and thought of these guys...


Be honest...

Badadaba!

I thought of these guys actually

Can't beat that. 

[tikay]

"what will be the next most watched event of 2012? It might be the closing ceremony. It won’t necessarily be the men’s 100m final, which many people would expect.

‘In China, the biggest audience for actual sport was a women’s volleyball preliminary between China and Cuba,’ Alavy says.

That match drew a global audience of  184m who watched the whole thing, and 450m people who watched part of it. The vast, vast majority of those people were in China, and many of those who weren’t were in Cuba."


Corruscating commentary,a must read, here:

http://www.sportingintelligence.com/2012/07/26/london-2012-beware-billions-bollocks-ceremony-to-be-huge-tv-hit-but-not-that-huge260701/

A masterclass in de-bunking hype, excellent.

I like "corruscating", too, especially now I have looked it up.

[bobby1]

Horse racing seems to be falling apart at the seems Tony but this is still a bit of a shock.


Hereford and Folkestone  to close at end of 2012
 
BY BILL BARBER 11:00AM 27 JUL 2012
 
THE Northern and Arena Racing Group owned by the Reuben Brothers has announced that Hereford racecourse is to be closed down at the end of the year.

And in news that will rock British horseracing, Folkestone racecourse is also set to shut its doors at the end of 2012, although its owners hope to reopen the track.

Folkestone's future depends on plans to redevelop the site with the building of around 800 houses being approved.

Hereford, where racing was first recorded in 1771, will be the first course to close since Great Leighs lost its licence in 2009, although hopes remain that the sport will return there. Before then Stockton was the last track to be lost permanently in 1981.

The courses' fixtures in 2013 will be redistributed among the other tracks in the group.

When Northern Racing's owners the Reuben Brothers bought Arena Leisure in March it created Britain's largest racecourse group, accounting for around 40 per cent of fixtures in the UK.

Tony Kelly, managing director of the enlarged group, said: "Hereford is owned by Herefordshire County Council and run under a lease arrangement.

"Attempts to extend the lease, which has 17 years remaining, have been unsuccessful. Despite being unviable for several years we have supported the racecourse but much-needed investment, required to breathe new life into the racecourse, cannot be justified in the absence of a long-term future for the business. 

"Folkestone suffers from out-dated facilities and has been the subject of detailed discussion between the previous management, Arena Leisure and Shepway District Council for several years now.

"The proposal for the site incorporated significant residential development, which would have enabled a new racecourse to be constructed with much enhanced amenities.

"However, these plans have been delayed following the recent Examination in Public of the local plan.

"Discussions will continue with Shepway District Council in the hope that there will be approval of development plans which would secure the future of the racecourse. If they succeed, work to reconfigure the racecourse could commence in 2013.

"Every effort to continue trading at these racecourses has been explored but it is with regret that a variety of circumstances means that this is no longer possible, therefore both Hereford and Folkestone racecourses will therefore cease trading at the end of the 2012 season.

"The fixtures will be transferred to other racecourses within the group, where we will be able to offer increased prize-money and better quality facilities for connections and racegoers alike."

Paul Bittar, Chief Executive of the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) said: "This decision is a matter for Northern Racing and Arena Leisure. We recognise and respect the commercial pressures that lie behind it.

"While British racing is immensely popular on many levels, and enjoyed record attendances last year, the fact is that the sport's financial model remains badly outdated. This undoubtedly makes life very difficult for all who depend on the sport for their living and it also impacts upon racecourses, particularly smaller ones.

"We are encouraged to learn that the fixtures transferred as a result of the closures will benefit from increased prize-money, but the priority for the whole sport remains the modernisation of our funding mechanism to underpin the future of British racing and ensure a fair return for all participants."

[tikay]

You know how annoying these things (Captcha's) are when you're trying to register an account somewhere.



Well do you know the link between

1. A modified version of these

Click to see full-size image.

2. One of the companies you admire greatly - Google

3. The Google Book project where they have already scanned over 20 million books into an online readable format?

Yes?  Oh, crap.

No?  Great I'll explain for no other reason than I found out about this a while ago and though you'd find it interesting.

Every time someone is presented with one of these modified Captcha's, known as ReCaptcha's they are solving a puzzle.  What's clever is that Google realised they could put this mass-problem solving workforce on the internet to work.  They have around 200 million of these solved by people on the internet every day, so that's 200 million words deciphered by users for free.  You solve one of those you're working for Google!

How is that helping Google?

Each time they show a ReCaptcha one of the words is a "known" word and one is "unknown".  The "known" word is taken from a set of words suitable for mangling to make it tricky to guess. The "unknown" word is taken from the Google Books project book scans.  When they scan a book they can Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the output and turn most of the scan into text, the parts they can't OCR they break into "words" and pass to ReCaptcha for solving.  Ingenious!

Check out the following link to see the pretty amazing accuracy achieved

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/digitizing



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

Thanks Aaron, that is nothing short of beautiful.

It's all about upside down thinking, isn't it, thinking different?

Sheer simplicity, & sheer genius.

In one of the books I have about google, they go through the conception, gestation & birth of book scanning, which was done largely in conjunction with the great University Libraries of the world. The thing that is so hard to comprehend is the sheer scale of the task. The world contains "quite a few" books.

Page & Brin constantly discussed "scaleability" when doing their google think-tank stuff in the early days, but scanning every single book on earth is just beyond my imagination.

The world is overflowing with stuff we can barely comprehend.

[kinboshi]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

[tikay]

Also the lack of tax Google pays on its UK profits is incomprehensible.

Yes, even google has it's haters. Sign of success, I guess.

[bobAlike]

You know how annoying these things (Captcha's) are when you're trying to register an account somewhere.



Well do you know the link between

1. A modified version of these

Click to see full-size image.

2. One of the companies you admire greatly - Google

3. The Google Book project where they have already scanned over 20 million books into an online readable format?

Yes?  Oh, crap.

No?  Great I'll explain for no other reason than I found out about this a while ago and though you'd find it interesting.

Every time someone is presented with one of these modified Captcha's, known as ReCaptcha's they are solving a puzzle.  What's clever is that Google realised they could put this mass-problem solving workforce on the internet to work.  They have around 200 million of these solved by people on the internet every day, so that's 200 million words deciphered by users for free.  You solve one of those you're working for Google!

How is that helping Google?

Each time they show a ReCaptcha one of the words is a "known" word and one is "unknown".  The "known" word is taken from a set of words suitable for mangling to make it tricky to guess. The "unknown" word is taken from the Google Books project book scans.  When they scan a book they can Optical Character Recognition (OCR) the output and turn most of the scan into text, the parts they can't OCR they break into "words" and pass to ReCaptcha for solving.  Ingenious!

Check out the following link to see the pretty amazing accuracy achieved

http://www.google.com/recaptcha/digitizing



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

Thanks Aaron, that is nothing short of beautiful.

It's all about upside down thinking, isn't it, thinking different?

Sheer simplicity, & sheer genius.

In one of the books I have about google, they go through the conception, gestation & birth of book scanning, which was done largely in conjunction with the great University Libraries of the world. The thing that is so hard to comprehend is the sheer scale of the task. The world contains "quite a few" books.

Page & Brin constantly discussed "scaleability" when doing their google think-tank stuff in the early days, but scanning every single book on earth is just beyond my imagination.

The world is overflowing with stuff we can barely comprehend.

What puzzles me about this....
If CAPTCHAs are used in this way, on Google Books, how can it be used to authenticate a real person who is trying to access a site? If these words are unrecognisable to OCR then surely a human is needed to check what the real user has entered??

I may be missing loads here but something doesn't quite fit.