Blue Angels

Flash back to my Navy days... the Blue Angels flew over CVG on their way to Dayton for an airshow. They look so beautiful and graceful on their slow pass in tight formation. I still get a thrill watching them!

Quick Update

I just wanted to add a quick update on my happenings here in the great Midwest. Nothing overly thrilling. Summer has arrived and we are hot and humid... flashbacks of Florida, complete with afternoon thunderstorms and tons of bugs. My hikes at Big Bone have tapered off due to the humidity and bugs, plus the thunderstorms makes the trails very slippery. Unlike Florida, we don't have sand so when our trails get wet, they slime-up!

Wildflower taken at Big Bone on  my last hike.

Update on the baby birds,  they have all taken flight! On my last trip out there, the nests were empty and there were lots of little birds zooming around the fields. I'm told to keep watching the boxes for more eggs, at least until August.

Update on The Magic of Thinking Big, great book! Wow! Really good advise and written in an entertaining and sincere manner. It is about the power of positive thinking but it goes beyond that to the power of positive actions. I think I originally compared it to The Secret but it is nothing like that book, which I kinda chocked up to wishful thinking and blew off as a bunch of hokey. The Magic of Thinking Big is all about how you have the power to make your own life however you want it to be, there's nothing luck or fate or meditation can do for you, you have to act properly to get results. Amazing that it was written nearly 60 years ago and besides his references to a "successful salary of $30,000", everything is still relative to today's society.

And finally, my last noteworthy happening here in the great Midwest, is a shout out to the wonderful job our library does. This past month I took a watercolor class and loved it. I'm inspired to buy some supplies and paint a few more pictures. I will probably do nothing with the finished pieces but hide them in my closet, but it was the most relaxing and enjoyable experience. The teacher was wonderful and the other ladies in the class were fun to talk with. It was a great price too, $15 for four lessons! Where ever I end up, it must have a great library with continuing adult art or cultural enrichment type classes. Gasp, am I really going to post them?! Well, here are my works of art :)

Oops, my horizon looks a little off, everything is leaning. My tree is a bit juvenile too!

My car and buildings are cartoon-ish, but it's not bad for a first time water color-er.

This one was all about intensity of color to create effect with just one color of paint. A little boring if you ask me, I prefer lots of colors, but this was a class and I sure did learn a lot! I can throw crazy colors together next time.

MMM

Not long ago, my sister introduced me to the Mr Money Mustache blog and I am a big fan. Therefore, I want to pass it on. The theme of this blog is how, by being extremely frugal, you can retire early. Since I am in my mid 40's and more than ready to retire, this theme is near and dear to me and I am gobbling up every bit of advise he types. I have actually started at the beginning of his blog (first post was April 2011) and am reading multiple posts every day to catch up. Today, I am only up to May 2011 (hey, he post lots of advise, every day... or maybe I'm just a slow reader...or better yet, maybe  I am thoroughly absorbing his wisdom and maximizing my most-certain potential for early retirement).

Whatever the case, on May 28, 2011, MMM wrote up a review on the book The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz. Click here to read his review. It sounds like the book The Secret or any number of those other self-help, power of positive thinking type of books. Gotta love a good self-help book, right? So, I bought it! Hahaha, not what MMM would advocate, but the library up here didn't carry it. Actually, I didn't need to spend any of my money. Last month I received an Amazon gift card for my birthday, so I used the card and will consider the book a birthday gift from my employer. A book that will help me to eventually leave my employer!

Stay tuned for my review.

Early Summer Hike

I went on a hike this past Saturday with a few Sierra Club friends (it was National Trails Day, if you didn't know) and can you believe it, on June 7th the starting temperatures were in the upper 60's! Maybe that doesn't seem too spectacular to some folks, but since I am from Florida, I was thrilled. I'll complain about the snow and ice all winter long, but that doesn't mean I want heat and humidity. 60's and 70's are perfect for a trek through the woods. 

We went to Big Bone Lick which is a park I often hike and believe have blogged about already. Well, here are more pictures. I don't think I will ever get sick of this park. It is very close to my condo so I come down here for exercise when I'm tired and bored of concrete. Miles of winding paths with lots of elevation changes to challenge me physically, plus a peak at the cows and bison somehow rejuvenate me spiritually.

Can you spot me? I'm the one just about to step out of view behind the tree. The woods were so lush!

The neighbor's cows enjoying a bit of shade.

Ahhh.... baby bison!

CAPTCHA

Did you know…

I was thinking of starting a new topic line that would be filled with interesting and, in my opinion, not widely known facts. Just things I’ve heard that have caused me to scratch my head and wonder how many other people out there didn’t know that, or made me wonder how I could have NOT known whatever that was.

My first “Did you know…” topic is about a CAPTCHA. Has anybody ever heard this word? I’m sure anybody that has tried to make an online purchase has come across a CAPTCHA, though, if they are like me, never gave a thought as to its name and only vaguely understood its purpose.

Luis von Ahn is the computer programmer that created the CAPTCHA. I heard his TED talk, Why We Collaborate, this morning and was amazed at what I didn’t know. I thought this thing was just a way for websites to determine that the entity filling out an online form was actually a human being and not a computer program that was on autopilot submitting the form millions of times. And that is true, and that was the purpose behind the CAPTCHA’s creation. Luis von Ahn says, “The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters, whereas computer programs simply can't do it as well yet. So for example, in the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time.” It was just a security step. I accepted it, deciphered the scribbled words, and moved on. Not a second thought what-so-ever.

Well, did you know… that every time a person fills in the box, they are helping to transcribe physical books into digital ones?

What? Huh? Are you kidding me?

So, turns out, approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. It takes a person about 10 seconds to type the CAPTCHA, which equates to 500,000 man hours a day, wasted. Von Ahn thought those hours could be put to better use. Amazingly, he created another program, called reCAPTCHA, that turns those decoded squiggly letters into digitize books.

Here is an excerpt from his TED talk:

“So what you may not know is that nowadays while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're actually helping us to digitize books. So let me explain how this works. So there's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon, now with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically the way this works is you start with an old book. You've seen those things, right? Like a book? (Laughter) So you start with a book, and then you scan it. Now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. It gives you an image for every page of the book. This is an image with text for every page of the book. The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image. That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there. Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For example, for things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words. So what we're doing now is we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet.”

 Crazy, right? Did you know that?

“So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize. And now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because, you see, one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was, and it's going to present it to you. But since it doesn't know the answer for it, it cannot grade it for you. So what we do is we give you another word, one for which the system does know the answer. We don't tell you which one's which, and we say, please type both. And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer, it assumes you are human, and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately.”

Von Ahn says that so many websites have incorporated his reCAPTCHA program that 100 million words a day are being captured, which adds up to 2.5 million books a year.

Duolingo is another one of von Ahn’s crazy program ideas. It’s a language learning program? Ever hear of it? If not, check it out. It’s free. I’m using it to learn Spanish and it’s pretty cool. I actually enjoy it, almost like a game (give up Angry Birds and install Duolingo!). The crazy part… the program uses the student’s responses to translate the internet. Yep! Translate the entire internet! Crazy!

You can find the whole TED talk at http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration

More Baby Tree Swallows

The third nest of eggs has hatched. I must of gotten there soon after it happened because I could not believe how little these guys were!

Newborn Tree Swallows

The first nest of babies are doing fine. Their feather have grown in and they are much cuter. They were fast asleep when I visited and I was very careful not to disturb them this time.

Baby Tree Swallow with Feathers

Sorry, no pictures of the Bluebirds. I peaked into their nest and they were all very deep inside of the box. I snapped a picture but it came out too dark to really see anything. The Bluebirds build their nests closer to the bottom of the boxes and the nest cavity is deep. The Tree Swallows on the other hand, use so much nesting material that the babies are very close to the top of the box and the cavity is quite shallow. This is probably because the Tree Swallows are smaller than the Bluebirds and if they didn't build up the nest the babies would never be able to get out through the box opening for their first flight. Oh, I can't wait until they start flying!