Updated 65 Days ago
We all have them, lurking in the back corner of our bottom drawers or hanging onto dear life to the far reaches of the closet bars. They are ugly and the collect dust, and unless you are a religious closet-purger they can hang and sit there for years. Items like the shiny taffeta dress from the days when Dallas was in heavy conversational rotation and the hideous sweater Grandma Ruth gave you for Christmas because "it was so cute" are being born again as the stars of ugly clothing theme parties.
The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party has been gaining popularity as each holiday passes. So much so, there is a site dedicated to buying and selling the ugliest Christmas sweaters out there. The idea behind the soiree is dusting off sweaters with reindeer, snowflakes - you know the stuff - and donning them for an evening out. There is usually some type of contest involved with voting on whose familial holiday gift giving skills are the most heinous and a prize (or bragging rights?) for the winner.
Other closet relics being reprised as a party theme are the hideous, once high fashion, cocktail dresses from the '80's. Getting and invitation to an Ugly '80's Cocktail Dress party means you are invited to share in an evening of bliss - filled with taffeta, plenty of big bows, and enough lace to keep a doily factory busy. These parties can also put those ugly bridesmaid dresses that haunt most female closets to good use.
There are also the White-Trash themed parties where you can pull out all of your ugly closet hogs to cut, slice, dice, and create your way to a fascinating theme party outfit. Don't forget to bag a can of beer and roll a cigarette pack in your sleeve before heading out the door.
These celebrations of fashion gone wrong make for a relaxing party (it's hard to be pretentious when your wearing a sweater with snowmen) and also churn out a load of hilarious pics. Added bonus - they have all the fun of a Halloween party but without the pressure of finding "the perfect couples costume" or the least cheesy vampire get up. So the next time you are staring at that ugly outfit in disgust ask yourself: what kind of party would this make for?
I was once invited to a party where each guest had to wear their wedding dress. It was all divorced women that were invited. To what other event could I wear my wedding dress? Maybe an Ugly 80's Cocktail Dress party??!! I might even don the pearly banana clip that held my tresses back!!
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.