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Updated 65 Days ago
Sweet, It's National Honey Month
Honey is often underestimated. It's sweetening abilities are similar to sugar, but it's a lot better for you: it has less calories (it's more concentrated than sugar, so you should be able to use less) and it doesn't spoil in the pantry if it takes you a while to eat it all. I put my sweet nectar on cereal, oatmeal, warm rolls, and with peanut butter on toast.
So imagine my excitement when I learned that September is National Honey Month. Sweet, eh? Another thing that I appreciate about honey is that there are many different local options when purchasing the sticky stuff.
Gibbons Bee Farm is probably one of the most well-known honey makers in Missouri. The farm is headed by Sharon Gibbons, and since its start in 1980, has grown into a company that now produces 80,000 pounds of honey from right here in the Central and Eastern Missouri areas.
If you head further south in Missouri, you might be able to find Mo' Honey. This honey (and most local honey varieties) is said to improve allergies and boost energy.
Missouri Honey is sold in Shop-n-Save and Dierbergs, and is made close by in Florissant. Their site also has a great list of honey factoids and a few fun recipes that claim honey as a main ingredient.
Also, you can often find locally made bottles of honey in your neighborhood grocery stores. Just check out the label to see where it was made.
Happy Honey Month!
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.