Slashdot Mirror
Can You Raed Tihs?
An aoynmnuos raeedr sumbtis: "An interesting tidbit from Bisso's blog site: Scrambled words are legible as long as first and last letters are in place. Word of mouth has spread
to other blogs, and articles as well.
From the languagehat site: 'Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.'
Jamie Zawinski has also written a perl script to convert normal text into text where letters excluding the first and last are scrambled."
Quick! Someone go register goaste.cx, micorsoft.com, ssdlhoat.org...etc.
Actually, does this work well with letter pairs like, "th ch wh sh qu?" I forget what those are called.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Bad splelnig no logner nedes to hlod aynnoe bcak!
Urantian -- and proud of it!
No need to open the terminal ... Jeff comes to the rescue!
http://jeff.zoplionah.com/scramble.php
- - - - - - -
Orppf urp mf y.ppcxn. yflcbi otcnnov C am yflcbi yr n.apb Ekrpatv (Dvorak -> Qwerty)
I think this should be "istlef". At least the capitalize the first letter of each sentance. I can't read those lower case comments.
--
From a wanna-be grammer nazi.
WRDOS SBRCALME YOU!
No.
What? L337 speech isn't really all that elite? Say it ain't so!
If you can read this, don't thank a teacher
---
Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach
Those who can't teach, teach teachers
Those who can't teach teachers, administrate.
Holy FCUK!
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
frist psot
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Justification for the lack of spell checking on Slashdot...
We always go hoem after work. Also, we repine a lot too.
I didn't even notice it until after I read the whole headline and re-read.
So d__s t__s m__n t__t we d_n't n__d t_e m____e l____s at all?
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Why do I get the feeling that this particular thread will hvae a few mroe snpellig eorers tehn uusal?
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Wrer not iodits, wrer aeahd of our tmie.
That is not always teh case.
Frist Psot!
Wlel, not rlaely.
"encryption".
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
In Svoiet Rsusia, seplling bdas yuo!
Its official, Slashdot got hacked.
Next article: "BSD is Dying".
It's a perl script to format normal text into text that looks like a perl script? I think my head is spinning.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
I showed this to a student here who is native to Indonesia, so english is not her first language, and she had a very difficult time reading it. Any thoughts on why this might be so tied to your native tongue? I would have thought that anyone fluent in english (which she is) would be able to read the post without much difficulty.
D
w00t! n3w l337 sp34k!
now everyone is going to start writing like this and give me even more head aches. I hope that guy also wrote a script to decrypt the words.
-Tim Louden
Throw out the I before E rule once and for all.
This meme has been kicking around blogland for a couple of days, and it definitely seems to be true. The only part of the above paragraph that was difficult to read was the sentence, "the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae".
Normally I would never post a comment about grammar, but it is kind of startling that in a block of text that jumbled the absence of 'the', and the swapping of 'is' for 'are' still jump out at you.
So what is this info useful for? A spammer's tool? Perhaps know that we know how well we can read garbled words, we can (attempt) to build better spam filters?
Random rants about technology: http://technorants.blogspot.com
...I bet people won't the RTFA
I am not a niroacehiplc, but retahr a medost iduvinadl
Agrlhit cleevr clogs - see if you can sbarclme eggs
I have not been this blown out by a discovery for a long time. I imagine that many people will feel the same way, but I have one question:
What are the possible uses for this?
It seems quite at odds to be this astounded by something that, as far as I can tell, has absolutely no purpose.
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Interestingly enough, I found that I could read through that post almost at full speed, even though all of the letters were mixed around.
Now the only problem is that it takes the average person a LOT longer to mispell words than it does to spell them right. I mean, can you really make yourself type "slahsdot" wihtout taking longer to think it through? It takes active concentration to type it, but not to decode it back to the way it should be.
Celebrate Steak and a Blowjob Day!
ok *fuck* this bullshit. no, seriously.
i've had it up to here with all this "teh" and
"pwn" shit, but now this?!
man this makes me feel SO old. what the hell are you kids huffing after school anyway?!
TAHN!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Don't ever do this again, Slashdot.
Given how many copies of this I've gotten in my mailbox over the weekend, I suppose we should classify it as a meatspace virus.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I've known this for years, it comes from reading other peoples writing on slashdot and at scohol, sometimes even if thye dont remember what they're talking abotu when writing it can still make snese. Humans have built in error correction
This has been all over slashdot over the last few days. I can't believe they made this crap into an article, but have not mentioned the free state project once...
And to think I was about to apologize for my last typo-ridden post.
-R
Actually, the "English university" is Concordia.
...wehn amazon.com is giong to petant taht
if raeding tihs txet would voilate the DMCA ;-)
Understanding a language is only 50% comprehension. The other 50% is being able to predict what will come next based on previous experience. This is especially important in spoken language, because the brain simply does not have the power to parse each word separately in real time.
So while it is possible to understand words that are not spelled correctly, it can still take a while to understand if the nxet few wdors are not qieut waht you epcext. It is aslo mcuh lses pbatldicree wehn you use lgenor wdros.
I hpoe tihs was an imuilntinag eplamxe!
Mclettat
I wonder if the origins of this trend aren't in the terrible spelling and bad grammar that many internet age children employ, having gone through a school system that accepts MS Word's spelling correction as normal?
I wonder if the CIA/NSA crew take this into account when they run text through carnivore...
the mistake is in saying that the unscrambling is
done at the word level. jump you eyes randomly into
the text and try to read just one word in isolation.
as someone on cogling@ucsd pointed out, there are
also a bunch of non-scrambled key words that help
your brain figure out what the in-betweens should
be. anyhow, point being that it's not a feature
of word recognition that you can read it, but rather
a feature of higher-level reconstruction.
mt
Also, what effect will this theory have on ai programs that need a trim on their amount of execution.
Is it possible that face (or whatever) recognition algorythms could benefit from this?
Could this be the beginning of lossy compression for text?
Does the law allow me to change my name for the sole purpose of being able to experiment with it in this way? btw, my name is Dan.
That's great, you can actually read it :)
(No, moderator, don't waste a point on modding this redundant, do your job and find something interesting to mod UP instead)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Wow! What an incredible revela... wait. That's not interesting at all.
Seriously. Raise your hand if you had no idea that the human brain could intuitively make corrections to faulty input.
Ok, anyone raising their hand is a moron.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The best part of the pearl script is the copyright notice:
# Coyprgiht (C) 2003 Jamie Zawinski
#
# Premssioin to use, cpoy, mdoify, drusbiitte, and slel this stafowre and its
# docneimuatton for any prsopue is hrbeey ganrted wuihott fee, prveodid taht
# the avobe cprgyioht noicte appaer in all coipes and that both taht
# cohgrypit noitce and tihs premssioin noitce aeppar in suppriotng
# dcoumetioantn. No rpeersneatiotns are made about the siuatbliity of tihs
# srofawte for any puorpse. It is provedid "as is" wiuotht exerpss or
# ilmpied waanrrty.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Many people reading this right now are coders.
We're all being told that spelling isn't important.
WE'RE ALL BEING GROOMED TO CODE FOR MICROSOFT!!!
Don't park drunk, accidents cause people.
Also... what happen when the scrambled word is another valid word? Or a misspelled valid words?
Reading that description reminded me why I don't use AOL IMer anymore.
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Funny...I read the whole thing without problem, except for "ceehiro"--probably because my linguistics tend to be sound based and I think of "ch" as one thing.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Am I epxceted to udensrtnad tihs?
all the 'frist psot' posts here.
The latest Slashdot meme.
for erunmoos wdros like asssseehdbnnnaaamrtttliiiiim or prrnnnnmmaatoooooooooiiiiiilllsssvuueccccccps though.
The "consonant pairs" seem to always be still paired in these words.
If I type
sllpenig it's clear I'm typing "spelling"
but, if I type
slpenlig it's not so clear anymore.
What about: according
Aoccdrnig (as in the article) is ok but...
aocdrncig is not nearly as clear
There's a limit to how far your brain can stretch it. Some consonant pairs your brain DOES intepret much like a single letter, because it's an irregularity in english.
Words that use such consonant pairs and triplets like "tch" are much harder to distinguish when those pairs and triplets (which really sound like a single letter) are split.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
While this bodes well for CmdrTaco, there is still two letters per word he could mess up.
I tried a script posted and put in some long words. The word "typographically" was almost impossible to decipher, and I even remembered the sentence I typed in. For short words, this article makes sense, but I doubt it can be upheld with longer and longer words. Could make for an interesting paper or science project.
I have a feeling that the folks that do the jumble puzzles for the newspapers have known this one for a long time.
I call prior art; CmdrTaco has been doing this for years!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Not that I'm saying we need education reform or anything... *Cough* *Cough*... But maybe if you taught reading by phonix instead of sight reading people would be more litterate and better spellers...
Huct en fonics rilly werkd fur me!
Karma is like sex. I can't remember the last time I had either of them.
The server seems to already be running slow... Anyway, here is the text of the blog at http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000224.html . (this was the first blog linket to in the article)
c-n y-- r--d th-s?
Languagehat has an entry concerning the decipherability of English texts made up of words that have had their letters scrambled (except for the first and last). [via Avva in Russian] I had written something about this phenomenon back in March with a different scrambled text. (I am always amazed how these unattributed texts can spread like folklore across the Web.) It was hard at the time to find a source for the quoted text, but I think I've traced it back to some work that Kourosh Saberi at UC Irvine and David R. Perrott at Cal State Los Angeles have done, mentioned here in an article by D. W. Massaro at UC Santa Cruz. I sent some email to Professor Saberi, but hadn't heard back from him. They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature, but I've been unable to find it online. Here's a press release for that article; see also this editorial in Nature Science Update.
[Addendum 09/15/03: The jumbled letters meme continues to spread. In good folkloric fashion, I've seen two variants: the first with "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy" and the second with "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy". Here's another reference to the Saberi and Perrott article on the ABCNEWS dot com site.]
#include "sig.h"
Fuck, I don't know what opinion to form on this. Is Slashdot groupthink agreeing that it's good or bad? Stories like these make my brain explode.
First time I read the headline, I saw: 'Can you raed this'
I just read it and realized it is actually 'Can you raed tihs'.
Come on, you slacker trolls!
(ethighy-ftifh psot!)
I had but a simple dream, to destroy all humans.
Eht sbviouo txperimene ot monfirc eht yheort si ot ees thaw sappenh nhew uoy ecrambls ynlo eht tirsf dna tasl setterl dna eeavl eht eiddlm setterl eht eams. Eompletc Kobbledegoog.
Taht atricle is teh reul
I see the newest Slashdot cliche after SCO. Gosh I hope this one doesn't stick...
I must say it's a cool effect right up to the word ceehiro, I couldn't get that word right away.
Can you just see the encouragement the future generations will get when they are told they don't have to order letters correctly?
-Non sig- Negative sir, I am a meat popsicle.
-The Fifth Element.
"frist psot", "pron" and "fsck" work so well, although I suppose the latter is something of a departure from "scramble them up".
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
people here don't read just the first and the last letters of a word... we generally don't read anything at all, we just hit reply and dive right in.
We don't need to give any legitimacy to ebonics. Either spell it right or go here.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
Can anyone track down an authoritative source for this?
Bisso got it from languagehat. Bisso also cites a Nature article that may be related; however, the Nature article clearly deals with hearing time-reversal of segments of spoken sentences, not reading mangled written words. languagehat cites Avva, who languagehat admits doesn't give a source; I can't get to the Avva entry at the moment.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I hvae acute dyxlisea. Plaese driect me to the narseet nurgloeoy cnilic.
Karma: Excellent^(-t/Tau), Tau=Wittiness/Trollishness
So, while it's apparently true that bad spelling makes no difference to some people, nobody will complain about good spelling -- and people with all sorts of reading styles will be able to easily see what you have to say.
I can't go TEN FUCKING MINUTES without this being brought up in IRC, IM, or on the various forums I attend. It's even been brought up TWICE by phone!
GRAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Two reasons your message doesn't work without great effort:
1 - You've left out the letters, and thus our brain can't do the quick magic to "know" the words. The summary of the story worked really well, surprisingly well. But yours is hosed.
2 - There's no real context for your sentence, so it's even that much more difficult to guess quickly.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
I had problems reading "ceehiro", but part of that is that I wasn't expecting that word--I'm not eating cereal, and I'm not British.
This guy's got a point. It is possible to read words even if they are misspelled. It may be 'annoying', but it is a fact of life that the spelling Nazi's should learn to live with.
There are reasons people don't spell 'properly'. It's not because they're stupid. It's not because they went to school. It's not because you're the only one on Earth who learned how to spell. Instead, there are real reasons that comments made on the web that have spelling errors.
- Browsers don't have spell checkers when submitting forms. Even if they did, they come as an after thought, as opposed to the way MS Word works by showing you the little squiggly line. Few people want to sit there and have to click 'ok' on every word that wasn't found in the computer's limited dictionary.
- Some people have learning disabilities. A rather talented friend of mine has a learning disability that has impaired his ability to spell. What's the point of me going all Spelling Nazi on him? What good would that do? The solution for me is to be used to it and not worry about it.
- Most people just don't care. The important part is "can you understand me?" If I say u instead of you, so what?
- Not everybody has english as a primary language. It's ridiculous to expect that everybody getting on the web is a college graduate who majored in grammar. It's doubly so when people are in the process of learning English and are participating in web conversation in order to grow. Slashdot, with its international audience, should particularly sensitive to this point.
I originally started writing this post in order to say the author has a point, but I think it turned more into a "be more tolerant" preach. Well, sorry. I do hope, though, somebody reads this and relaxes a little. Successful understanding is the most important aspect of communication, not how closely it follows protocol.
Licaawloyllpwlowgshcongitfoblogealylnliyrrdnrrngog lgwygylh
Posting AC from work, but you know who I am...
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO
By radineg tihs txet, yr'oue viilatnog the DMCA. Palese go dreitlcy to yuor nraeset law erfceonnemt ctener and trun yesurolf in to the poprer arotiieuhts.
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
Please go and feed the the cat.
Bet ya didn't see that, did ya?
Re-read it slowly.
-dave-
The pig browse. With Google. Sigh is to the chicken. Chicken is fool. Giggle. The DailyWTF giggle.
This only seems to work for small words - can you tell me what airoapmpitoxn, pirtaaranlinem, and coahtrbrdaeys are at a glance?
It also helps that it isn't just random letters, but appears to be pairs of letters as well.
Still, I wait excitedly for the Slashdot article "Check this out! It's a poll that tells you what your favourite colour would be if you were an 18th century russian author!"
...but I'm having trouble reading anything with words longer than a few syllables. Here's a sample of real text scrambled.
SAN FICCANSRO, Ciionflara (CNN) -- A fdraeel appales cuort Mdanoy orreedd Coliinrafa olffiiacs to hlat prrtepinoaas for the Oecotbr 7 gnboeutaairrl raecll eotleicn, cniitg ccronnes about a "heurrid, cnntttlliiusaooy iinrfm" psercos.
Sccellapiify, a tehre-judge pnael of the 9th Cuciirt Cuort of Aelppas siad the satte ndeeed to updgare its vontig eiupnmeqt fsirt.
"The ieerhnnt dteecfs in the styesm are such taht aeamxrlppitoy 40,000 vtoers who treval to the polls and csat their bollat will not have thier vtoe cutoend at all," the cuort relud, ciintg vitnog mnicahes that the sacrrteey of sttae's ocffie has daleercd uifnt.
Verots had been shucdleed to go to the polls Obtocer 7 to ddicee wthheer to rvomee Coiilanrfa Gov. Gary Davis, a Domeract.
The battle may haed nxet to the U.S. Surpeme Cruot as an aeottnry for the man who ianettiid the relacl eorfft siad his clenit wuold file an aeppal to the ntioan's top court. The lewor court syeatd its oerdr for sveen dyas to aollw aealpps.
If Mdnaoy's rilnug stands, the raclel vtoe cuold be meovd to Mrcah 2004, wehn it wuold sarhe scpae on the ballot wtih Cfiinloara's prantdiieesl prrimay.
Diavs, who Modnay snpet a scneod day caagpnnmiig with frmoer Peerisndt Cltnoin, siad he was "paeeprrd to cncduot tihs eicleton whnveeer the cruots tlel me the etoliecn is gniog to ouccr."
Divas had phseud for the rclael vtoe to take plcae in Mrach, when the satte's paiisteednrl pmiarry was exeeptcd to draw a hihegr Dimoatrcec tuunrot.
"It seems to me that the more ppoele thnik abuot the raclel, the more that decide to oppsoe it," he said.
ACLU obicejtnos
The riunlg foollws a haeirng last week at wichh the Aecramin Cviil Lteeriibs Union aergud that eiloectn oiiafflcs suhlod hvae more time to rapcele attuieqand vitong mechnias in srveeal Clfoniiara citonues.
The ACLU siad the pnuch-card stesym could dnnssiiarcehfe vtroes in six cutneois, iunncidlg Los Ageenls, the sttae's lseargt. Tshoe six ctinoues ildncue 44 peenrct of satte vteros and hvae hvaey cinnnooeattrcs of mrotniiy vetros.
A leowr corut lsat mnoth had rtjeeecd the reeuqst, but the alaepps court dgsiraeed.
"In sum, in ainessssg the pbiluc itsreent, the baacnle fllas hevialy in fvoar of poopsitnng the eoelictn for a few mnohts," the crout cucldoend, cniitg the U.S. Spurmee Corut's Bush v. Groe dosceiin taht seelttd the 2000 piisdeentarl eceitoln.
"The chcioe bteeewn honildg a herruid, cooutttllsiinnay iinrfm elicoetn and one held a sorht tmie later taht assuers vroets that the 'rniaumdtery rturieeeqnms of euaql teentarmt and fudteaannml fnresais are ssaeftiid' is claer."
Mark Reoabusnm, a laywer for the ALCU, cllead the dseociin "a mcatsieerpe."
"To thsoe who say tihs will uspet tginhs, I souppse one asewnr is in fact this is gonig to gvie the vrtoes of Cariioflna mroe tmie to cnoesdir the issues and the caaechrtr and the snausbcte of the ceaatnidds," Raobnusem siad.
The 9th Ccruiit has a reupattoin as bneig one of the msot lbieral aapplltee cotrus in the faeedrl jdcrauiiy, and its dsniiceos are otfen rreeesvd by the Semurpe Cruot.
Aaeppl veowd
An aeottrny for Ted Costa, who inatteiid the recall erffot, said he will file an aeppal whiitn two days to the U.S. Spumere Cuort.
Cotsa wlil baypss the srdtaand frdeeal alppaes pcreoss and go sgithrat to the ntiaon's hiegsht court, his antteory Cuhck Dniaomd siad.
Costa is haed of a Sremtncaao-bsaed asvtciit guorp caelld Ppeloe's Atvaocde. The rlcael effrot was llgeray ballonkerd by Dalerrl Issa, a GOP cssmrngeoan and mnoiiillrae bssseaimnun.
Aoctr Alonrd Scanweeehrzggr -- the leinadg Rlaecbpiun cddtaanie to raecple Divas suhold the recall sccueed -- said he wolud cinntuoe his cpmiaagn for goonevrr and cllead on Staeecrry of Satte Kievn Seehlly to appael the diieocsn iialeedtmmy.
"Htiisrollacy,...
Is that easy to read? I guess it's easier than I might have guessed but it;s still hard going.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Ok, so now they discover that randomizing the text within words doesn't detract (too much) from readability - does that mean we'll soon be seeing:
ELNRAGE YUOR PNEIS!!!
on the subject lines of emails received? How would any of the pattern matching anti-spam methods out there deal with this one?
And, we just gave them the tool do use!
-Ben
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Another interesting tidbit: You can still read a sentence if the bottom half of the typed sentence is chopped off. Take a piece of paper and cover the bottom half of a sentence you haven't read, then read the uncovered top half. You can even read the sentence when about 2/3 the height of the sentence is covered.
Wi not trei a holiday in Sweden this yer?
See the loveli lakes
Does somebody want to take that PERL script and re-write it in PHP or perhaps make a webform translator like babelfish? That would most definitely be rad.
I remember an old 16-bit FORTH implementation whose symbol table only used the first and last letter of each symbol, lowering storage and computation requirements on those tiny machines. So FOOBAR and FEATHER would be the same variable. Somehow it worked out ok though, at least for small programs, which was the only kind you could fit in memory anyway.
Where do I go? I don't find it easy at all to read the carp people are wrtiing. Am I a frgignig alein? Oh wiat...myabe thier rseearch is carp?
If you just keep the first and last letters intact, the text will still look like rubbish, but if you keep the first and last TWO letters, you won't even notice.
Slashdot is an enormous newssource.
Slsadhot is an enroomus neswsoruce.
Salshodt is an enromuos nwesosucre.
--
Will work for bandwidth.
While at University I thought I'd take some Xhosa courses and eventually packed it in because I was struggling so much to read Xhosa, though I could speak it better than most of the other kids.
This leads me to think that once one builds a certain familiarity with any language, one can cope with the scramble.
To me, the most interesting part of this discovery/research is that it might find a way to help dyslexic kids. I sure hope so.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In Siovet Russia, lngauage scramlbes you!
F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a drn.
...this is probably entirely due to /..
Mental Note: Never end a sentence with /., the extra period makes it look like you're a dyslexic sending the reader up a directory.
But, my question is, if we are all so damn good at fixing letter transpositions and mispellings in-line as we read, and given English is about as complex as any language, artificial or otherwise, gets...
What the hell is wrong with cpp?
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
Bad news, bad news. This seems like a good way to pass through bayesian email filters.
I ran the jwz job on my bit, and it did not do it.
Did I do it ok?
best web host ever
Let's sbclamre all of the vaalrbie and foitcunn nemas in the Lniux knreel so taht SCO won't rncogeize wrehe we've stoeln tehir Unix
.sig isn't smbearcld yet:
cdoe!
Taht way, isanted of manneufigl funciotn names like fexecve and ntohl, we'd get feecxve and nhotl!
(I'll bet msot pepole wloud have a hrad tmie fnugiirg out wihch ones wree the rael fnuotcin naems!)
Srroy, my
Time to upgrade the lameness filter.
983467 replies beneath your current threshold (most of them garbled).
Every once in a while, I see a funny thing on some IRC channel, forum or whatever. And then I keep getting that funny thing from every posible place...
I got this lteters thingy yesterday, and today my dad told me: "I just got a mail with something really interesting" so I asked: "is that the thing about reading words with scrambled letters?" I wasn't surprised to hear that it was that....
Same thing goes with the badgerbadger flash... I'm pretty sure everyone here saw that aswell...
^_^
I, for one, wlecmoe our new msispleegin ovrelrods
Learn something new.
Would be great if we can get this as a google language filter. Maybe some of the searches for SCO will make sense now.
what an annoying meme. the next week on the internet is going to be fun.
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
Now I wont b'e made fun of for NOT using correct punkduation and gramer when poesting on /.
Ave Molech Setting
"rscheearch" is spelt wrong - I thnik it shuold be "rscheearer"....
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
and I, for one, wlcemoe our new dslyxeic ovlrerdos!
I hope the spammers don't use this information to trick the anti-spam filters!!!!!
I recall reading a study showing that a word's silhouette is important to recognition. The researchers looked at using just the silhouettes of words (in sentences) and the recognition rates.
When the first and last letters are added, the recognition rates jump to a very high score.
Thus, "the wetar si fnie" is grasped more quickly than "the wtear si fnie", since the silhouettes are preserved.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
All yuor spleinlg are blenog ot us?
Who doesn't like free music?
i'm wondering how this can help word recognition software, like spellcheckers for example.. maybe improve the accuracy..
This is the first time I have read something truly original, genuinely new and important, on Slashdot!
This is a breakthrough for a great part of humanity - it almost puts in question why should we even write the way we do. Sure, legal documents and such will stil have to be thorough and correct, but maybe a lot of other human-created docs could be leniant on typos, as long as the word contains all the necessary letters and the first and last letters are in place.
This thing really, truly works!
Sigged!
This is so darn old... I thought Slashdot was bleeding edge! Here is the original forward FYI:
Titled: Do Spellings Matter?
"... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same, and
reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce retigcionon.
Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing coentnt by paarllel
prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang"
And if you liked *that* one so much, you might like this one too:
Read the sentence below carefully:
"I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications' incomprehensibleness".
This is a sentence where the Nth word is N letters long.
e.g. 3rd word is 3 letters long, 8th word is 8 letters long and so on.
And if you like that one too, here is another one you can try to kill your boredom...
While sitting, draw clockwise circles on the ground with your right foot. While doing that, try drawing the number "6" in air with your right hand.
Your foot will change direction.
I like the proposed UN English language modifications to make English easier for everyone to learn!
The European Union commissioners have announced that agreement has been reached to adopt English as the preferred language for European communications, rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phased plan for what will be known as EuroEnglish (Euro for short).
In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced by "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20 per sent shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of silent "e"s in the languag is disgrasful, and they would go.
By the fourth year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" by "z" and "w" by " v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou", and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters.
After zis fifz yer, ve vil hav a reli sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech ozer. Ze drem vil finali kum tru.
Occasionally a word is *not* easy to understand -- I just got a word that read "pitosoin".
- Can anyone guess what the original was? (It's a fairly common word)
- Why is this one hard to read? (It's even harder out of context I would imagine...)
LOL becomes... LOL.
ROTFLMAO becomes RAFTLOMLO
>8-) becomes >-8)
Conclusion: There's gonna be a lot of screwed up AOLers if this becomes law.
The words are harder to read if they are in uppercase. We recognize word shapes using the forms produced by the lowercase letters. Narrower columns of text (up to a point) are help to increase reading and comprehension speed. Scrambled letters will slow you down a bit
Which is easier to read at a glance,
"ALL OF THE WORDS AND ALL OF THE LETTERS DON'T MAKE A GREAT DEAL OF SENSE WITHOUT CONTENT."
or
"All of the words and all of the
letters don't make a great deal of
sense without content."
Basic typography.
I'm not really a web designer, I just play one on the Internet.
Now the spammers can use this perl script to get around all my spam filters... until we can find a way to teach the computer how to figure out the word even if it has scrambled middle middle letters. Unless someone makes a spam filter that requires >50% of words to be spelled correctly... 'course, I may get too many false-positives in that case!
Does this work only for English? Or only for Romance languages? Or can we find a similar scheme for any language?
My parents are both teachers, and one of the most tiresome quarrels in education is Phonics vs. Whole-Word debate. Do you teach someone to read by teaching them how to sound out syllables (phonemes)? Or do you teach them to recognize whole-word patterns by rote?
Experimentally, a pure-phonics approach has proven to have the highest success rate. However, these results would suggest that whole-word approach *does* map onto some important cognitive structure . Perhaps this means that, once past the basic level, whole-word techniques would prove to be valuable in turning beginning readers into advanced readers.
... iprmoatnt? Wlel,watheevr, teehrs ntohnig wonrg wtih my bllckoos!
Surely, there's a lot to do with context here. How many caught the subject confusion with mispelled "importent" and "impotent"? How many figured out "bollocks"? Context and background seem to be most relevant. Sm ffct f y drp ll cnsnnts.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Enojy :)
/$1 . shuffle($2) . $3/egix;
//, shift;
#!/usr/bin/perl -p
# scram: scrambles the innards of words
# Usage: scram <input-text >scrambled-text
# Craig Berry (20030915)
s/
([a-z]) # Initial letter
([a-z]{2,}) # Two or more middle letters
([a-z]) # Final letter
# Fisher-Yates shuffle
sub shuffle {
my @chars = split
my $i = @chars;
while ($i) {
my $j = rand $i--;
@chars[$i, $j] = @chars[$j, $i];
}
return join '', @chars;
}
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
It is commonly known ("The Psychology of Reading", Taylor & Taylor, 1983) that we match words starting at the outside ends & we work towards the middle, aborting when we think we know what it says (i.e. when our global hypothesis is good enough). Also we match letters from the outside details in towards the centre.
Another interesting thing is that our spatial resolution for forming letter and word hypotheses is very low. You're already reading all the letters in a word all jumbled together, you just aren't aware of it.
This is also an illustration of how critical context is in reading, because all you need is two letters (and a few hints) per word, and you can figure out the rest from context. Context == error correction.
Giong to hvae a ltilte tourlbe raeidng my eailms form hree on out are we??
Boo hoo....
-matt
A consonant cluster refers to multiple consecutive consonants in the same syllable.
Finally, a single phoneme notated with multiple letters is called a "digraph", "trigraph", etc.
Am I the only one who thought "blog + raed = salam pax"?
If the words are scrambled and misspelled, it will start to make things a little harder to decipher. :-)
Also, I noticed that random words take longer to decipher than reading a properly composed sentence:
inidnect
Same for slightly less common words:
fltiiany
But maybe it's just me.
I msut amdit taht tihs is rlleay anndisotug! If Tmitohy hdan't trohwn in that elxmpae, I don't tnihk I wloud have bveeelid this srtoy!
How many posters do you think will post in scramble?
Whew! This water sure is cold!
I would argue that comprehension using this technique correlates to the reader's core vocabulary and that recognition decreases as you stray from that point. For example, I had to stop and stare for a few seconds at 'ceehiro' since, as a Yank, I'm not used to seeing 'cheerio' very often, while the rest of the (arguably more scrambled) words didn't really faze me.
1) Spelling just got a whole lot easier.
2) Spelling just got a whole lot worse.
Fabulous, you just rendered the only working spam filters (bayesian based) obsolete by posting this. Now THAT was clever wasn't it?
bah
slashdot has been posting stories with mispellings for years now, no wonder we can read this article.
So does that mean the spammers have another tool to bypass the filters?
This is a common thing when learning speed-reading. You basically do the same thing, but ignore the rest of the word and intuitivly know what the word was from the other words in the sentence.
However, it also makes reading out-loud difficult when you are used to skipping words when you read them.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
Ayhe I okwn htsi si tno eth rerccot ywa ot ubjlem het rwsdo I stju ndwtae ot vhea nuf htiw oyu hslaoses
Hkoeod on Piohncs wekord for me!!!
Interesting enough, I could almost read the whole thing the first time. If you threw in the missing letters, I think it would be even easier (I read the jumbled up sentence in the story post with little problem). I'm not sure if this type of finding will revolutionize anything, but it is kind of interesting to see. I know a special ed instructor I had (in college) showed us once how he could hold up a sign with the word the repeated twice, and almost everyone read it without catching it. It's kind of amazing what we do automatically without deep, serious thought.
Matt Fahrenbacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
... all of a sudden, some blogging scientist-types not only think that dyslexia is cool, they actually write perl code to dyslexitize perfect spelling? Are we TRYING to kill the education system?
Where was this research when I was in Grade 5? If bad spelling was cool, I'd have won a Pultzier Przie by now.
But seriously folks, it's obviously true that people NOW can read this jumble easily, but that's because we all spend so much time on the internet. We're ACCLIMATIZED to it by now. In fact, we're DESENSITIZED to it. I just ignore it now, like my friend Vince, who doesn't even realize he's got a blue screen, they happen so often.
They should just rename the internet the Itnerent, the spelling's so bad.... Ask your grandfather to read the same passage you breeze through and watch the cursing begin. See my piont?
When one is learning to read a new language, it is a deterministic, serial process, the letters are scanned in order as you sound out the word based on the rules you know. I'm trying to learn Russian now, so I'm getting reacquanted with the proccess.
Deterministic serial processing is what computers are good at.
Human brains are neural nets, which are much better at massively parallel, nondeterministic computation. Try this: pick a random word on this page. The meaning sprang to mind, right? No left to right scanning needed? I notice that at about the same moment that my eyes focus on the first letter of a word, the meaning springs to mind.
I think this is a fascinating hack because it may be giving us clues about how our brain accomplishes the task of breaking up the task of reading a word to leverage it's strengths against the problem at hand.
-Lux
Is this an incommensurable phenomenological hypothesis or the manifestation of the inteligibility of idiomatic individualistic intercommunications?
Want me to scramble this?
You must have had a lot of fun with that perlscript.
hguone ton saw ver nialp a wen syawla I
(:
I wonder how much of the idea of acronyms that people think they can pronounce arises partly from overgeneralized usage of this ability of the brain.
It'd be one of the better explanations as to why I see so many disagreements between people as to how to pronounce an acronym or whether to do so at all - different error correction bases, or something.
--
viqsi - See "vixen"
If we do not change our direction we are likely to end up where we are headed.
Does it always work?
What if I use a mixture of tall and short letters in the side?
axl ywrjr baee axtxe bwejkjkjkg to us
or what if I vary the length?
aasdfl yasdfr basdfe aasdfe basdfg tasdfo uasdfs
This is my sig.
Good lord I can still barely understand it.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
There appears to be no actual research grounds to this. Plus, they misspelled research (too many ch's), thought (missing h) and important. Seems a bit unlikely to have been actual research :)
Just make sure if her english "writing" skills are on par with her english speaking skills, which you claim are adequate. BTW, english is NOT my native language and I had no problem whatsoever reading the post.
<sigh>
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
That's easy. Let's say you have a text file that consists of 14,000 instances of the word "begat". This compresses to a file that simply indicates "repeat 14,000 'begat '".
Now, after you scrmable it, it's got equal quantities of begat, beagt, baget, baegt, bgeat, and bgaet. It's not so easy to compress any more.
Essentially, you're increasing the entropy of the file by a fair amount. Truly random data is not so easy to compress as english, because english has lots of order. Added disorder or entropy means compression is just not as easy.
My amazing wife - Artist, Author, Philosopher - Laurie M
I brought this up over at ScienceForums yesterday, and someone pointed to the mentioned article that says: "They wrote up their results in the 29 April 1999 issue of Nature, but I've been unable to find it online."
The original article that particular blog is based on can be found here
Abstract is here
and full text (HTML and PDF w/ images) for those without access to Nature is here
However, this research was done on words that are reversed, not internally scrambled. I have been unable to locate research on the letter order within longer words, however the principle is accurate and I'm sure it exists.
Here's a similar working program in python:
/usr/bin/env python
#!
import fileinput, re, random
def scramble_word ( mo ):
word = mo.group(0)
innards = list(word[1:-1])
random.shuffle(innards)
return word[0] + "".join(innards) + word[-1]
for l in fileinput.input():
l = re.sub ( "\w{4,}", scramble_word, l )
print l
see subject. we kenw tihs lnog ago...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Came up with this after receiving an email that contained just the little bit of text.
#!/usr/bin/perl -p -w
use strict;
sub scramble {
my @i = split(//, shift);
my @o;
push(@o, splice( @i, rand( @i ))) while @i;
return join('', @o);;
}
s/\b(\w)(\w\w+)(\w)/$1 . scramble($2) . $3/eg;
# Seems to work pretty well.
This topic was discussed at length just YESTERDAY here at /. :-)
The Perl script was better too, with a far cuter scrambling technique. Jamie can't code for twinkies.
Web Hosting Reviews
I think you meant:
Sm ffct f y drp ll vwls.
Or maybe:
ae ee i ou o a ooa.
But that one is a lot harder.
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
Cool new fad. I bet I can try and not use it. ;-)
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
...it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. ...
So tell that to a prospective employer that is reading a resume full of typos like this...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Did anyone else first think this was about Raed from
Baghdad.
plentie prhactice in reedieng ani kaind of splelieng misstaiks flooentlie...
Oh well, what the hell...
This is not unusual. If you practice speed reading, you do not read out each letter of a word as you reading text. You are trained to look for patterns of words and phrases.
M.
I work in a lab. A while back, we did a useability(sp?) study on user interfaces.
We were trying to figure out why text messaging on phones is such a hit in Japan, and yet everyone over here thinks its rather clumsy.
The study basically pointed out, that to say something like, "I love you", requires you to "type" a lot of characters to convey that message. Using Kanji, one or two characters will suffice. I should've known, (being married to a chinese person), but after I thought about it, it makes a lot of sense. I have flashbacks of watching old chinese movies, and seeing the characters say a few characters, and the english subtitles would be a paragraph long.... And conversly watching english movies, and the guy rambles on-and-on, and the subtitles contains a handful of chinese characters...
Not quite the same effect with the dropped vowels, (you said drop all cons, I am guessing you meant vowels) as i found the missing vowels a bit harder to read; readable, but just slower going.
Certainly context plays a big part, at least for those words that are less familiar, and of course some words may have the same first, last and interior letters in a different order. consider this:
thaw doulw nappeh fi uoy deverser eht tirsf dna tasl setterl? nac uoy ltils dear ti?
I find myself reading the words backwards myself, still trying to find what the first and last letters are.
And I would think that this whole process falls apart when trying to read large words:
hmoahepoty, or catunenakos, or even tolievesn.
Good stuff
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
Wouldn't this defeat some sort of Carnivore-style email keyword search?
'Bmob' sails right through but 'Bomb' gets tagged and read by Poindexter.
I am utterly amazed that I can read all of that without a single problem, even as a non-native speaker of English.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
Haha, the second I saw this post I thought of jeffk.
Now if only Jumble came with first and last in right place - or maybe they can make sure they never are...
This is an an intriguing area for me, I love doing crosswords, and it is very noticeable that obtaining first and last letters massively increase the ability to recall.
The question would seem to be, why are the word boundaries so important to the neural architecture for recognizing words (well, I guess one has to break up a sentence...) and the middle letters are mutable...
I'm guessing this isn't a hardwired feature of the brain, but rather a developmental one (I mean, the brain comes with an English version?) I'd guess it'd apply to other languages, but what about ones based on concept symbols, such as chinese and japanese? or is it a hardwired feature of our vision system that happens to work on word recognition?
The Rumelhart, Hinton book on Parallel Distributed Processing has a nice discussion on parallel word recognition, but I dont think it clearly addresses
order of middle words... but it does suggest that maybe word edges would give stronger activation strengths, and thus reduce the number of potential concept matches massively, allowing out of order letters to trigger the final match.
Aremcinas are the sukcs.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Most likely we are getting enough context clues from shorter words. Words with less than 4 chars. are always correct. Words with 4 chars. have only two possible permutations, one of which is the correct one.
Please, oh please someone do justice to the Perl language and post this in a one-liner! Certainly 5 lines are more than sufficient!!!
With this phenomenon, it seems one could use a simple letter-replacement encryption (applying it to the scrambled words) that would be much harder to decipher.
I read this
and thought it was talking about impotent things. You still have to get the right letters between, even if not in the right order, in order to make sense. So mostKLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
HTTP/1.1 405
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2003 23:07:16 GMT
Server: Stronghold/2.4.2 Apache/1.3.6 C2NetEU/2412 (Unix) mod_fastcgi/2.2.12
Allow: GET, POST
Cneonction: close
Content-Type: text/plain
http://www.steilproject.com/cgi-bin/jumbler.pl
and yes, that is my domain (note my last name)
If he could figure out what makes this work for people [I'm sure similar tricks are for other languages] and apply it to machine vision it would be great. Also interesting would be what tricks like this would apply to other languages, and in turn , how those people think?
I'm not a linguist or a neurologist but I think that pattern matching is a different process entirely from reading a structured language. (I.e. Latin, English, music)
Mentally speaking pattern matching seems akin to pictographs and ideographs. As evidenced by the existence of linguistics I imagine that reading a structured language is a different process entirely.
However through my study of western humanities I can say with certitude that this knowledge (or perhaps wisdom) was common until the Renascence. This is why Latin has been preserved the way it has. One of the many functions that the "scribes" had was to safeguard the official language from confusion.
Makes me curious about how many glaring errors I made in typing this...
Some more detail on this topic..
Being reasonably intelligent, and very good at pattern matching, we can do this in many cases with only the first and last letter, more if blank placeholders are preserved. We can recognise word patterns in most cases where all vowels have been dropped. When vowel position has been scrambled, we can instantly recognise the pattern without thought.
The exact pattern matching process used by the human brain while processing text is resonably complicated, but to be brief a process similar to below is followed:
Match the first char
Match based upon preceding tokens
Match based upon approximate length of string
Match on last char
Match on constenants
Match on vowels
Read the word
There are numerous other ways in which a string can be scrambled, and yet still be ledgible. The simplest and most commonly used in matching algorithms is to drop all vowels and double charactors.
A fully trimmed string, so far as pattern matching is concerned, would look like:
Cognitive Sophistry --> CGNTV SPHSTRY
Following the rules of human pattern matching, having the last letter would help here:
CGNTVE SPHSTRY
We can deal with this better than a fully trimmed string, having the correct length:
C_GN_T_VE S_PH_STRY
Of course, the following are even easier to read:
COGNITOVE SIPHOSTRY
All this is nothing new. We've been using these concepts in data matching algorithms for years.
Wyatt
Pron
Cna't beileve I was the frist to say it...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
"Carnivore" or whatever it's called now suddenly has a much harder problem. Add a liberal use of slang (pun intended), metaphores, spoonerisms, and the massive and increasing volume of spam that also has to be scanned, and it's probably out of business.
Forfather to the internet with those catchy application names like:
pwd
diff
netstat
ls
Unix is fully to blame for the start of the abreviations and its no surprise that its translated directly into the next generation. ^_^
L8R
Quack, quack.
hmmm that sounds wrong.
Have the spammers implemented this New! Improved! way of mangling the "content" in their crap? It's a good thing those Bayesian filters are getting very common, no wordlist-based filter could do anything to this.
PS: No spammer is to utilize this "insight" as an excuse to send more spam. We get plenty of mangled garbage already!
perl -n -e 's#([a-z])([a-z]+)([a-z])#my %tt; my @w=split(//,$2); foreach (@w)
{ $tt{$_} = rand; } @w = sort { $tt{$a} $tt{$b}; } @w; $1.join("",@w).$3;#ieg; print;'
(watch line wrap)
I have to admit, I blatantly stole Jamie's randomizer code. I believe his Perl code may have been a SysV derivative. Bottom line, get a $700 SCO license before running the above code. Thanks.
Michael
Do you have ESP?
As a graphic design student, I have been taught that it is more difficult to read blocks of text that have been made in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS. The reason for this is that the ascenders (pieces going up from the main body of the word, like the top of the "d" in "word") and descenders (like "y" in "you") help us to see the word at a glance. In effect, once we have gotten used to reading the english language, we no longer read letters at all, but words as whole characters. Even when the middle letters are scrambled, the letters have almost the same shape. I would like to see someone try this little experiment with capital letters, as I doubt it would work nearly as well.
A friend of mine wrote an email to this effect. It took me a minute of deliborate effort to unscramble "nriingoebhg." Of course, there were contextual clues, but they don't help that much if you can't parse it instantly.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Am I the only one on Slashdot with enough of a long term memory to realize that this is not new, and possibly a Slashdot dupe?
(\(\
(=_=) Bani!
(")")
This is like that Ebonics bullshit a few years ago when the bleeding-hearts tried to legitimize the mangled English that uneducated niggers speak into a recognized language that would be taught in schools, for Christ's sake!
Now they're essentially telling us that it's okay if you spell like shit too, because people will get the gist of what you're trying to say as long as you get the first and last letter right? Wonderful. Kids already think nothing of handing in school papers typed in SMS shorthand, as if that were perfectly acceptable.
As someone who takes pains to speak and write proper English, with correct spelling and use of capitals and punctuation, this kind of horseshit makes my blood boil.
I can raed, but where is Raed?
yxx cxn rxxd wxrds wxthxxt vxwxls -- so why should i be surprised if "all lysdexians of teh wrold UNTIED"?
stay alert -- ike
Help me, I can't figure it out.
Context would help greatly in that descrable I'm thinking.
I was never good at word scrambles anyway. Dunno why because I always aced all of those other stupid "cognitive" tests.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I found this very interesting, one of my aunts works with children who are dyslexic and I'm sending her this--she'll be intrigued.
http://dearraed.blogspot.com/
If someone had written a compression algorithm which took advantage of how scrambled text is readable, it'd compress better than the normal text since you no longer need to store the order of some of the characters.
Instead, you're now trying to compress the randomness you added. Which naturally doesn't compress well....
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There is a better compression(that should be used). Zip normal can not come close on pure text. Now the problem I dont know what size the out put is. But is compression is fine for binarys.
Binarys have random layouts why this happens.
Your resultes are incomplet did zip win or did it still lose. What was the zip size of the compress section or the percent of the Gzip compress to file size.
This could be just a strange file effect on that file. This happens Gzip is built to compress source code and other docs. Basicly it is not ment to be used on binarys even though slackware does.
Basicly there is Bzip2 as well the compare is important. Because some times it is not even worth compression.
That's because "CH" is one of those pairs that's hard to split. :-)
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I find this very interesting. I showed it to my 7 year old (very advanced reader) thinking she would not be able to read it because she would go to slow and try to read each letter because she was so young. It turns out she read it as well as I did. Even young children appear to be able to look at the words instead of read them. When she was in pre-school they had words on the board they called "sight words". Words that you should know by sight instead of reading. Like the, it, that, she etc.. I guess this is the way we end up reading as we get used to the word patterns. What did your children do ? LouSir
Reading isn't putting together letters as much as it is recognizing what words look like. When you've learned how to read, you stop scanning each letter. Instead, you start recognizing patterns. This is why it is so difficult to spot transposition errors in text. If we had to read text one letter at a time, it would take forever for us to read anything.
I seem to recall that this was a reason that dyslexics have difficulty reading. The way they perceive text doesn't allow them to develop the pattern recognition that most people are able to master.
It would be interesting to see if we could use this concept to test peoples' reading abilities. You can't graduate high school if you can't pass a test based on a scrambled passage of text.
So much for the innocence of "French Connection, United Kindom"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=78588&cid=6966 974
I guess someone submitted it as a story. Too bad the AC didn't get any credit.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I wlil begin by dsbiiecnrg a puocderre nmead CykilttSSee1 that uses a pleyar key to dcyrept the dsik key.
The pdcrroeue rternus no vaule. (It is of tpye "viod".)
The pcurroede teaks two aurgtemns.
The fsirt argmneut is nmaed KEY, and is a pienotr to a vcetor of six uinnesgd bytes. Tsehe byets illaniity ctoanin an eptnreycd dsik key. They wlil evtnllauey hlod the deerycptd disk key cuepmotd by the pcuoerrde.
The soencd arenumgt is nmead im, and is a pnoiter to a voectr of six uesignnd betys. Teshe bteys are the deicotpyrn key (the pyealr key) that the prrocedue wlil use to decpyrt the betys in the vriblaae nmaed KEY.
The poerrdcue mkaes use of seearvl terrmpoay (laocl) vbreiaals.
Trrmeoapy vraaelbis t1 trhuogh t6 are uennsigd ieenrtgs.
Tparreomy vaablrie k is a vecotr of five uiennsgd bytes.
Topemrray vrbiaale i is an ieegntr, uesd as a loop iednx.
The body of prrcoduee CSSyeeklitt1 is as foollws:
1. Take btye 0 of im, OR it with the hdxieecaaml csoanntt 01x00, and store the rsluet in t1.
2. Tkae btye 1 of im and store it in t2.
3. Take byets 2-5 of im and sorte tehm in t3.
4. Tkae the low odrer there bits of t3, whcih can be copmtued by the AND of t3 wtih the coastnnt 7, and srtoe the rulest in t4.
5. Mpllituy t3 by 2, add 8, sacbturt t4, and srtoe the rluest bcak in t3.
6. Sotre 0 in t5.
7. Beign a loop by iiiiiztlanng i to 0. Tihs viraable wlil rgnae from 0 to 4, and wlil be uesd to idnex the vlibaare k, whcih hodls a fvie byte imadtteernie rseult in the dtyprceoin of the six byte key.
8. Cinnotue lnooipg wihle i is lses tahn 5, iiteecmrnnng i by 1 on each sqsneeuubt psas tohugrh the loop. Wehn i is eqaul to 5, exit the loop by jinupmg to setp 20.
9. Use t2 as an iednx itno the tblae CbSSta2, and rrvtieee a btye, wichh we'll call b1. Use t1 as an idnex into talbe CbtaSS3, and ritvreee aonhetr btye, wihch we'll clal b2. Cpomute b1 XOR b2 and srtoe the rsluet in t4.
10. Sfiht t1 rgiht by 1 bit, and sorte the rsulet in t2.
11. Take the low-odrer bit of t1 (whcih can be obieatnd by tanikg the AND of t1 and the csatnnot 1), sifht it lfet by 8 btis, and XOR it wtih t4. Stroe the result back in t1.
12. Use t4 as an idenx itno the tbale CtbaSS4, and rvrieete a byte. Sorte the rueslt in t4.
13. Shfit the cttnneos of t3 rhigt by 3 bits, XOR it wtih t3, sfiht the rlseut rghit by 1 bit, XOR it with t3, sfiht the ruslet rhgit by 8 bits, XOR it wtih t3, sfiht the rlsuet right by 5 btis, and ecraxtt the low oderr byte by AnDiNg it with the hxieecmaadl caosnntt 0xff. Srtoe the rueslt in t6.
14. Shift the cttnnoes of t3 left by 8 btis, OR it wtih t6, and stroe the rsluet in t3.
15. Use t6 as an idnex into the tbale CSSbat4, and rrtveeie a btye. Store the rulest in t6.
16. Add totheegr t6, t5, and t4, and stroe the relust back itno t5.
17. Extcrat the low odrer btye of t5 (wcihh can be dnoe by ADiNng t5 wtih the hcxeedmaail cnntaot 0fxf), and srtoe the rulest in the i-th byte of the vtocer k.
18. Shfit t5 rihgt by 8 bits and srtoe the rsuelt back itno t5.
19. Rrteun to step 8 to cioutnne lpoonig.
20. This is where we end up wehn the first loop is cleotmpe.
21. Bgien aehnotr loop by iaziiiinntlg the vrbaaile i to 9. This vaailrbe wlil rgnae form 9 down to 0. The vleuas of (i+1) and i wlil be uesd to idnex itno the 11 btye tlabe CtSSab0, whsoe enteemls are of csoure nmeerubd from 0 to 10. This talbe deecsbirs a poirettaumn of the 6 byte key; its entmeels are ieerngts from 0 to 5.
22. Coutinne linpoog wihle i is geeartr than or equal to 0, dmcnneeeirtg i by 1 on ecah ssqbeenuut psas thrgouh the loop. Wehn i is lses than 0, eixt the loop by jupinmg to step 25.
23. Use i+1 as an inedx itno the table CSSbat0, and clal the rvireeetd vaule p1. Use i as an idenx into the tlbae CtbaSS0, and call the rvieeertd vuale p0.
Let's see if they search for
Led Zlepneipn - Sriawty to Hvaeen.mp3
hahahahah!!!!!
(applies pearl script to mp3 directory)
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The spammers now have a new weapon against Bayesian filtering. Nice work.
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
So it IS true! Dyslexics definitely has more fnu!
RFTA. You're not spespuod to mvoe the frist and lsat lttrees.
Long and uncommon words rarely work with this. After almost an hour of piping all conversations through scrmable.pl on IRC we figured out that is really only works good on word with6 or less letters, and even then only on common words.
If you must!
This explains why proofreading a paper can be so damned hard sometimes.
neighboring
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
It wroks!
Rock!
That's cuz some fancy schmancy store beat 'em to it - don't tell me you're unaware of the French Connection UK (FCUK)!
All the people i know who read at all quickly "see" the word, rather than hear it, and are able to go at much faster than speaking speed, whereas all the people who leared phonics tend to hear it, and thus cant read much faster than they can read aloud.
I laso noticed that if i read a word the wrong way once, i tend to see it the wrong way untill someone points it out to me. I dont really process the word, it just goes straight into my brain.
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
I doubt anyone who learned English as a second language would be able to read the scrambled words as easily as most Slashdotters.
I'm a Norwegian, native language Norwegian, but I talk and read a lot on the Internet in english, use a lot of english software, higher education had books in english, and in general there's a lot of american english series and movies on TV.
I think many in the Western culture can read it quite well, even if it is a second language. You tend to get pick up quite a bit of it, if you want to or not...
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Introducing random letter sequencing adds randomness, which results in a larger file since the randomness is itself incompressible data.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I'm no expert but wouldn't this render even the simplest decryption method a lot harder for machines to crack that depend on properly spelled words to tell when the job is finished? And what about all the workplace e-mail filters/monitors? How long till "Moms against Terrorism/Drugs/Smart_Ass_Kids" gets bad spelling made a felony? Or SCO press release #4312 proves a dictionary is really a circumvention device subject to the DMCA? Only people who hate freedom would play around with this bad spelling business.
Who ndees a Prel spirct? I type like taht all the tmie. No, raelly.
Litigious bastards
Deos taht scpirt voilate the DCMA?
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
I think the phonics are really necessary for beginning readers. I've seen kids taught on the "whole word" method who were COMPLETELY unable to figure out a really basic word that they haven't ever seen before.
But, the whole concept of making a kid read is an exercise in helping them to develop their own "whole word" recognition, hence why the shift changes from phonics to "reading" somewhere in elementary school.
Good point tho.
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I understood everything but 'ceehiro'.
This reminds me of that 'finger reading'. You know, learn to read 15 times faster with better comprehension? It was based on the premise of looking at BLOCKS of words, rather than one word at a time. Over the course of a few weeks, you can tach your brain to understand the blocks of words, so you don't have to mentally sound-out every word (unless of course, you are hooked on phonics).
The first and foremost thing I can see this being used for is for HIDING FROM THE RIAA by scarmbling the titels of songs you share on kzaa.
As you know, we don't use nearly all the combinations of letters. I imagine the more "compact" the language, the more combinations in use, the less intuitive it is.
Most of the time we'll probably read it correct based on context anyway (e.g. expecting a verb, not a noun), but I imagine it'll be much harder and confusing.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yep spelling is even more important that you have the right letters. Yep check the word "iprmoetnt" is importent(Opps spellchecker is still required)
clogs?
clgos?
cogls?
colgs?
cgols?
cglos?
I don't get it. What's a "clever clog?"
Stewey
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
I skimmed over beginning of the summary ("An aoynmnuos raeedr sumbtis") without even noticing the spelling mistakes. Go figure.
Note that the research was done on experienced readers.
.
The disastrous "Look-Say" method of teaching English reading was started by a similar piece of research.
The researchers studied the better readers in elementary school and found that they were reading words as chunks.
The goal was to get all the students to be good readers. So they designed a program where they TAUGHT words as chunks, discarding teaching the language as a phonetic code. This method was called the "Look-Say" method, as opposed to the earlier "Phonics" method.
And we ended up with a generation of illiterates who couldn't handle any word they hadn't explicitly encountered in class. They'd graduate with a written vocabulary in the hundreds of words, if that, with strange tendencies to misspell, and with no
The falacy is that the good students went through a progression of learning stages. First they learned letters and letter-groups as a phonetic code. Then as they gained proficiency they'd rote-memorize shortcuts for sylables, word fragments, entire common words, then progressively less common words. But when they encountered an unfamilar word they'd drop back as many levels as necessary to crack it, to the phonetic level if necessary, and do it automatically. (That's why you probably didn't even stumble the first time you encountered "Lite Beer" {or "Lite [whatever]} rather than "Light Beer".)
Victims of the Look-Say method were taught the language, not as an alphabetic language with a phonetic code, but as a hieroglyphic language, where each word is a separate picture and must be learned separately.
= = = =
The observation that internally-scrambled words are easily read seems to me to be one applicable only to advanced readers. Try it on a third-grader and I bet you'll get different results.
This limits its usefulness, and must be taken into account if you intend to do anything with it.
(Of course it might be useful to hide adult subjects from children - at least until they are very good readers. B-) )
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Bfeore I cuold at lsaet lokoup words in a dcnaitoriy and use a sreach enngie. Now I'm FUKCED!
Finaly a legitimization for spelling error here on /.
Time is the only precious thing I've got left; Don't waste it
How it would work with phonetic writing? I suspect there it'd be more like one sign = one "sound". Of course, that's not a language, so wouldn't really apply to many people ;).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
This just goes to show how much more wetware 'computing' there is to language than a mere mathematical parsing of characters - you almost have to have an intuitive 'feel' and cognitive background, a common experiential consciousness to communicate. A computer cannot easily be programmed to 'understand' a written sentence because it has not lived, all it can do is match strings and spit out canned responses programmed by someone who has. I mean, you know - this shows how much of 'communication' is in the mind of the receiver, like being able to enjoy a song you know on a radio that's full of static and a very poor signal, because you can fill in the missing information.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Because english words are made up of some common components. 'i' always comes before 'e' in 'ie' pairs, for example.
My neighbor weighed your argument. He used a beige scale, and decided it was probably the heinous act of a foreigner to make such a statement. And you're weird. So rein in yourself, and remove the veil of ignorance, ye feisty cad!
Thou should forfeit karma, but that is neither here nor there.
Code poet, espresso fiend, starter upper.
I treid to tset it wtih all cpas but the laemenss flietr wno't aollw it...
It seems possible that one can create better compression scheme for text. If you fix both ends of a word, order the middle letters, then there are sequences appears more frequent than in nature writing. The trick is to unscramble the word based on the context. The scheme probably will introduce some errors.
Old people are grouchy. And were probably grouchy to you too - when you were younger. :)
I'm pushing 30 and found the post interesting in a forget-about-it-20-minutes kind of way, so what more do you want in the level of coverage? This is Slashdot, not a prize-winning newspaper.
Every generation has had their slang - sometimes deliberately crafted to annoy people such as yourself. And they invariably grow out of it as they mature.
I am one of the fastest readers I know, and in school always scored in the 99th percentile on reading. However I was always close to the bottom of my class in spelling. (my spelling is even worse than this post implys because I have to re-word many lines because I can't spell the word I really want) I learned to recignise words, which is the best way to read fast. It is a bad way to learn to spell those words - it means I know what the first letter is, and the last, but I don't know what is in-between other than it looks wrong on paper. Memorizing the sequence of letters is the only option I have, which is very difficult. Somehow though, memorizing how words look is not difficult at all.
Someone in education can likely take that and write a paper - I hope you get a good grade on it.
Taws biirllg, and the stlhiy toevs
Did gyre and gilbme in the wabe:
All msmiy wree the broooegvs,
And the mome raths orubtage.
Brwaee the Jbbwoecrak, my son!
The jaws taht btie, the calws taht catch!
Bearwe the Jjuubb brid, and shun
The foimruus Braastecnndh!
He took his varopl sword in hnad:
Lnog tmie the mnomaxe foe he shogut --
So rsteed he by the Tuumtm tere,
And sootd ailwhe in toughht.
And, as in usiffh tguhhot he sootd,
The Jeocabbwrk, wtih eeys of flmae,
Came wnfflhiig thguroh the tugley wood,
And beurbld as it cmae!
One, two! One, two! And trouhgh and trugohh
The vroapl bdlae wnet skneicr-sncak!
He lfet it daed, and with its head
He went gmluhniapg bcak.
And, has tohu slain the Jobbwcraek?
Cmoe to my amrs, my bmeaish boy!
O fobujras day! Caoollh! Cllaay!
He cholretd in his joy.
Taws biillrg, and the sltihy tvoes
Did gyre and gblmie in the wbae;
All msmiy wree the bvooogres,
And the mmoe rahts otguarbe.
I wonder how much context has to do with our understanding of these sentences. Take for example these words, scrambled and taken completely out of context:
rteglus
blafams
frignde
It could be very frustrating to someone attempting to unscramble them when they find out they were completely random. It's just this sort of frustration that would make someone like me laugh out loud, or lol in the parlance of our times.
My Blog
I've often wondered at how easy it is to read text that is half-covered lengthways. Indeed, in school, I would sometimes see how much of a line of text I could cover before I could no longer read it.
Try this yourself: Find a web page with a large block of text, and scroll the window so that the bottom of the window cuts the last line in half. Read it.
So why don't we just write half our letters and be done with it? Handwritten text would be akward to write, but books and documents, on the other hand, could use 50% less paper.
My motorbike travels in Chile.
Or that the principle at work here is called (I think) "closure."
Is it dangerous to our language to promulgate this sort of thing?
By reassuring writers that their scrambled verbiage can in many cases be readable, we may be heading to a slippery slope of increasing incomprehensibility.
This is news? Come on. People have been posting stories spelled randomly on Slashdot for years.
I appologize for replying to you .sig but I believe it is incorrect. The quote actually comes from Benjamin Franklin and is as follows:
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both." --Benjamin Franklin
y3s but c4n j00 r34d th1s ???
spelling Nazis might as well shoot themselves in the head right now.
Anyone know if this finding is also valid for reading Braille?
Here's that url:
http://dogma.net/markn/articles/Star/
aboard abroad, actuators autocrats, abode adobe, alerters alterers, alerted altered, alerter alterer, argues augers, ailment aliment, ailments aliments, alerting altering, aimers armies, Aires Aries, alerts alters, antimony antinomy, allots atolls, babbled blabbed, babbling blabbing, bearded breaded, boarder broader, beards breads, beaters berates, bagger beggar, baggers beggars, bathers breaths, barked braked, bakers brakes, brakes breaks, bakes beaks, baler blear, barely barley, barley bleary, boaters borates, bared beard, beard bread, bares bears, bears braes, barest breast, bastes beasts, barking braking, binary brainy, board broad, bare brae, barn bran, bars bras, bedroom boredom, begins beings, beings binges, bugled bulged, blushes bushels, blisters bristles, blowers bowlers, blotted bottled, blower bowler, bugling bulging, bugle bulge, blotting bottling, blowing bowling, blot bolt, blots bolts, blows bowls, brunt burnt, casually causally, casual causal, cleansers clearness, catered created, cashers chasers, chasers crashes, cashed chased, casher chaser, cashes chases, conservations conversations, conservation conversation, catering creating, caller cellar, callers cellars, carters craters, carter crater, caters crates, carved craved, cavern craven, carves craves, cashing chasing, Callisto Castillo, complaint compliant, carving craving, calm clam, calms clams, Carla Clara, cantors cartons, carol coral, carve crave, clobber cobbler, clobbers cobblers, clods colds, conserved conversed, conserves converses, compiled complied, clippers cripples, conserving conversing, consoles coolness, costumer customer, conserve converse, clod cold, clot colt, cloud could, corps crops, crud curd, derails dialers, details dilates, dales deals, damned demand, dared dread, dairy diary, discreetly discretely, densities destinies, density destiny, divers drives, deus dues, excepted expected, excepting expecting, excepts expects, except expect, entireties eternities, entirety eternity, Eire Erie, fallible fillable, farmed framed, farmer framer, fastens fatness, fares fears, fates feats, farming framing, faults flatus, finders friends, feeling fleeing, feels flees, forested fostered, fighters freights, field filed, filer flier, files flies, fiend fined, fired fried, fires fries, flower fowler, forests fosters, flows fowls, form from, gateway getaway, garter grater, garb grab, gilded glided, genres greens, glovers grovels, gird grid, girt grit, Gorton Groton, gusty gutsy, Haley Healy, hares hears, hates heats, heirs hires, incest insect, indented intended, indenting intending, indents intends, Janos Jonas, lakes leaks, lanes leans, lair liar, lairs liars, liens lines, lions loins, lion loin, marital martial, maiden median, maidens medians, mantels mantles, males meals, manes means, mantel mental, mates meats, mildness mindless, meets metes, parental paternal, paternal prenatal, paperers prepares, phasers phrases, panelist plainest, painters pantries, pantries pertains, parties pirates, paled plead, panels planes, planets platens, parley pearly, pales peals, peals pleas, petals plates, panel penal, pares pears, patrols portals, patrol portal, procotols protocols, piled plied, perils pilers, pilers pliers, piles plies, pointers proteins, penis pines, pluses pulses, rationalizes realizations, reared reread, retains retinas, rapier repair, rapes reaps, Roland Ronald, recurses rescuers, recourse resource, reserved reversed, reserver reverser, reserves reverses, reserving reversing, retired retried, retires retries, resorted restored, reserve reverse, rhesus rushes, reliving reviling, relive revile, resorting restoring, resins rinses, retinue reunite, resin risen, rogue rouge, scrapes spacers, sacred scared, snatch stanch, seahorse seashore, shares shears, saltiness stainless, sainted stained, snakes sneaks, skaters streaks, skated staked, skates stakes, stakes steaks, sales seals, salted slated, salter slater, slates steals, salver slaver, salves slaves, spared spread, spares spears, sated stead, sates seats, saints stains, satin stain, skate sta
...how far down Google's search results people will go once they do this to their blogs.
And how soon the ones who like doing this can start.
And how soon after that Google's preferences page will include an "allow scrambled words" checkbox.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
CowboyNealSpellingJoke$
Cool!
There is no Kitsune in Kitsune Udon
this has been going round on email (i hate those forwards) for a few days now. it is interesting tho.
Seriously folks, this is what trolling, and by extension slashdot, is all about.
Maybe its just me, but I tend to absorb lare phrases and clauses at once. Sentances and sometimes whole paragraphs. Are just a few entities linked up. I cant seem to do it with mixed up letters, though. Reading one word at a time is so darn slow, i can imagine anyone going at it one letter at a time.
So I can write a novel this way, and anyone
who naturally decrypts because the brain
works that way is in violation of the DMCA.
Actually, developed, this has the makings of a possible protest. How about encrypting the DMCA bill this way, where everyone is in violation who reads it..
I can understand how people read words commonly mistyped or even rarely. "Teh", "shoudl" are very commond to our Time New Roman trained eyes.
But has this experiment been tried with handwriting? Do those with dislexia perform better at these tests. These are two questions i would like to have the answers to.
The wait is OVER!
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
One thing I've noticed lately is that I tend to recognize words, and possibly entire phrases, by their overall shape rahter than sequences of individual letters. I've been studying/using Japanese for the last seven years or so, and it may have been reading kanji, which have completely different shapes, that got me thinking about this; as my Japanese skills have improved, I've noticed that rather than having to read everything out loud as I used to, I can see a kanji or sequence of kanji and understand instantly what it means. When I then went back and read a book in English, I realized I was doing the same thing: seeing the words as "images", or patterns in and of themselves.
I'm not sure what practical benefit the particular discovery mentioned in the article has, other than letting CmdrTaco rest easy, but it's an interesting insight into how the brain works.
Deyxlisa creus YOU!
Will I retire or break 10K?
This technique is in wide use on Usenet, e.g.
Mciorofst Ociffe 2003 Dsik 1.iso
CEE5210S The signal SIGHUP was received.
So does this mean that evil spammers can use this to bypass spam filters?
You could also use it to prevent search engines from finding things you didn't want indexed.
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
I before E, except on the Internet.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This is nciote taht by reinadg this, you are in viiltaoon of the DMCA
by using the ciyhgoprt cncuvriioetmn dvciee kwnon as yuor mind.
Pay us 2,000 or we wlil sue you for 100,000 for vtloniiag our IP.
Seignd,
SCO and the RAIA
I didn't even notice those were registered wrong at first. One has to ask why why we bother to spell things right too in elementary school if we can read and communicate in a proper way without having to spell everything right. We need to make our language adjust to people and not the other way around. You aren't any more smart if you can spell correctly or not.
Sig: I stole this sig.
I just tried this with some co-workers! They still don't believe it.
compare : (first line input, second scrambled text)
:
aaaabbbb
abbbaaab
aaaabbbb
abbbaaab
with
aaaabbbb
aaabbbab
aaaabbbb
aabababb
this perl script is sorting letters together...
url for patched script
scramble
Chinese is ideographic, and Japanese combines Chinese ideograms ("kanji") mixed with phonetic syllable signs ("kana"). Korean has an actual alphabet ("hangul"), except that instead of the letters coming in a row as in Latin, Cyrillic, or Hebrew, each syllable is packed into a box. Korean used to be written with borrowed Chinese ideograms, but nowadays the alphabet dominates writing.
You can Read more about Hangul, but you may have to have Korean support installed on your OS to display the Hangul characters.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Thanks to Jamie Zawinski, this whole thread will now be riddled with dyslexic text. More fun than a barrel of grease monkeys..... not that I know how much fun a barrel of grease monkeys is.
Atrox
-Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master.
Gerat, aenhotr tool for srampmes to use to get eimal psat feltirs.
assert(birth_date<time-86400)
Boy, when they say some programmers don't give good comments, they weren't kidding! Guess I'll have to delete that garbage since I don't know what he's tinryg to say! ;-)
--- root@127.0.0.1
A DOG IS
IS A MAN'S
BEST FIEND.
Can you find the two errors in the above?
You can solve the issue from the software manual by rewriting the sentence in imperative: "Press the button to make the printer proceed." Find more tips on how to avoid passive voice and other unnecessary uses of "to be" at E-Prime.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I remember long ago (BBS days) that qmodem had a jive mode, that would alter incoming text and change it to read (sound) like jive.
Wow, cool. It's not for the meek, but the eye can see it.
(I did it too... See? I did a good job!)
I got the perl script. The first thing I notice is that the copyright is tllatoy unecnofirble...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Before he did i think ;)
:/
http://junglist.org/jumble.php
src @ http://junglist.org/jumble.php
too bad i am not cool like jwz
.era llits yeht fi wonk t'noD .sdrawkcab etirw ot deniart eb ot desu stsilaicepS snoitarepO ynaN SU
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I wonder how many people will really care about all this blog stuff in 3, 5 and 10 years. I wonder how many name changes it will go through in that time as well.
I just noticed this misspelling has carried over into comments in another /. article. I believe that makes this an official new trolling phenomena. The folks that write this will surely have some updating to do soon.
Not all cases are as easy as the example given. How about this: Aaaatttmnnnbiiiiisssseehldrn, a daiuolnsel psoiohhply, is a pcuordt of the rntreaaicoy arotsinipas of the crtvvoeansie elsingh accstroairy.
Communication!
Nothing more.
But, and more significant, nothing less.
Those who trade freedom for security will soon have neither.
You know, I'm not so sure about that -- is a license rendered invalid just because contains spelling errors? I strongly suspect not.
(Anyway, the copyright is enforcable because everything is copyrighted by default, even if it has no notice at all. The interesting question is whether the license I put on that thing actually grants you any rights. I think it probably does.)
Turhgoh = Through
A topic that does not seem to have had much coverage in this article is the actual iconic visual recognition that our brains appear to use in word recognition.
Obviously each word approximates a patterned rectangle (serif fonts emphasize this further) with occasional outliers (ie. t, y, l, and any other letters that protrude above or below the base rectangle).
People with poor eyesight rely on this fuzzy but fast recognition frequently. In fact there is a classic psych experiment based around displaying a word that iconically is very similar to another word, while simultaneously presenting a context that implies the second word, and asking the subject to record the word. The subject mis-records the word roughly 90% of the time.
Q.
Insert Signature Here
Perhaps spammers have discoverd this phenomenon already. I have wondered who buys anything from advertisers who send e-mails where almost none of the words are spelled correctly.
With this scrambling technology fooling spam filters is a piece of cake, no two sent spams need be identical because every e-mail can have the middle letters of every word reordered ramdomly.
Filtering based on typical words fails also, there are 4! = 24 different spelligs for Viagra. Enlarge can be spelled 120 different ways.
Actually, I can think of one extremely interesting application for this idea - cryptography. It is actually highly intelligible, but definitely bound to give any code-breaking algorithims headaches when trying to correlate know words to patterns. I may have to try doing this to send messages to my friend in a chinese prison. I'm sure it would give the censors fits trying to translate it.
It's interesting but EXTREMELY old news (like 60 years or more). We've already known this about phonetic spelling systems since very early in the field. Phonetic spelling systems are easier to learn and easier to read if you don't know the word, but once you know them you just look at the pictures. This is why kanji and Chinese work so well, depite being really hard to learn if you don't know what they are (no phonetic sense to them). All people read by looking at patterns. If phonetic (or quasi-phonetic, as in the case of English) orthography were necessary for written communication to work, cultures such as the Chinese could have never become literate.
In short, what you're looking at here are some people with some very monolinguistic precepts discovering what anyone who knows anything about language already knows.
Hey, evryenoe tihs is THE cnhace to mkae a the ogg vrbois of the txet, i see hgih csosimepron rtaes on the hrozion!!!!
"Tikang garet crae, I septped bihend the gril, and fdnoled her basters"
Um, that is a little hard to read isn't it. Well, ok, I think you're right. Notice "gril" and "basters" in the same sentence, make you think of cooking.
And yes, this statement could be offensive. Well, I'm male. I can't really help it.
Tihs is one of the msot aewmsoe sotries I've seen on Salshodt! Now, let me konw wehn you find a way to mkae my cmputeor inerptert my cppary, malfromed Jvaa cdoe!!!
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
pr0n...? or autopr0n?
my blog
I cant undstand wahts rong wthi rigthing like tath I alweys do. I'm a writerator.
GW Bush
If you have a bunch of words for which the letters of each are totally scrambled (like the popular JUMBLE game published daily in many newspapers), it's not a challenging task to write a computer program to decipher the words by rearranging the letters in alphabetic order and comparing with a dictionary word list which is similarly arranged, and not any more challenging to do something similar when the first and last letters of each word are fixed. Anyone thinking that scrambling letters will confuse automated searches of web content for very long is in for a rude awakening.
Wy scmble wt u cn lv ot?
For the longest time, I've thought about stuff like this. English obviously has WAY to many variations on spelling of the same sounds.
Ideally, the letter C could quite easily represent the sound for CH, once C is no longer representing S and K. As for SH, I'd hope for new letter to represent that sound. Prehaps with the elimination of the letter Q (since it's a completely useless letter, easily replaced with K) we could use the Q to represent the SH. It would take a little getting used to, but we wouldn't hafta redesign english keyboards. At least that' the way I'd do it.
Finally, to deal with different versions of vowels (long and short), I'd designate the duplicate vowels represent the long version, and singular represent short sounds.
So for the word "Change", I'd like it to be spelled: caanj. And words like "Shout" : Qowt (remember the Q represents SH).
How could I say to men: "Speak louder, shout! For I am deaf!"? -Ludwig van Beethoven
Yeah, right.
Well this is hardly news for those of us suffering from dyslexia. I've been telling people this for years.
Perhaps its only apparent that this is how we read and process words when you have to spend so much more time trying to read the darned things.
emacs is better because vi has that useless and unnecessarry and therefore inefficient transpose characters command!
I knew it all along.
this wasn't posted by CmdrTaco...
It reminds me of the project to get the Brits to drive on the right side of the road (instead of the wrong side). The white paper called for a progressive implementation of the new directive. On the first year, only trucks and busses would have to drive on the other side of the road, and if the move is successful, cars would follow suit the following year.
http://www.masquilier.org/republic/election/ Condorcet, Plurality voting and alternative voting enabled bulletin board.
What screwed me up was that I read it right away as "cheerio", and figured that couldn't be right.
Cheerios are only a breakfast cereal here in the US.
It didn't help that it wasn't capitalized (another key contextual hint), and I didn't notice the period before it... referring to "the whole cheerio" is slang I'd never heard before, so I rejected that out of hand.
There are only 10 types of people: those who understand decimal, those who don't, and, uh, 8 other types I forget.
Willing to bet the managers and programmers in NSA Echelon offices are not real pleased this lovely late summer evening. I, for one, am willing to tolerate a little extra spam getting through the filters in exchange for the knowledge of the clumps of hair that are gathering on the floor tiles of NSA offices around the world.
but that doesn't surprise me, it's really just an experience thing. If you read the words often (i.e. reading another language) then, after a time, you can read a word by just glancing at it and taking it in as a whole (context also helps a lot). But when you learn new words or happen upon some rarely used word you have to read them letter by letter for a few times. When you start with a new language you'll do all words letter by letter at first.
When you look at a kid that's reading letter by letter and compare your own reading style to that you'll also notice the difference. It's harder to "slow down" to letter by letter reading (or at least checking for correct order) as anyone sure noticed who went over a text for spellchecking or trained a kid in reading skills. I also sometimes notice that i'm reading a word "wrong" at first and then have to go back and reread it after i notice that something is out of context. When i stumble over such words i always notice that the word i wrongly "read" and the real one contain roughly the same letters and start with the same letters too (i didn't pay too much attention to see if final letters match but will in the future).
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
About as many as remember and care about BBSs now (i.e., just a few older farts wallowing in nostalgia).
Yuo inesnsivite cold!
philcrissman.com.
Because the correct spelling of the intended word is "important", with an 'a'. (As it appears above, it looked more like "impotent".) But it freaked me out to realize that I could read the rest of that almost transparently. I think context is crucial, though -- it's easier to read those "words" as part of a sentence than it would be if they stood alone.
I guess it shouldn't be so surprising: I can't count the number of times I've read past a typo without even realizing it on first reading (or second, or third). That's what makes proofreading such a bitch. Maybe I should consider a spell checker, at that...
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
The script doesn't preserve punctuation location and doesn't ensure that the last letter of the word is in the right place. For instance:
./scrmable.pl.orig
./scrmable.pl
$ echo "Slashdot is nerdy." |
Shdtolsa is n.dyer
Here's a fix:
<patch>
--- scrmable.pl.orig 2003-09-16 00:57:27.000000000 -0400
+++ scrmable.pl 2003-09-16 00:57:37.000000000 -0400
@@ -21,7 +21,7 @@
sub scrmable {
while () {
- foreach (split (/([^[:alnum:]]*[\s[:punct:]]+)/)) {
+ foreach (split (/([\s[:punct:]]+)/)) {
if (m/\w/) {
my @w = split (//);
my $A = shift @w;
</patch>
$ echo "Slashdot is nerdy." |
Slhadost is ndrey.
Have already covered this,small potatos. Please do not feed the rocks.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
I think it's cool that everyone is so into this but researchers in cognitive psychology have done this very thing and answered the very same questions for over several decades. Rediscover the wheel people. Pick up a journal and read.
I noticed, while testing the script out with a paper I happen to be in the process of writing, that compound words do not seem to work with this scheme. Though I'm hardly a linguist, it may be a result of the compound word being translated seperately and then placed together when we read it. When the letters intermingle, we aren't able to differentiate the two halves.
Examples from the paragraph I tested with are "worldview", "afterlife", and "humankind". I'm sure iterations that keep the halves partially seperate would be readable, but ones I came up with (like "wirovdelw") simply make no sense.
Other, larger words that I've noticed do not work are "consciousness" and "unenlightened", though I'm sure it wouldn't be too isn't unusual to expect large words to begin to obfuscate themselves too much.
This doesn't explain the shorter words that seem to obfuscate very readily, such as "religion" and "autonomous". Once letters and/or vowels become repitious and clump together, the word seems to be more difficult to readily decrypt. I can also confirm this is true from my experience of occasionally playing TextTwist on Yahoo! Games.
(end random paper-avoiding post)
Hope someone gets the sarcasm of the poster
There's no need to make up "news" to justify your poor speeling.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
It seems that many spammers have already figured this out. I get a lot of spam which has purposely misspelled words in it to avoid spam filters. I don't know if that defeats Bayesian filters as well, but I would guess so. Eventually, the misspelled words will make it into my filter, but they do get more longevity through this technique.
Let's say one were to install a browser plugin which automatically rearranged words in this fashion. Over prolonged use, what would the effect be on the person's reading ability, if any?
Also, on another note, I have a hunch that this effect is what causes me to misread numbers on a fairly frequent basis. In my learned haste to skim through text, I try and skim numbers and read them wrong. Hmm.
P.S. I wonder how much worldwide bandwidth the original post sentence caused. I received emails with this in about 5 times the past week from various people who'd forwarded it to friends etc. I'm sure other /.ers have had the same experience...
I took a speed reading course when I was in high school. Pretty much what you are taught it to first see whole words, then phrases, then sentences, then paragraphs, and finally whole pages at a time. It works pretty well once you get used to it. After years of practice you can read REALLY fast. The human brain is pretty impressive. For practice we would try to read a whole line from left to right and then the next line from right to left. It lets you read quicker and your brain puts the info in the right order. As long as you see the letters, your brain will do the rest.
I am a native Spanish speaker, with English being my third language. I could read the text easily, though. /read/ or /speak/ English in your everyday life. Uhn... being a frequent /. reader helps a lot when trying to decipher scrambled text :)
However, note that I use English primarily as a written language (I do not live in an English speaking country). Probably the ability to read scrambled text is heavily dependent on whether you have to
1. At what age does this ability manifest itself?
2. Does this ability
Q: 'What does an agnostic, dyslexic insomniac do?'
A: 'Lies awake at night wondering if there is a dog.'
You can get away with a bit of digraphing here. It turns out what English speakers think is one sound (or at least Americans) CH, is actually two: T-SH. So, you let C represent SH, then just tack a T on the front.
/z/ and /t/, not /s/ and /d/ liik wee liik tou think.
As for J as in judge, it's actually D followed by the sound in garaGe. So, we let J represent that sound, then just prefix with D for what was J. Thus, we have djudj, and garaj.
For your examples, you'd spell "change" as "tcandj", and "shout" as "cowt".
As for a post before me, you have the problem where plural endings can change, such that you would have "bagz" and "kaaks". Well, either we can either leave the spelling different, or since we generally take them as the same sound, we could use "x" (which of course, is also completely useless) for ending that change based on the voicedness of the previous letter. Thus, "bagzx" and "kaakzx", with "djumptx", and "thumbtx".
Thu tcoys uv "zx", and "tx" iz aktualee baastx on waht II lerntx in u lingwistikzx klas, that thu "reel" sowndzx involvtx, ahr aktualee
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
--
Simon
My first language happens to be swedish, although I consider myself fluent when it comes to english. I had no problems, whatsoever, to decipher the scrambled text. In other words, it's all about the level of fluency, not if it's your mother tongue or not. Your trheoy sckus bgitmie.
Oh great. I can't wait. "Ernalge yuor piens now!!!!"
Off topic, I really don't understand spammer thinking. Most (if not all) of the suckers that actually buy the advertised products don't even use spam filters. The people that *do* use spam filters don't want their spam and don't want the products being advertised. So... why don't the spammers just send out plain old emails with no tricks (and subject starting with "ADV:")? The people that don't want to see their crap will easily filter it out, and the idiots who don't use filters can continue to go on buying the stupid products.
Can't we all just be friends?
The poster formerly known as Krokus (I forgot my password, and the associated email addy is now toast, dammit).
...how about this, instead:
) ;$w=$1;while(@a){$w.=splice@a,
while(<>){s!([a-z])([a-z]+)([a-z])!@a=split(//,$2
rand@a,1}$w.$3!ieg;print$_}
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
Sltil no crue for cnacre
As some may say.
AT&ROFLMAO
Homeland securitah is going to have to update it's email sniffing programs in case people start talking about bmonibg the pserdinet or making hmoe mdae ptalisic eplxoviess. CIA, KGB, and NSA are still safe, however.
As Simon says uppercase is difficult to read because uppercase words are not easily recognised by their shape. But we should also be more aware of layout and location as cues for understanding.
When reading a report, I automatically remember where important points are on the page and where that page is relative to the whole report. I don't remember (or even read) paragraph numbers and page numbers.
Slsahtot has a good layout when you are in the articles. Slashdot also has good search facilities. But sometimes it's difficult to find "the article I read last week which had an interesting item that mentioned something about a new computer language", when I can't remember its name.
Some sort of graphical interface might help - a bit like a windows desktop with a week's topics on it. This might be something like a map with spots on it (only in this case laying out the days rather than towns and cities). This would enable people like me to follow up our vauge memories and remember more once we had found the context.
See Gole's map of UK blogs for a mapping example. It's a bit rough and ready but you can get the idea.
Their "Why gole works" startsYet, it works for non-native speakers. But it does not work with the german language because there are too many words which are combinations of others - they are not recognisable. I doubt that it will work for other languages which for example put a lot of information into the declination/conjugation instead of using articles/pronouns and auxillury verbs.
Sm thng s trw wth lphbts wth no vwls. It dsn't hlp to hv tww wys of shwg
vwls lk wth sbstt cnsnts nd lttl sgns thwgh whch ld to dblg wf th sllbles!!
Ask 'im up there!
"When the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem begins to resemble a nail." - Abraham Maslow (1908-1970)
I know people who speak english fluently and read it pretty fast, yet they can't decipher that. I on the other hand learned my first english words at the age of three. By the time I was twelve, half the time I was "thinking in english". Could this be somehow related, as I had no difficulty understanding the scrambled text?
What about optomaienooa ?
fr emaxlpe waht fi yu dscerbied a manes of cventircuming the D**A no a bew pgae dna ti swa lal srcabmeld. dlouc uoy eb psorceetud ?
Wtah touba srcabmeld ecsour doce in +C+ ?
RFTA
Try pronouncing it. (Note, of course that that passage is an old joke that has been going around for ages)
1. srcblmae lterets
2. ???
3. piroft!
Modern English is the offspring of many different older languages (as you may know). These languages all had varying ways of representing different sounds with the alphabet given to them by the Romans. When English took all of these methods and combined them into one language. Thus, there are many different ways of creating the same sound, or phoneme.
Therefore, English does not encode the spoken language into text exactly. Though there are some sounds that can only be created one way ('ng' and 'ch' come to mind), many can be spelled numerous ways. For example: whir, were, and work have the same sound in them, but are spelled differently. This makes spelling words in English more difficult, but makes identifying misspelled words easier. You could say English now comes with error-correction. This has no doubt helped it remain in existence, despite its lack of consistent grammar rules and general lack of user-friendliness.
Disclaimer: I blame any grammatical or logical errors on my lack of sleep. Now I'm going to bed.
that that is is that that is not is not
Speaking and reading english means pronouncing and reading entire words. In german or danish or such this wouldn't work half as good. For one, the words are longe and have more sylables. THe advantage though is that in german you know how to pronounce a written word even if you haven't heard it yet.
Allthough I do think context of sentence should make this trick somewhat possible in german too.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'm not srue taht tihs trhoey hdlos ctlmpoleey ture aawyny. The oaiirgnl seetnecns ddnit rllaey itnapcorore vrey sbstatanuil ratmoondisain. See waht I maen?
for those who living on pine:
save scrmable.pl to your home (chmod, etc)
set "display filters" in pine to the file
save & ejnoy!
What can we learn from that about the way we write software? WeShouldProbablyStopWritingLikeThat instead we_should_write_like_that.
"Can you raed tihs?" - Wnrog qteoisun, pal.
Dsn'oet tihs look jsut lkie a sartandd Shdlasot aiclrte, olny wtih a llitte mroe tpoys tahn uausl?
Aalctuly no. It jsut miniaants the uausl lveel, I'd lkie to say.
So, as to awensr yuor sluopeurfs qteoisun, aalctuly, yes, I can raed it. No plerobm.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Funniest post I have ever read!
Now all the goddamn spammers are going to use this technique to get past word filters.
Hi, I just tried that script with a german Tagesschau.de article which is like this: Viele altere Lehrer, zu groBe Klassen, zu wenig Studienanfanger - Deutschland hat laut der jungsten OECD-Bildungsstudie in vielen Bereichen weiter Nachholbedarf. Die zu geringe Zahl der Studenten ist nach Ansicht der OECD auch fur die aktuelle Wirtschaftsschwache mitverantwortlich. scrambled its like this: Veile altere Lheerr, zu groB Ksselan, zu wineg Sninuetdafanegr - Dnulsaechtd hat laut der junstgen OECD-Biudgdsunsitle in vielen Bechreein weteir Nohahlbeacrdf. Die zu gniegre Zhal der Sutednetn ist nach Ahscnit der OECD acuh fur die akleulte Wftrchhssacstiwache martcrwntvoieilth. German words get too long unlike English.
Some people have mentioned that they saw this years ago. Actually, it is usually said that Mark Twain originally wrote this!
. i18nguy.com/twain.html
http://www.unifon.org/spel-fun.html
http://www
(Too lazy for HTML)
MPEEEEEEEET!
tch? I think that fits the bill ght?
Now this is interesting. Indeed, sending English text through
Jamie's script renders the text still completely readable, as per the
researchers claims. But trying the same thing with e.g. Scandinavian languages gives a different conclusion, the text simply gets unintelligble. Oh, you can figure out what it probably means but
you have to stop at most words and work out how it's scrambled, unlike the scrambled English text which you can read full speed.
I was reading that fine until I got to the "is" where they meant to put "are". Then my eye tripped up and I had to read the setence again.
This shows two things. Firstly, the process works. Secondly, I'm a grammar nazi.
Has no-one spotted the spelling error in this text, then?
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch"
Shouldn't this be "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch" or "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearcehr"?
Can someone supply a patch to ispell to cope with these?
So, am I really the first to realize that spammers would love this? Now, they can get a message through that a human can decipher, but that a computer would have a very hard time deciphering. You probably now need to attach a spell checker to your spam filter and if there are too many misspelled words, then trash the message. 'Course, I'd lose a lot of mail from my /. friends! :-)
Just be sure to wear the gold uniform when you beam down -- you know what happens when you wear the red one.
Grafitti on a wall near me: "Clysdexia cant eb stoped."
http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2003/9/14/234221/ 928/20#20
Dsxleiics of the wrlod, yuor pootisin? (I just wanted that to include "poot".)
To make a long story short, I don't think you can really say that a jumbled word has more entropy than a non-jumbled word. I guess it depends on what you mean by order and disorder and stuff.
And yes, I am quite bored at work today to be thinking on this.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
I believe there's no correct way to write in French, you just try to get as many of the right letters in the word.
http://twitter.com/gr
Or did he just reply to his other personality????
This might give Echelon fits!
I'm guess this stuff wouldn't working in Binary. 011001101000110101111000
-516
Spaces were introduced in the sixth century
Case was introduced in the eigth century
Ponctuation was introduced in the eleventh century
soyoudontneedneedneitherspacesnorponctuation norcaseanditisstillreadablethoughmoredifficult
Note also that some languages don't represent vowels
sydntndvwlsthr
( s y d nt nd vwls thr )
( so you do not need vowels either)
Ahem...
Here is a (french) link with some dates
Does the perl script actually jumble the word, or does it just scan Slashdot for a misspelling that contains the same letters?
/* It's amazing the damage someone with a stunted sense of humor and mod points can do to your karma. */
Wll, wht abt vwls? Ths r nncssry mst f th tm, t. N fct, nc y gt rd f th vwls nd mddl lttrs, y cn s hw trly wstfl th nglsh lngg rlly s!
This reminds me of that old programming axiom:
Every program has at least one bug.
Every program can be reduced in size by at least one instruction.
Therefore, by induction every program can be reduced to one instruction which doesn't work.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Coach Z emulator!
I would expect there are words that when mixed just don't make sense.
I would bet that we also recognise by the shape of the word and the pattern of letters as much as the first and last, which is why l33t speak seems to be legible. The shape and patters of 7h3se VV0rd5 stay close to what we expect them to be.
Sig
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars
I don't have to porff read my post today. The "Spelling Nzais" cna't touch me!
...or when sounded like A as in neighbor and weigh.
Being a native English speaker who has learned Dutch, I'm naturally curious as to how this post would look in Dutch. After thinking for a couple of seconds, I decided not to even try.
:)
First of all, there are a lot of letter combinations in Dutch that I think would be pretty important for me to see to be able to correctly interpret the word.
Secondly, depending on the placement of vowels and the desired sound of the word, sometimes a diaresis accent (a.k.a. umlaut, trema, etc.) is necessary. I won't get nitty-gritty with the rules becuase it's irrelevant to explain them here, but I think they'd certainly play a part.
However, I'm curious as to whether native Dutch speakers can read this without problem:
[Bjderif] bdeit de btekkroen celnit de mgolekjhieid zjin lpoboaan te vanedreern of aan te psasen op een wizje die zeowl voor hmezlef als voor de wregkveer bvdreeigned is.
Descrambled, that's:
[Bedrijf] biedt de betrokken client de mogelijkheid zijn loopbaan te veranderen of aan te passen op een wijze die zowel voor hemzelf als voor de werkgever bevredigend is.
Now that I've written that out, I can read it no problem because I know what it says already. But perhaps some of you can post other scrambled Dutch texts and/or give me feedback about this. I'm interested
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
This was on slashdot in the day, but it's still pretty nifty ... a perl script shaped like a camel, that prints four little camels:
a il /stuff/docs/perl-camel-source.shtml
http://www.thinkgeek.com/tshirts/coder/321a/det
Well, where did you think little camels came from?
My bedroom doesn't have much energy left in it to do work. I set it on fire.
Gee. I thought I could read it because I practice on /.
--
As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
I doubt anyone who learned English as a second language would be able to read the scrambled words as easily as most Slashdotters.
I can.
And I learned english as a second.5 language, learned some spanish before english (but never mastered that one). However, I have a way with languages...and I use english a lot.
(And to awnser your question: French)
You can't take the sky from me...
pron came from
for sure
Booyah! Funny how a piece of code written using a "worthless" methodology didn't need fixing, where as a bloated piece with endless unnecessary variables did...
xxx
And I think this is the shortest version so far, no one else has got below 64 characters. Evolved from Pez's version.
What is this word supposed to be? You might assume it was "researcher" or just "research", however, neither is the anagram of those letters. In fact, there is no one word anagram for "rscheearch". So did I miss something?
***
Charles Martin
Database Developer IV @ Santander Consumer USA
The article mentions that skilled readers won't have a hard time parsing reordered words like this. I think that's a very important part of the story. You really need to know all the words in the sentence to be able to read like this.
Also, (and off-topic) it seems like most misspelling doesn't just include the right letters in the wrong sequence. Usually people will also include several incorrect letters. This makes the words have the wrong length, which I don't remember seeing the article address. I'm a teacher so I've seen a great deal of misspelling, but I don't presume to know about All Spelling Errors.
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
hmm I didn't think it worked at all. maybe i need word length as well?
But the improvement will probably be very small, and as for me I think those scrambled texts are funny to read in small pieces... not in the amount that requires compression.
This sheds some light on neural processing and perception. The first thing that came to mind when reading about this is that "if you can raed tihs?" also implies "context" into "raeding tihs". I found, personally, that after everyone started misspelling their comments that I could follow the sentence along, deciphering and interpreting as long as I could predict what was going to be said. Some people garbled the words so much that I could no longer comprehend the misspelled words simply because I could not predict what the writer was trying to explain. When I say that I can "predict" with some certainty what will be said, I mean that internally in my little brain, the gramatical syntax processing emerges to interpret sequentially what words have been read, interpreted, and what words should follow to make gramatical sense such that as we in the English language label as a "complete thought" with a subject, verb(s), direct object, indirect object, adjectives, etc... This is how I think we are still able to "raed tihs" as it is misspelled. It is an excellent exercise in measuring gramatical syntax and comprehension, including a feature known in the IQ and MQ arena as "span", i.e. attention span. This plays an inportant role in comprehension and mental functioning. The ability to focus and manipulate as many pieces of information (brain RAM) also is important for mental processing.
Wow, this is cool stuff!
So is raednig tihs a DMCA voilaiton?
Here it is:
De aorcdo com uma pqsieusa de uma uinrvesriddae ignlsea, nao ipomtra em qaul odrem as lrteas de uma plravaa etaso, a uncia csioa iprotmatne e que a piremria e utmlia lrteas etejasm no lgaur crteo.
O rseto pdoe ser uma ttaol bcguana que vcoe pdoe anida ler sem pobrlmea. Itso e poqrue nos nao lmeos cdaa lrtea isladoa, mas a plravaa cmoo um tdoo.
Incredibly easy to read, if you know the language :-)
I wrote it, in '76 I think, as a joke about the EEC, implying that it was going to become the Fifth Reich (the original ended by parodying a German accent). Immature, yeah, but I was too at the time; I was eleven. This, of all my writing since, lives on...
Your all right. It dosent happen all the time. But it was just an example, ok? The underlying logic applies.
to justify not using spellcheck?
A few people had trouble with my script, and it turns out to be some kind of stupid Unicode lossage: it only seems to malfunction if $LANG has "utf8" in it, which is the default on recent Red Hat systems. That screws up the interpretation of "^\w" among other things. Check this out:
echo -n "foo.bar" | \
perl -e '$_ = <>; print join (" | ", split (/([^\w]+)/)) . "\n";'
=> "foo | . | bar" (right)
setenv LANG en_US.utf8
echo -n "foo.bar" | \
perl -e '$_ = <>; print join (" | ", split (/([^\w]+)/)) . "\n";'
=> "foo.bar" (wrong!)
perl-5.8.0-88, Red Hat 9. WTF?
window.close
Regardless of where you stand vis a vis the Sapir-Whorf theory, it's clear that spelling only augments understanding - it is not an prerequisite for it.
The first line has an error. It reads "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch". It should read "Aoccdrnig to rscheearch" - "rscheearch" is considered plural. Or perhaps they meant "Aoccdrnig to a rsearecher"... :)
I think this indicates why it is so hard for people to proofread documents - the typos barely affect comprehension so most people ignore them.
WWHHAAAAAAAAA!!!
The definition of information entropy is -sum(p(x)*log(p(x)),x) where x ranges over all possible outcomes of the random source, and p(x) is the probability of such an outcome.
It can be interpretted as the average number of bits required to transmit a source symbol.
You are not the first to notice the relationship between informational entropy and thermodynamic entropy. This is the reason Shannon coined it "entropy" in the first place. As information theory advances, people are discovering more and more than thermodynamics and information are more tightly linked than we had ever imagined...
Now, as to your statement that a jumbled word has no more entropy than an unjumbled one -- it depends on how you define "source symbol." If the symbols are individual letters, then you are correct. Merely changing the order of the letters does not alter their relative frequencies. But instead of examining single letters at a time, we might examine pairs (digrams). Scrambling the letters disrupts the digrams and therefore alters their frequencies, and this changes their prior probabilities, which in turn influences the entropy. You can imagine that this argument extends further, we could examine trigrams, or n-grams in general. Or we can treat entire words themselves as symbols.
If you find this stuff interesting, Google around for "information theory," "Shannon entropy," "mutual information." It applies to cryptography, quantum computation, error correction, signal modulation, pretty much everything under the sun.
Drew
Be careful what you wish for...
Where your treasure is there is your heart also...
Great, now spammers have another way to trick filters.
...But can young readers read the above? People who learned to read using the phonics method? Does it take measureably longer to read with the lteters srcamlbed taht way?
Get a life kid ;)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Would you want your doctor or pharmist to use these word guess/whole reading therory to write and read your proscriptions? Also what about words you have never seen before how do you figure it out what it says? By reading letters not the whole word. Time mag as a good article on how reading works in its July 28, 2003 issue.
I did a couple of intentional changes to make that slightly harder to read than a random sort might be. I think that the original post is a fraud because it shows some attention paid to the same aspect, except to make it more readable.
Give up? I made sure in my sentence that the shape of the words is distinctly different from the original word. I.e. if the original word had an early ascender and a late decender I intentionally switched the two. A lot of the words in the original text retain their shape: "Aoccdrnig", "lteter", "wlohe", "iprmoetnt", etc.
OVERUSE OF ALL CAPS IS UNWISE, AS CAPS "BLOCKS UP" THE TEXT MAKING IT HARDER TO READ.
Now you know why people "shouting" online is annoying. Important text shsould always be in mixed case, because we use word shape as a cue. As many have already pointed out, we do not read a letter at a time.
It seems to me that in many of the words of the above paragraph the word shape is retained, and that makes me think it is a handcrafted meme, birthed by an agent of chaotic and perhaps evil intent. We should hunt down the author and burn him, as any reasonable mob would do.
love,
jaz
Death to Argument by Slogan!! (This post twice-encrypted with ROT-13. Replies not using same will be ignored)
no, you did not. i noticed it as well, but i've commented on it enough on other forums to not post about it here. i'm pleased that someone else noticed it of their own volition, though!
Nveer get out of the baot. Asbouletly Gdodmnaed Rhigt.
Can't find any good examples of this, but words that have anagrams should be harder to decipher when scrambled.
Only one I can think of off the top of my head is:
The maneless lion remained nameless to hide the lameness of his maleness.
try deciphering that if scrambled.
For anyone who has access to PHP but not perl on their web site:
<?php
$string = "Welcome to the Wonderful World of Shuffled Letters!!!";
$break = preg_split("/(\W+)/", $string, -1, PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE);
for($i=0; $i < count($break); $i++) {
if(preg_match("/\w/", $break[$i]) && strlen($break[$i]) > 3) {
$mixer = substr($break[$i], 1, -1);
for($a=0; $a < 3; $a++) {
$mixer = str_shuffle($mixer);
}
$break[$i] = substr($break[$i], 0, 1).$mixer.substr($break[$i], -1);
}
echo $break[$i];
}
?>
Has anyone noticed that the google search phrase correction algorithm does almost as good a job as we do in the implicit orthographic deciphering of the scrambles? I haven't tested extensively, but for phrases such as "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't" and "mttaer in waht" it succeeds. Any info on their algo?
Well, I developed my first IE plugin, that essentially does this effect to webpages. Give Scramble Plugin a try, and let me know what you think!
i needed an excuse to learn how to write code in actionscript2, so here goes:
word scramble in flash7
such fun!
enjoy.
bset,
t
So now we have new SNES game translations.
- http://bisqwit.iki.fi/topshu/ - Tales of Phantasia in Ensligh.
- http://bisqwit.iki.fi/ctshu/ - Chrono Trigger in Ensligh.
There are screenshots of both.
There have been various forms of this email doing the rounds - including one that mentioned Cmabrigde Uinervtisy (which is where I work doing research on how the brain processes written and spoken language).
g de /
Since I thought I ought to know about this, I've written a page of notes on the science behind this meme, including a list of the factors that my colleagues and I think might be relevant for reading this kind of transposed text. You can read more here:
http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~matt.davis/Cmabri
Matt
Iltnsegnetiry I'm sdutynig tihs crsrootaivnel pnoheenmon at the Dptmnearet of Liuniigctss at Absytrytewh Uivsreitny and my exartrnairdoy doisiervecs waleoetderhlhy cndairotct the picsbeliud fdnngiis rrgdinaeg the rtlvaeie dfuictlify of ialtnstny ttalrisanng steennces. My rsceeerhars deplveeod a cnionevent ctnoiaptorn at hnasoa/tw.nartswdbvweos/utrtep:k./il taht dosnatterems that the hhpsteyios uuiqelny wrtaarns criieltidby if the aoussmpitn that the prreoecandpne of your wrods is not eendetxd is uueniqtolnabse. Aoilegpos for aidnoptg a cdocianorttry vwpiienot but, ttoheliacrley spkeaing, lgitehnneng the words can mnartafucue an iocnuurgons samenttet that is vlrtiauly isbpilechmoenrne.
:)
Or, if you prefer...
Interestingly I'm studying this controversial phenomenon at the Department of Linguistics at Aberystwyth University and my extraordinary discoveries wholeheartedly contradict the publicised findings regarding the relative difficulty of instantly translating sentences. My researchers developed a convenient contraption at http://www.aardvarkbusiness.net/tool that demonstrates that the hypothesis uniquely warrants credibility if the assumption that the preponderance of your words is not extended is unquestionable. Apologies for adopting a contradictory viewpoint but, theoretically speaking, lengthening the words can manufacture an incongruous statement that is virtually incomprehensible.
You mean like the United States?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
a) sex wtih a mrae
or
b) scambreld wrdos
?
I think this posses some serious legal issues.
Imagine a contract where I mispell certain keywords buried of course deep in the small print.
Would a person be legally obligated to abide by a contract of implied meanings , where the words were actually sytnax erorrs[hehe syntax erros]? I bet they wouldn't.
I think this article should be hidden from lawyers everywhere, I bet we would all be surprised how many lawyers read slashdot thou!
I bet they do this trick all the time, then wait and see if people catch it.
Perhaps what is happening here is that our brains are pattern-matching the words and finding the 'closest' fit given the context of the word. I remember reading something (it was an online book about consciousness, I forget what the site is) which put forward the theory that we mostly sense the world by recognition. Our brains perform the minimal amount of computing work needed to give us a useful perception of the world around us. Only if we need further details does the brain process sensory information further.
I find that although I can read the scrambled text in most cases, it does take more concentration to read at the same speed than unscrambled text. The hardest scrambled words for me to read are those that can't be readily figured out from their contexts - for example, a persons name that you have not read before.
Also on the topic of reading vs. speaking, I think there is some link depending on how you have been taught to read. We are often taught the sounds of the words as kids, before we learn to read them. When I read, I 'think' the sounds of the words in my head - I don't actually comprehend what the word is until I have 'heard' it in that sense. It's more like listening to someone speak to me. Of course, I don't _really_ hear the words - it's more like my own voice speaking back to me. I studied a speed-reading course once which said that this is how most people read silently. This limits their reading speed to the maximum speed at which they could speak. Learning to speed-read involved learning a new way to read, more 'visually'.
incomprehensible