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."

Comments

Here you go

[JM Apocalypse]

No need to open the terminal ... Jeff comes to the rescue!

http://jeff.zoplionah.com/scramble.php

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, does this work well with letter pairs like, "th ch wh sh qu?" I forget what those are called.

Digraphs?

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[adamsan]

"They're called dipthongs (sic)"

No they ain't, diphthongs are pairs of vowels that merge together. Pairs of consonants are called err..consonant pairs.

Re:Does this work for non native speakers?

[gdchinacat]

I think it is actually cheerio.

WordNet (r) 1.7 [wn]

cheerio
n : a farewell remark; "they said their good-byes" [syn: adieu,
adios, arrivederci, auf wiedersehen, au revoir,
bye, bye-bye, good-by, goodby, good-bye, goodbye,
good day, sayonara, so long]

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[edwdig]

By randomly scrambling the letters, you're eliminating a lot of the redundancy.

Huffman compression would be unaffected though, as it works on a per character basis.

Compression worse...

[douglips]

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.

Re:Compression worse...

[CarlDenny]

The first half dozen occurances of the definition you quoted also included:
2: (communication theory) a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome; "the signal contained thousands of bits of information"

If it's a pet peeve of yours, perhaps you should make a study of statistical mechanics and information theory, where the concept and term are more clearly and quantitatively defined. With a slightly deeper understanding of statistical mechanics, you will find that ther term is more fundamental than you thought, and that they are mathematically identical, applied to two separate fields. With this understanding, your objection is similar to saying that length is defined by the distance between two ends of an object, and that talking about the length of a file, or a length of time, is completely wrong.

While the term originated in thermodynamics, it was given a formal definition (even within the realm of physics) by Boltzmann with the development of statistical mechanics. Statistical mechanics allow Boltzmann to formulate and discuss entropy well in advance of energy or temperature. When they do enter the picture, thermodynamic (dQ/dt) entropy is identical to the statistical definition, with temperature defined by 1/t = d(Energy)/d(entropy) where those ds are partial derivatives. It's actually a fascinating topic, and a beautiful mathematical insight.

The description and definition used by Boltzmann for statistical mechanics are exactly the same as those used in information theory:
Entropy = Sum (-p(state)*ln(p(state)))
(over all possible states)
Or, with all states equally likely (the equipartition principle):
Entropy = ln( # of possible states)

Which is, of course, why Shannon used the term and the definition.

Sorry to contradict you, but misunderstandings and misuse of the term entropy are also pet peeves of mine, and this is not one of them. ;)

Re:Yes, a cat's got my tongue, OK?

[Demodian]

diphthongs and triphthongs are the vowel-only subsets of digraphs and trigraphs.