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."
I t___k y__r p__t is p___f t__t we d________y do n__d t_e m____e l_____s.
Read: I think your post is proof that we definately do need the middle letters.
Just because I doubt myself does not mean I find your position compelling.
Actually, does this work well with letter pairs like, "th ch wh sh qu?" I forget what those are called.
The reason it DOES work well with those letter pairs is that they aren't familiar at all in reverse. You're more likely to udnerstand their juxtaposition as what it's supposed to be, because you're used to it being one way.
Where it DOESN'T work as well is when you begin breaking up complex phonemes or diphthongs in short words. Konw what I'm sayin'?
Also... what happen when the scrambled word is another valid word? Or a misspelled valid words?
Bt we nd te ss fr te wd cs.
But we need the spaces, at least, for the word cues.
So how many "bits" of information can we strip from a sentence, on average, before we can no longer intuitively decipher it? The spaces give us information, but not as much as the letters themselves. Yet clearly the ordering of the letters contains much less information than the contents of a word's endpoints. This is odd stuff.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
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.
No, the middle letters are still necessary. I find myself misreading all the time because my brain took in the first and last letter and read it as a word with similar spelling and length.
So I would hypothesize that the first/last letters along with the lengths of the words and a rough idea of what letters go in the middle are what our brains look for.
But this only comes with practice. English is my first language and I have read millions and millions of words in English in my lifetime so I am very used to taking in written information this way. But if I switch to reading something in French (for which I took for 11 years in school but never became fluent, mainly because I hated learning french) I still have to read each word carefully because I am not used to reading it.
So if some person who is just learning english looked at words with jumbled internals, I expect that they would have a terrible time trying to figure them out. Their brains have not read each word thousands of times so they still have to decode them letter by letter.
Uh oh, Jamie Zawinski has shown an interest in something. We have very little time before it is integrated into the standard xscreensaver loadout.
...
FUNNY?!
This is a serious problem. Now we just killed one of our methods for eliminating spam.
-Tim Louden
ActuallyIHaveFoundThatWeDoNotNeedSpaces.
e Th ere.
T he Firsth atScrip tToSend
h eM iddleOfo LveAnyAtT heBgngOr
WeDoNeedPunctuation,AndSomeQueThatASpaceShouldB
IWasAbleToWriteASetOfScriptsThatWouldCapitalize
LetterOfEveryWord,ThenStripOutSpaces.IUseT
TextPagesToMyCellPhoneToSaveSpace.
ToFollowUpOnYourIdea,WeCouldStripOutVowlesFromT
WrdsAndStllFndMstOfTheTxtRdbl.IThnkWeNdT
EndOfTheWrdsThgh.
At the moment it takes a bit of extra thinking to do that though.
-Rusty
You never know...
Uh huh, and you probably post to Slashdot by tapping on the ethernet jack with battery and a paper clip, right?
People who actually know how to program realize that while line noise one-liners are sometimes a cute party trick, it's a worthless way to program.
The more your Perl looks like static, the less well you have written it.
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.