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)
WRDOS SBRCALME YOU!
Holy FCUK!
--
"I'm not bright. Big words confuse me. But Wanda loves me and that should be enough for you." - Cosmo
Justification for the lack of spell checking on Slashdot...
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.
"encryption".
I have something in common with Stephen Hawking...
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
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.
...I bet people won't the RTFA
Agrlhit cleevr clogs - see if you can sbarclme eggs
TAHN!
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Don't ever do this again, Slashdot.
And to think I was about to apologize for my last typo-ridden post.
-R
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?
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
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
Also... what happen when the scrambled word is another valid word? Or a misspelled valid words?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a drn.
Bad news, bad news. This seems like a good way to pass through bayesian email filters.
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.
and I, for one, wlcemoe our new dslyxeic ovlrerdos!
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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?
Is this an incommensurable phenomenological hypothesis or the manifestation of the inteligibility of idiomatic individualistic intercommunications?
Want me to scramble this?
<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.
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...
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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
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?
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.
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
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.
"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.
Yuo inesnsivite cold!
philcrissman.com.
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)
There's no need to make up "news" to justify your poor speeling.
Sleep is just a poor substitute for caffeine, anyway. -Bob Lehmann
1. At what age does this manifest itself?
2. Does this work in other languages? I am guessing japanese (at least) would not work....
3. What implications does this have for cryptology, in that you can't look for strings anymore?
Big Bonus question:
4. If 2 is false, in that it doesn't work for other languages, is this intrinsic property of English the reason that English has become the language of global business or is it simply a by-product of English being spoken by those who sailed the world and conquered the world (British and American Imperialism)? ie because English is recognisable after mangling, is that the reason that it is so "popular"?
Inquiring minds want to know....
andy
--
Simon
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
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)
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.
I'm guess this stuff wouldn't working in Binary. 011001101000110101111000
-516
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