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.
"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.
Agrlhit cleevr clogs - see if you can sbarclme eggs
Don't ever do this again, Slashdot.
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
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.
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.
and I, for one, wlcemoe our new dslyxeic ovlrerdos!
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.
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.
<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
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...
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.
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.