I gotta gripe about this...

[eyelikeart]

It annoys me enough when people forward useless b.s. to me, but I thought this was pretty funny the first time I received it this week. I've now gotten it from 5 different people!!

Where did this come from? Why do I keep getting it? :rolleyes:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in
waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht
the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.
The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm.
Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but
the wrod as a wlohe.



Amzanig huh?

[jefhatfield]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
It annoys me enough when people forward useless b.s. to me, but I thought this was pretty funny the first time I received it this week. I've now gotten it from 5 different people!!

Where did this come from? Why do I keep getting it? :rolleyes:

hey eye,

that looks like the spelling of ambitiouslemon's macrumors posts:p

where is he these days? he was a mod here

[shadowfax]

WOW! someone sent that to me over AIM today. i didn't even laugh. that's the most unoriginal piece of humor.... sheesh. what a shame that it's making the rounds...

[Doctor Q]

I got that one too, yesterday, from one of the "friends" who delights in sending me anything that circulates - ethnic jokes, political humor, dubious medical news, heartwarming stories, etc. At least she doesn't pass on all the hoax warnings (i.e., fake warnings about nonexistent computer threats) because I've got other "friends" who do that.

I put up with it to a point. That point is when they put my e-mail address in a huge To: or Cc: list, thereby sending my address to everyone else they know. And some of those people forward it, with the To: or Cc: list intact, to another big list, multiplying the effect geometrically. I've taught everyone who sends to me to use Bcc if they must broadcast something. If they don't, I respectfully insist that they take me out of their address book.

[vollspacken]

yeah, I got that too...

first I thought it was about someone being drunk who tried to say/type something (and I laught), but then I read the first line and I did not find it funny.

:(

vSpacken

[e-coli]

Uh, guys

I don't think it's a joke. It was an actual study, and these are the actual results. I thought it was pretty amazing.

[FredAkbar]

Gosh I hate those chain mails about fake e-mail viruses...my friends always just assume they're real...oh well, I guess I should just accept the fact that they aren't as geeky as me :)

And yeah I thought that rearranged letters thing is pretty cool.

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by e-coli
Uh, guys

I don't think it's a joke. It was an actual study, and these are the actual results. I thought it was pretty amazing. yeah, it's pretty amazing that reasonably intelligent people can understand stupid people....

j/k. but quite honestly, this is nothing new, i don't think. have you ever unscrambled words? we've always known that this is a very easy task for people with good vocabulary.

teh qoutsien si, twah sue si ti? ti wolss oyur raednig wodn kile a omhtre *cf*er, rof on raenos ta lal.

unscrambling in sequence. people can do it. ahhh. i needed a cambridge researcher to tell me that.

[eyelikeart]

jef-
lemon's still around, but someone in some dark cavern or cave on an island in Hawaii doing field research.

e-coli-
I don't don't this thing was real, but my complaint is in the fact that I have to get it 5 times in 4 days. I mean, is there an "email forwarder's commission" where they release these things for the bored people at work to start forwarding these things out to everyone they know all at once? :eek:

shadow-
hahaha... :D

[Powerbook G5]

I'm glad I hit home to all of my friends not to send me useless junk fwds. What I did was just go to AOL filter and block any subject that had "fwd:" at the beginning so whenever someone with my address in their group to forward to tried to, they got an annoying box saying my address does not accept said email until I got removed from their group fwd mailings. Now, the only forwards I get are from my uncle, grandfather, and once in a while my mother asking me if the recent virus warning email they got is real or not. My uncle got one last week where the person in the email said to remove all of these critical files in Windows saying they were infact virus files and it was passed at least a good 100 times from the look of the forwarding paths.

[shadowfax]

as to the reality of this, you might try looking through the links on this page. (http://www.bisso.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi?__mode=view&entry_id=227)

[eyelikeart]

so wehn wlil teh mdaness edn?!

[Edot]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
so wehn wlil teh mdaness edn?!

teh qoutsien si, twah sue si ti? ti wolss oyur raednig wodn kile a omhtre *cf*er, rof on raenos ta lal.



The weird thing is that it really only works when the first and last letter are the correct letters in the word. These sentences do not follow that pattern and you stumble over most of the words.

[eyelikeart]

Originally posted by Edot
The weird thing is that it really only works when the first and last letter are the correct letters in the word. These sentences do not follow that pattern and you stumble over most of the words.

hmm...the irony in my post has failed to be effective... :rolleyes:

[MrMacMan]

Well.

The Sutdy sohewd taht poelpe can raed suftf sepleld bdlaly.

This was posted on Slashdot (What the hell, no one reads /. ?) and it was a real study with real results.

This isn't a chain letter, like other chain letters. Just being fowarded.


Ha, I got pissed off some much about chain letters last week I made my own for people to Shut the hell up...

Right here (http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=Mrmacman23&tab=weblogs&uid=33282715)

Yaeh All Wrdos can't be switched.

All words which have 3 or less letters cannot be changed...

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by Edot
The weird thing is that it really only works when the first and last letter are the correct letters in the word. These sentences do not follow that pattern and you stumble over most of the words. os uyo smutble oevr wrdos lkie teh?

i ond't thikn yoru analgyo ohlds.

i would posit that the complexity of the scramble has a great deal to do with the relative order of the word. for instance,

multicausality is easy to get if you spell it "mutlicasuality" or even "mitlucuasliaty," especially in the context of a real usage, like "fi oyu race ot emaxien teh mitlucuasliaty fo teh vente, ti cebomse lcaer..."

but it's almost impossible to get "camsuuallttiiy," even in the context of a sensible phrase.

the complexity of the "coding" shouldn't depend on just the first and last words, and this is especially true in larger words.

the Cmabrdige example is easy for you, and most literate people, because it mixes comparatively small numbers of letters in the words. but for more apt puzzle-solvers (and i don't include myself in this group), much higher levels of complexity can be overcome without "stumbling." but the general principle of this is that any interposing of letters causes you to stumble, at least until you get used to it.

the reason this works for people is that reading the screwed up version is the same basic activity as reading. when you read normal text, your mind sees the letters and puts them together in a way that makes sense to you within the context of what you are reading; when the letters are scrambled, but still there, your mind panics at first but can, at least in most cases, quickly realize, oh, that dumbass, he meant "word," not "wrod." reading in itself is an activity of decoding. your eye sees patterns of words and your makes them into concepts and ideas, in effect translating them. in the case of the screwed up text, this decoding activity has the added layer of accounting for discrepancies in the order of words. it's not that the word order doesn't matter, it's that many people are intelligent enough to figure out what is wrong and acount for it very quickly. i hope this doesn't seriously impress anyone...

[Zaid]

Guys it is a real study, looking into why all natural languages have a certain level of redundency built in.

Also with regards to the scrambling you have to leave the first and last letters in place (Because this helps preserve the 'word shape' allowing our mind to quickly determine what the word should have been), and you are not allowed to break complex phonemes in mono or bi-sylabic words. (eg ough in through)

Other examples of stuff like this include
Y cn rd nglsh wtht ny vwls

The idea being that the redundency allows the message to be understood even if it is partly distorted.

For those interested, somebody on slashdot posted a pearl script that will randomly scramble letters within words leaving the first and last letters untouched.

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by Zaid
Guys it is a real study, looking into why all natural languages have a certain level of redundency built in.

Also with regards to the scrambling you have to leave the first and last letters in place (Because this helps preserve the 'word shape' allowing our mind to quickly determine what the word should have been), and you are not allowed to break complex phonemes in mono or bi-sylabic words. (eg ough in through)

Other examples of stuff like this include
Y cn rd nglsh wtht ny vwls

The idea being that the redundency allows the message to be understood even if it is partly distorted. considered from this perspective, it is somewhat interesting, but still doesn't seem very important, even in linguistics.

i can understand vcm clnr, but it's much less clear than vacuum cleaner. so in that sense, the vowels aren't redundant. they add a vast amount of clarity, especially when it comes to pronunciation. but of course languages don't have to have vowels. even phonetic ones like ours. look at Hebrew...

as for preserving the first and last letters, i think it's irrelevant in short words (teh wodrs, etc), and useless in massive words.

[wdlove]

I was able to read the paragraph, but it gave me a headache.

If it is true, just another example of our tax dollars at work. Someone probably just got another PhD! :p

[eyelikeart]

ok...some of u seem to have failed to see my reason for posting this...

I realize it's a real study, and I find it's valid in many ways & quite interesting.

What I'm complaining about is the fact that I got it 5 times. One of my petpeeves is getting these forward emails from people, and this thing is making the rounds right now. I guess I feel these people I know all have no lives, when I find they are all sending the same thing.

like I'm one to point any fingers...with the time I spend here... ;)

[Moxiemike]

The thing is, stuff like this, while seemingly base at first, tend to lead to bigger and bigger developments.

All you geeks like Esperanto and such... and Star Trek speak... so this should be up your alley. :D

It's interesting from a point of view of lingusitics, and if someone got a PhD to figure this out, i'm sure there's about 20 other studies that have octopussed off of this one.

That said, there's lots of predictions that have been horribly wrong. And if we discount ANY creative thought (which this is) we're doomed to becoming a stagnant culture. Even if this by itself might not be useful, there's a lot of potential ideas that it could spawn.

Who knows? The bright minds can see the nugget of gold buried in this thing. The mediocre minds let it bug them. ;)

There was a prediction made that "Americans have no time. This TV thing will never catch on"

It's the people who lack foresight and creative thought who make these brash statements and really fail to read between the line.

This study is intriguing, and I really wanna see where they take it. ;) who knows??

[agreenster]

Originally posted by shadowfax
os uyo smutble oevr wrdos lkie teh?

i ond't thikn yoru analgyo ohlds.

i would posit that the complexity of the scramble has a great deal to do with the relative order of the word.


Edot was clarifying (for you) that the study makes it clear that the first and last LETTERS have to remain as the original, otherwise it takes significantly longer to descramble.

So, don't cant be "ond't," it must me dnot. And think cant be "thikn," it must be "tinhk" or "tnihk" or "tihnk." Get it? Half of your scrambled word examples do not follow the original study, so it isnt HIS analogy--its Cambridges.

[Edot]

Originally posted by agreenster
Edot was clarifying (for you) that the study makes it clear that the first and last LETTERS have to remain as the original, otherwise it takes significantly longer to descramble.

So, don't cant be "ond't," it must me dnot. And think cant be "thikn," it must be "tinhk" or "tnihk" or "tihnk." Get it? Half of your scrambled word examples do not follow the original study, so it isnt HIS analogy--its Cambridges.

Thanks agreenster! Also, I think this study shows us more about the human mind's approach to written words and language than it does about the language itself. Maybe this can be used to simplify our language since it's foundation is far from consistent. I can't see this concept working with a language with no alphabet, but who knows.

[Dros]

I think the study may lead to some important insights. (I know... the thread is about getting 5 messages a day, I'm just responding to the sub-thread). For example, dyslexics read letters as swapped, so something in their brains is not good at taking in a word at a glance and remembering the order of the letters. It would be interesting to see if they fail (or are faster!) at reading words scrambled like this. Now they could do MRI brain scans of people reading normal words and scrambled words and ultra-scrambled (also first and last) words to track what parts of the brain are used for these tasks, then see if dyslexics use their brains the same way, then perhaps therapies will be more apparent.

Same for stroke patients who are re-learning to read.

So waste of tax dollars, as someone above said? I don't think so.

[Moxiemike]

Originally posted by Edot
Thanks agreenster! Also, I think this study shows us more about the human mind's approach to written words and language than it does about the language itself. Maybe this can be used to simplify our language since it's foundation is far from consistent. I can't see this concept working with a language with no alphabet, but who knows.

See, this is the kind of thinking i'm talkin' about.

Nicely thought.

I like the idea of a language with no alphabet. Would the foundation be graphical? Symbolic?

[rainman::|:|]

i agree that while it's an interesting concept (not new to me, when i learned to speed-read, it was by identifying words by shape, which is basically the same as what's happening here)... it is annoying how many times i've received it as an email... it's been posted here on MR before, and i just got it again 5 minutes ago from a friend of mine (twice, actually, he sent it to me personally and a mailing list i'm on).

pnw

[bcsimac]

I just hate getting a ton of forwards too, but I am lucky because a lot of people stopped doing that when I go into this huge long speale about how Macs are not like Windows machines (translated.......we don't do windows duh!) and how we don't have viruses as much as they do and how Windows (ie Windoze)viruses don't work on Macs.......anyway ya'll get the idea. I make this email llike 3 pages long just to irritate the heck out of them to give them a taste of their own medicine and also to educate them.

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by agreenster
Edot was clarifying (for you) that the study makes it clear that the first and last LETTERS have to remain as the original, otherwise it takes significantly longer to descramble.

So, don't cant be "ond't," it must me dnot. And think cant be "thikn," it must be "tinhk" or "tnihk" or "tihnk." Get it? Half of your scrambled word examples do not follow the original study, so it isnt HIS analogy--its Cambridges. i understand that i was diverging from their pattern; that was the point. do you understand that i am positing the idea that not maintaining the integrity of the first and last letters doesn't make a very significant difference?

Cambridge does say that don't can't be ond't; i know this. that's why i did it. because i think you can, and still have it work ok. it does make it a bit more challenging, but that's just logical progression. making the rule that the first 2 letters and last 2 letters had to remain intact would make it even more easy to decode, e.g. lteerts vs letetrs (the word is letters, of course).

i have to agree, though, that the study is more interesting as a look at the decoding process that humans do in reading, and the tolerance our understanding has for mistakes than as a look at language itself.

[wdlove]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
ok...some of u seem to have failed to see my reason for posting this...

I realize it's a real study, and I find it's valid in many ways & quite interesting.

What I'm complaining about is the fact that I got it 5 times. One of my petpeeves is getting these forward emails from people, and this thing is making the rounds right now. I guess I feel these people I know all have no lives, when I find they are all sending the same thing.

like I'm one to point any fingers...with the time I spend here... ;)

I can understand where you are coming from eyelikeart. It sounds like you get a lot of messages because of your prominence on this forum. Just try to remember that they are doing it out of friendship. Hopefully now that you have let us know about your pet peeve it won't happen again.

Try to take some slow deep breaths, smile! ;)

[zach]

I hate getting these things too. Even worse are the fake AIM shutdown notices where it says you have to send to like 30 people..

[eyelikeart]

Originally posted by zap23
I hate getting these things too. Even worse are the fake AIM shutdown notices where it says you have to send to like 30 people..

hmm...I've never gotten one of those...

but for the record...the number is up to 7 times this week now... :rolleyes:

[zach]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
hmm...I've never gotten one of those...

but for the record...the number is up to 7 times this week now... :rolleyes:

Yea, I have gotten the email 4 times.

Almost funny the first time you read it, but by the third... ::sighs::

Oh well...

[pseudobrit]

I have a headache.

[Moxiemike]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
hmm...I've never gotten one of those...

but for the record...the number is up to 7 times this week now... :rolleyes:

How about using your junk mail filter? I mean, it's all well and good that it's annoying, but there's measures you can take to divert the annoyance.

If you're not in OSX you could also do a rule in whatever email program you're using. ;)

[shadowfax]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
hmm...I've never gotten one of those... haha, one of my friends used to get AIM'ed porn from random AIM SNs he'd never heard of. it was like,

"hey! do you want to see pictures of me touching myself in a room full of guys? then go to www...."

spam is rather disturbing, whether from friends or strangers... all i can say is, pic your friends carefully.

[eyelikeart]

Originally posted by Moxiemike
How about using your junk mail filter? I mean, it's all well and good that it's annoying, but there's measures you can take to divert the annoyance.

If you're not in OSX you could also do a rule in whatever email program you're using. ;)

that would help out IF it were:

1) from the same person
2) listed as the same subject each time, which it isn't

so I'll just have to wait it out...I just find it interesting how this thing is being passed around like cold french fries...

[wdlove]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
that would help out IF it were:

1) from the same person
2) listed as the same subject each time, which it isn't

so I'll just have to wait it out...I just find it interesting how this thing is being passed around like cold french fries...

Did you try taking some slow deep breaths eyelikeart?

Are you saying that you don't like cold French Fries? I've eaten McDonald's when they are cold not bad!


pseudobrit, I happen to have a headache at the moment also!

[eyelikeart]

Originally posted by wdlove
Are you saying that you don't like cold French Fries? I've eaten McDonald's when they are cold not bad!

haha...sometimes u are too much... ;)

I don't eat fast food. I'd starve before subjecting myself to McDonald's. :eek:

[scem0]

That's kind of cool.

No more or less.

Just kind of cool.

:( ;)

scem0

[wdlove]

Originally posted by eyelikeart
haha...sometimes u are too much... ;)

I don't eat fast food. I'd starve before subjecting myself to McDonald's. :eek:

I actually couldn't tell you either the last time that I had any fast food either. Just trying to make a funny comment. It appears that I succeeded. :p