Did you hear the one about the geology costume contest?
The gneiss guise finished last.
Did you hear the one about the geology costume contest?
The gneiss guise finished last.
One of my favourite video games of all time is the inexplicable Katamari Damacy. Its quirky premise involves, as Wikipedia puts it, “a diminutive prince rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects until the ball has grown great enough to become a star.” In other words, it’s the most successful game ever made about exponential growth.
(more…)Based on corpus data, over half of the words in a typical page of English text has four or fewer letters, with the average word length being slightly less than five.
Length of… | Mean | Median | Mode |
---|---|---|---|
Unique words | 7.52 | 7 | 7 |
Words weighted by frequency | 4.95 | 4 | 3 |
According to an old piece of email forwarding-spam, it’s easy to read text even if you scramble all but the first and last letters in each word. But the truth is a bit more complicated.
The ancient meme reads:
Aoccdrnig to rseearch 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 plcae. The rset can be a toatl 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.
The form of this paragraph appears at first glance to provide direct evidence of its own “azanmig” claim. But something’s a little fishy: a lot of the words aren’t actually scrambled. Short words aren’t affected much if at all by the message’s middle-muddling, and most English words are short!
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