Personal Blogs



I always wanted to be in a Gregorian choir. But I never got the chance.

Joke from Jeff Esworthy, picture from https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1038066

Smneooe rinemded me rtlenecy of the qtuie aihntssonig fact taht as long as you keep the frsit and lsat letrets of each word in the rhigt pcale you can mldude up the ltertes in the mldide of the wdors and the wolhe thing wlil still be pfrlceety easy to usnrnedatd I wtore a prrogam to try this out and here is the rulest of a tset run. You sluhod esialy be albe to follow waht the mgsaese was

(My program can't handle punctuation properly yet but I can sort that out)

Not all sentences are equal though, here's one I tried to make harder

Riadsnonmig ieionrtr lrettes aftcefs cioepmnehrson mmiianlly cotiigvne scietsints dveiscor

There is a really interesting article about all this here. It discusses the origin of the meme and then goes on to consider things like what the underlying mechanisms might be, whether reading is slowed, what sort of sentences might affected more and which less by jumbling interior letters in the words, whether some permuation of the intrerior letters make more difference than others and so on. An interesting read, though I haven't finsihed digesting it!

My brother and his wife have been looking after some underweight hedgehogs. I thought you might like to see these night photos of Benny, who has been brought up to a suitable weight and is now ready to retun to the wild.

Benny is keen to go

Benny heads off into the wild

When I was about 9 or 10 years old two of my favourite books were The Three Musketeers and Twenty Years After, by Alexandre Dumas. Oh how I longed to be one of the musketeers! But one book I never read, not sure why, was The Count of Monte Christo. 

By chance tonight I came across a quote from that book and I felt that it was in some way appropriate to the extraordinary situation we find ourselves in.

Knock-knock!

     Who’s there?

Open up!

    What’s the magic word?

Police.