I saw this short in-between-programmes thing on National Geographic channel where they showed that when you read, only the first and last letter in each word is really important – the brain does some crazy pattern matching on the letters in the middle and recognizes the words anyway without too much trouble!
So I wrote this little Ruby script to check it out myself.
I msut say taht it is rllaey ture waht tehy say. the biran is pertty aminazg
hree is the spcrit if you wnat to try it out yurseolf
# word scrambler
str = ARGV[0]
srand(Time.now.usec)
strs = str.split(' ')
res = ''
strs.each {|curword|
scramble = String.new(curword)
len = curword.length
if (len > 3)
begin
sel = curword[1..len-2].split('')
(1..len-2).each {|c|
idx = rand(sel.size)
scramble[c] = sel[idx]
sel.delete_at(idx)
}
end while (curword == scramble)
end
res += scramble + ' '
}
puts res