Travis Gerhardt

At one point or another, we’ve probably been emailed the following:

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 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.

While there wasn’t a published paper on the topic from Cambridge University, Graham Rawlinson from Nottingham University did write his PhD Thesis on “The Significance of Letter Position in Word Recognition” in 1976. He tested a lot of different things such as replacing letters with their mirror images, reversing the letter order of words, reversing the word order of passages, keeping the first two and last two characters fixed while mixing the inner characters, and substituting letters with other ones that may or may not be similar. The results generally showed that it is possible to guess words with incomplete information, and humans are better at guessing the words if only the middle letters have been rearranged. This last part makes a lot of sense if you’ve ever tried to do a Jumble in the newspaper; the whole point is that it’s hard to unscramble words.

How does the trick work? First, note that the text is written in lowercase for the most part. In 1955, Miles Tinker found that reading lowercase text was more legible than all-capital text because of the “characteristic words forms furnished by this type.” Building on this work and scientific studies conducted from 1982 to 1990, Colin Wheildon explains “When a person reads a line of type, the eye recognizes letters by the shapes of their upper halves.” Looking at the shapes of the words, most letters are either switched with letters of the same height (like in “wlohe”) or only offset by one character (as in “ltteer” where tt has been shifted to the left by one character).

The next important point is how much the inside of the words have been jumbled. Two and three letter words cannot be jumbled and four letter words can only have their inside letters swapped. It’s only when we reach five letter words and beyond that we can sufficiently scramble the words to hide their meaning. Here are a few examples from Posit Science:

As soon as the longer words have their letters randomly distributed, it’s very hard to decipher what they say. Assigning one point for each place a letter has moved, the harder scrambled words have scores of 16, 18, and 20 compared to 8, 4, and 8 respectively. This small amount of randomization is easy enough for us to overcome, especially when compared to how the words could have been written.

When reading we also gain context from the sentence as a whole and can infer the meaning of words without knowing what they are. In the third sentence, “The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm,” 8 of the 15 words are unscrambled giving us ample context. This might be a point we miss as they’re all function words (words that join together the important nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives that give the sentence its substance) which we tend to ignore when reading. Further, while total is rearranged to toatl it retains its overall sound, which is another piece of information we use when reading.

The final issue with the theory is with words that can be rearranged into multiple other words. For example, salt can be rearranged as slat, but these words were avoided in the passage lest the effect be ruined. Clive Tooth has found a wonderful example of this in the following sentence:

“The sprehas had ponits and patles”

There are multiple rearrangements possible here including:

• The sherpas had pitons and plates.
• The shapers had points and pleats.
• The seraphs had pintos and petals.
• The sphaers had pinots and palets.
• The sphears had potins and peltas.

In summation, this hoax is similar to writing a paragraph missing that fifth symbol: it’s a pain to concoct but it only slows you down slightly to turn words into conclusions. As a bonus point, grammar is missing in parts such as “According to a research at…” and a word or two don’t unmix rightly such as “rscheearch” to “research” and “iprmoetnt” to “important”. Additional data by a PhD linguist is at this URL: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/Cmabrigde/

Today’s Tangent: Jumble was created by Martin Naydel in 1954 and now appears in more than 600 newspapers daily worldwide. An unintended byproduct was a gameshow in 1994 where four contests would face off to solve jumbles in the fastest time possible. It was one of four game shows created by Wink Martindale and Bill Hilleir for the Family Channel. Jumble only lasted six months, twice as long as the short running Shuffle also created by the duo. None of the game shows were still being produced after 1994.

My Tuesday Tidbits went on an unannounced hiatus for two weeks due to other obligations, such as the talk I did for Ignite 10. I’ll be writing up an article on my experiences leading up to my presentation and on the night, so look for that later this week. – Travis Gerhardt

During wartime lots of things become scarce: metal, meat, sugar, gasoline, and even chocolate. For the United States in World War II, chocolate was sent to the troops leaving those at home looking for something else sweet. It is because of this shortage that they turned towards jelly beans and other confections, helping to broaden the different candies available and ensuring that jelly beans would be around for generations. But there’s a lot more to jelly beans than just a wartime treat, and to tell that tale we need to visit Turkey more than two hundred years ago.

While the exact origins of Turkey Delight are unknown, the modern day version of the sweet was first found in 1776 in Istanbul, Turkey. It was at this time that Bekir Effendi, a confectioner from Anatolia set up a small shop there and started to sell his new confection. Unfortunately information around this event is scarce but we can piece together some things. It seems as though an ancestor of the treat existed back in  1626 as Francis Bacon wrote about similar sweets from Turkey:

They have in Turkey and the East certain confections, which they call servets, which are like to candied conserves, and are made of sugar and lemons, or sugar and citrons, or sugar and violets, and some other flowers; and some mixture of amber for the more delicate persons: and those they dissolve in water, and thereof make their drink, because they are forbidden wine by their law.

Bekir Effendi took this treat and made it softer and covered it in a liberal amount of icing sugar. Legend has it that he presented this sweet to the ruler Abdul Hamid I after he was commissioned to make a new confection; it quickly became a coveted dish and was associated with royalty. Eventually a Briton discovered the delight and brought back crates of it to England, reselling it under the name Turkish Delight. From there it made its way over to the United States and near the end of the 19th century was turned into the jelly bean.

The jelly bean was created by taking the jelly of a Turkish Delight, shaping it into a bean, and coating it with a soft shell of sugar. The coating is added in a method called panning where the centre of the candies are put in a open container that is partly filled with syrup, and then they are rolled allowing the candy to be coated evenly as the shells slowly harden. Since Turkish Delight came in multiple flavours, early jelly beans shared this trait and experienced great success during the penny candy craze of the time.

In the early 1900’s, the penny candy craze subsided in favour of everything chocolate. It wasn’t until World War II that jelly beans and other non-chocolate treats resurged. Then in 1960,  the small Herman Goelitz Candy Company decided to change from primarily producing candy corn to multiple other confections including jelly beans and the United States’ first gummi bears. These jelly beans caught the attention of then Governor of California, Ronald Reagan, who would end up eating them through his two terms in office, famous writing “we can hardly start a meeting or make a decision without passing around the jar of jelly beans.”

In 1976, David Klien had an idea for jelly beans of unusual flavour and top notch quality, and pitched his idea to Herm Rowland, then owner of the Herman Goelitz Candy Company. Using the Goelitz company as a distributor, Klien created the Jelly Belly brand and launched with eight initial flavours including root beer and cream soda, flavours that had never been made into jelly beans before. In 1980, Klein and his business partner sold Jelly Belly and all the associated trademarks to the Herman Goelitz Candy Company for $4.8 million.

Around this same time, Ronald Reagan became President of the United States and with his presidency brought Jelly Belly jelly beans to the Oval Office and on Air Force One. He went further and asked for a blueberry flavoured jelly bean so he could serve red, white, and blue ones at parties he hosted. Then in 1983, Reagan sent Jelly Bellies to the astronauts of the space shuttle Challenger as a surprise. Throughout his eight years as president, he continued to have the jelly beans as a snack, helping to launch the Jelly Belly company into further financial success. Because of this huge influence, a portrait of the former president (shown above) made out of jelly beans hangs in the Jelly Belly visitor centre in Fairfield.

Today’s Tangent: While we may know them as Turkish Delights, the Turks definitely don’t call them that. The original word for these treats were lokum, which now translates from Turkish to English as Turkish Delight. However, not all translations are as simple. In Romanian the word is rahat which is a shorting of the Arabic translation rahat ul-holkum. Interesting, the Romanian rahat took another meaning, roughly translating to shit in English. I’d say that English got the taster of the two translations.

Complete this sentence: “I’ll be back in a ___!” While you probably answered “minute”, “second”, or “moment” most people only know the length of the first two. How long is a moment? In medieval times, it was defined to be 1/40th of an hour which is equal to 1.5 minutes or 90 seconds. Interestingly, the moment was further subdivided into twelve equal parts of 7.5 seconds called ounces. The smallest they were willing to go was the atom, a indivisible amount of time that also meant “a twinkling of the eye”. Since there are 47 atoms in an ounce, it’s 15/94th of a second or roughly 160 milliseconds. But how small can we really divide time? To find out, we’ll have to slow things down, way down.

A sixth of a second isn’t much to talk about today when movies have 30 frames a second. In movies and television we often see slow motion sequences, a phenomenon best captured in Time Warp (a science show that documents numerous events with high speed cameras). Today’s high speed cameras can easily shoot 100,000 frames per second, which is 100 faster than the first high speed camera could go. Since Etienne Oehmichen created that first high speed camera (then called an electric stroboscoscope) in 1917, the technology continued to progress until Harold Eugene Edgerton improved the design and started making art, creating the iconic photo above in 1964.

Ultra high speed cameras have practical uses too. Scientists at UCLA are using a 36.7 million FPS camera to detect cancer cells among millions of possible candidates. Still too slow for you? MIT researchers have made a camera that can record light by taking pictures every femtosecond, giving their camera a speed of 10^15 frames per second (one million billion). As of May 2010, the smallest unit of time measured was 12 attoseconds, roughly 80 times shorter than the period between pictures of the camera just mentioned. But if you really want to get the theoretical smallest unit of time, that’s Planck time. Clocking in at 5.39 * 10^-44 seconds, there are roughly 3.1 * 10^25 units of Planck time in an attosecond. Slow still has a long way to go.

Today’s Tangent: A moment is 1.5 minutes, which means it could also be called a sesquiminute. The prefix sesqui- means “one and a half”, leading to one of my favourite words: sesquipedalian. It comes from the Latin sesquipedalis, literally meaning “a foot and a half long”. Today it aptly means “a long word”.

If you ask “What’s the highest point on Earth?” most people will correctly answer “Mt. Everest”. If you ask “What’s the lowest point on Earth?” you’ll get answers of “Death Valley” (the lowest land in North America at 86m below sea level), “The Dead Sea” (the lowest point in Asia at 423m below sea level), or maybe even “Marianas Trench” which is the lowest point on Earth. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it’s almost 11 km at its deepest, a place known as Challenger Deep. First explored in 1960 by humans, there wouldn’t be a return trip by man until 2012.

Just before Christmas in 1872, the HMS Challenger left Portsmouth, England on its four year mission of oceanography. It had nets for retrieving biological samples from different depths, housed six scientists, and travelled 127,000 km over four years. The mission discovered more than 4000 new species of plants and animals, but also discovered the Marianas Trench. Using a sounding line (a line with a weight on the end which is then lowered into the water) they were able to measure the deepest part of the trench. This point was then Challenger Deep after the HMS Challenger.

In 1953, a Swiss physicist named Auguste Piccard constructed and launched the Trieste, named after the Italian city in which it was built. With his son Jacques, the ship made its first dive on August 11. Over the next three years it would complete many more dives in the Mediterranean. These successes lead the United States government to investigate the craft in 1957, and it was recommended as the ideal craft to explore the Challenger Deep. It was bought for $250,000 in 1958 (worth approximately $1.6 million in 2012).

The dive to the Challenger Deep was uneventful. Manned by Lt. Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard, the submersible took nearly five hours to descend on January 23, 1960. During that time, the two occupants had little to do beside check gauges and look at the occasional bioluminescent sea life that swam by. At ~9.5 km they heard a bang which turned out to be the breaking of a secondary Plexiglass window in the entry tube, a non-fatal event. Once they reached the bottom they only stayed there for 20 minutes before returning up by dropping their ballast; the return trip only took 3 hours and fifteen minutes.

In March of 2012, James Cameron descended to the bottom of the Challenger Deep in a one-manned submersible. His descent took 2.5 hours and he spent 3 hours at the bottom, only half of his scheduled 6 hours which were cut short due to a hydraulic fluid leak. He brought multiple 3D cameras with him and recorded footage of his journey, and the team is eager to work out the kinks and try again. With only three people even reaching the bottom, Challenger Deep is one of the most remote places on the planet.

Today’s Tangent: As stated above, Mount Everest is the highest point in the world. But the highest point does not the tallest mountain make. Mount Everest is anywhere from 3.6 to 4.6 km high (3.6 on the south face and 4.6 on the north face) and is only the highest point because it’s in a mountainous region, raising its base more than 4 km. For the tallest mountain, look to Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa in Hawaii, both of which are 10.2 km tall though partly underwater. The tallest mountain on land is Mount McKinley in Alaska at 5.3 to 5.9 km tall.

Time has always been a fascination for humans. Just look at our sayings: we can save time, waste time, kill time, take our time, be pressed for time, run out of time, let time slip through our fingers, stall for time, be just in time, spend time, make time, have free time, be on time, have a tough time, watch time fly, watch time crawl, have a great time, be out of time, or even take time off. But despite all of this and our understanding of the theories of relativity, we have not yet been able to travel through time. That is, unless you discount the ten days that were skipped from October 4 to October 15 in 1582.

Let’s start with a flashback to 46 BC when Julius Caesar introduced the Julian Calendar. It was a simple design, consisting of 365 days with a 366th day being inserted every four years. This made a year 365.25 days on average, which roughly corresponded to what it actually was and it provided a simple rule to correct for seasonal drift. Unfortunately it wasn’t easy converting from the existing calendar to the new one, and it resulted in the “Year of Confusion” in 46 BC – the year had 445 days.

Jumping ahead to 325 AD, the first official council of the Christian Church meet in Nicaea to discuss Easter. The date for Easter is based on a complicated formula (you can see the current formula here) based on the vernal equinox (the “first day of spring”) and the cycle of the moon. In order for Easter to fall at roughly the same time each year, they set March 21st to be the vernal equinox. Unfortunately, the Julian calendar’s estimate of a year as 365.25 days was a bit too much, resulting in a drift of one day every 130 years.

Fast forward to 1582 and 1257 years have passed since March 21st was made the vernal equinox. By this point, the calendar was 10 days off from what it should be and so Pope Gregorius XIII (with the help of astronomer Christopher Clavius) determined that they would have to skip 10 days to get things back on track. Thus everyone in Venice, Spain, Portugal, France, the Dutch Republic, and Southern Netherlands made the transistion in 1582, while other countries wouldn’t follow until decades later, with Russia finally converting in 1918. If the change to the Julian calendar could be called the Year of Confusion, this is surely the Centuries of Confusion as the date difference only got worse as the years passed, reaching 13 days by the time Russia switched. Until everyone used the new Gregorian calendar, countries and their citizens needed to know how to switch between the two calendars.

Even in those countries that changed right away, it wasn’t a smooth transition. There was a lot of outcry from the public about religious ceremonies during those times. Since 10 days had been skipped, what happened to those celebrations? And would celebrating them on the new calendar days appease their deities as well as before the change? Even worse, Pope Gregorius XIII knew that his new calendar had to work better than the old one, so he corrected how leap years worked:

• They would happen every 4 years
• Every 100 years their wouldn’t be a leap year
• Every 400 years there would

Thus over four hundred years there would only be 97 leap years instead of 100, leading to an average year of 365.2425 days. The other change involved the equinoxes and solstices no longer being fixed to a specific date. As seen in the image above from Wikipedia, the summer solstice (the “first day of summer”) moves around by day over hundreds of years.

Of course this isn’t the end of the story. As the millennia wear on, addition corrections will need to be made. Earth’s rotation will slow from the Moon’s pull, Jupiter will slowly precess Earth’s axis, and changes on the surface of our planet alter its mass distribution and thus its rotation speed. In time, our descendants might once again leap into the future.

Today’s Tangent: You’ve heard of leap years, but have you heard of leap seconds? Due to the small changes in Earth’s rotation mentioned above, days aren’t exactly 24 hours. Over years these small differences add up from millseconds to seconds, and a leap second must be added, creating the time 23:59:60. Since the creation of the idea in 1972, 25 leap seconds have been added, most recently on June 30, 2012. Unfortunately, due to changes on Earth itself from earthquakes and other events, it’s impossible to know when the next leap second will need to be scheduled.