Wow… like twin grenades in the middle of my otherwise peaceful day, I received two brain twisting emails that shook the foundations of my subjective reality. How can we see things like this and subsequently trust and believe everything we experience!?!
The first was an email forward from a friend. The kind I hate, but printed here in its entirety:
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.
The second was this gif (163 KB) that moves, despite being a static gif file.
My english-as-a-second-language friend Alex was the origin of that particular optical illusion, and for some reason, he didn’t find the other email as explosive as I did. (some quotes are: “STOP IT!” and “it hurts.”) When I asked him if he could read it, he said barely. But I read the whole thing first time through without even a slight pause.
Some searching revealed this interesting blog post on the topic: http://www.bisso.com/ujg_archives/000227.html. You can bet Uncle Jazzbeau is getting bookmarked. Meanwhile, “Don’t believe everything that you breathe, you get a parking violation and a maggot on your sleeve.” (Beck)
update: Is it just an interesting coincidence that Jazzbeau was slashdotted only two days ago for his post that talks about this topic? Is this particular piece of text floating through the inter-aether at a more dramatic rate than usual?
Your english-as-second-language friend is a moron of some sort… He should have read the whole thing before making any assumptions… Those immigrants!
Well, the first forward has been sent through my extended family email list, which normally only gets things that are exceptionally popular (though slightly out of date) or somehow related to Midwestern sports teams. So I’d say the topic was propagating dramatically about two weeks ago.