Now for something completely off topic, please read the following:
Tihs ltlite pgigy wnet to mkeart. Tihs lttile pggiy steayd at hmoe. Tihs ltilte pggiy had rasot beef, Tihs lltite pggiy had nnoe. And tihs ltltie pgigy wnet “Wee! Wee! Wee!” all the way hmoe.
I’m sure you had absolutely no difficulties reading the above, but just in case you did, it is the old favorite ‘This Little Piggy’.
You may have seen scrambled sentences like this in an email and wondered how it’s possible to fully understand words that have been completely scrambled. The key to understanding these seemingly scrambled words is that they aren’t in fact fully scrambled. Apparently, we are able to fully comprehend what is being written because the first and last letters of a word stay the same, while everything in between is scrambled. For example, the word scrambled is much easier to decipher if it is written like scambreld than if it were written like srdalcmeb . With that said, even with the first and last letters staying the same, why are we able to comprehend these words so easily? There are many theories as to why we are able to read these seemingly illegible words, but the most common belief is that the human brain does not read the parts but the whole. Meaning that our brains are automatically auto-correcting the words due to some innate ability to identify words based on common shapes. Ok, this isn’t going to tell you a lot about humor writing, but it’s still humerous nonetheless.
You may be asking yourself, oh this is sooooo cool, I’d love to make up my own stories to amaze my friends. Well, you’re in luck, follow this link and this website will scramble your sentences for you. Enjoy!
Portuguese Exploration
1. Began as a Desire to bypass Overland trade routes to Asia (Ottoman turks)
2. Prince Henry the Navigator set up a school or information service to exchange navigational technology
3. New technology (learned from other cultures, especially Muslims and Chinese) made exploration possible
a. Compass, astrolabe and cross-staff
b. Cartography (grid system of latitude and longitude)
c. Lateen sails, new types of rudders, and caravels
d. Gunpowder and firearms
China
Muslim
Europe
4. Finding all-water route to the Asian spice trade
a. Bartolomeu Dias (tip of Africa only)
b. Vasco da Gama (all the way to India)
5. Pedro Alvarez Cabral defeats muslim merchants and gains control of Indian Ocean (naval battle; accidently discovered Brasil)
6. Line of demarcation drawn under the *Treaty of Tordesillas* gives Portugal the eastern hemisphere trade routes and Brazil.