Sturm und Drang

That's storm and stress to you non-German speakers. Storm blew in from the west two days ago. Complete white out! Even the keenest of the newbies didn't dare venture out of the station. They even took the sled dogs inside!

It was a time when being a penguin seemed like the last thing on earth you ever wanted to be. The guys on the winward outside were only kept in place by the weight of the rest of the rookery. If anyone had dared leave the 'huddle' they would have been swept away, low centre of gravity or no low centre of gravity! Being on the leeward was no better, you couldn't open your eyes without the pupils getting rammed into your sockets!

Fortunately, from the gang's point of view, it was a straight nor' wester so the test rig was pretty much protected from the worst of it by the bluff, they're round there now clearing the new snow off of it. We'll have to try and come up with a way of protecting it, I think. If we get a storm where the wind shifts direction every other second, the bloody thing will get buried. Ah well, no matter, we haven't come this far down the evolutionary road to be overly concerned with the kind of weather that has you running for central heating and hot water bottles.

It was a bit annoying that you couldn't read though. Sparky in front of me tried. The 'Dolphins of Pern' was last seen heading south east into the interior at about 120kph. Probably the best place for it. 'Moko' writ VERY large indeed! But you kind of get used to that sort of thing. I'll just order another copy from Amazon on the station's account.

What? Where else did you think we got our books from? The turnover's quite high in the station, people forever coming and going, and supplies only come every few months or so. So when they unpack the books, they just think some newbie who's just left ordered it and stick it on the library shelf anyway. It's not their money after all!

S'funny, while the wind was whistling around my ear openings, I started thinking about something I found a while back. It was this:

"Aoccdrnig to 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 in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter in iosltioan, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?"

Now I have my own ideas about what is going on here, which is at a slight variance to what is stated and I thought I would try it out on a non 'native' speaker whose English was nonetheless very good. She had no problem either. But curiously, the same statement had been translated into her native language and she found that much trickier to read.

Now I think that if you give the English sentence to an English speaking six year old (assuming they started to learn to read at 4-5 years old) they would have problems. After about 7ish, they'd be as good as an adult. It would be interesting to know if that is true or not. Perhaps I need to find a teacher of young children willing to co-operate with a penguin on some original research. Let's face it, it would have to be better than some of the stuff they come up with down here!