Pharyngula

Posted by: BronzeDog | January 26, 2006 3:17 PM

All bow before almighty Dog!

... I accept cash, checks, and DVDs. No credit.

Posted by: Jim Daley | January 26, 2006 3:23 PM

Evangelist: Evil's agent

Posted by: Glen Davidson | January 26, 2006 3:43 PM

Well it couldn't have just evolved, could it? So we know there's a designer somewhere, and quite obviously He smiles on Britney. We knew that already, though.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/b8ykm

Posted by: Bayesian Bouffant, FCD | January 26, 2006 3:57 PM

Or stoned out of your skull. Oh, those youthful conversations with my dope fiend friends!

Posted by: Patrick Nielsen Hayden | January 26, 2006 4:26 PM

Ah, for the days when "Spiro Agnew" spelled out "Grow A Penis."

Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | January 26, 2006 4:53 PM

[i]Is there a specific term for pairs of words formed by spelling one or the other backwards?[/i]

You mean like "Evil spelled backwards is live"? Yeah, that's a palindrome.

So PZ's title is perfectly correct in labelling god | dog a palindrome, even if the article refers to an anagram. [/pedant]

Posted by: Rey | January 26, 2006 6:35 PM

No, a palindrome is something that reads the same forwards and backwards. Like "dad". Or "Rise to vote, sir."

Posted by: bad Jim | January 26, 2006 6:41 PM

In response to Lee's question: back in the sixteenth century or so, scientists like Hooke and Galileo sometimes encrypted their findings in anagrams to establish their priority without revealing anything.

Posted by: Left_Wing_Fox | January 26, 2006 7:04 PM

Oh bugger, you're right.

Ah, here we go! It's a semordnilap!

Ok, perhaps a semi-palindrome, anadrome or a reverse anagram, but semordnilap sounds much more fun. :)

Posted by: jpf | January 26, 2006 7:10 PM

"I wonder if anyone has searched for mentions of Charles Darwin and evolution by utlizing that popular hoax, the Bible Code. I'll bet that Darwin's in there, if people look hard enough!"

Well, Mel Gibson is mentioned in there, why not Darwin?

Posted by: Johnny Vector | January 26, 2006 8:59 PM

Child's play! This version was (so I read on the web, so it must be true!) written by Guy Steele in 1983. It's my favorite:

A man, a plan, a canoe, pasta, heros, rajahs, a coloratura, maps, snipe, percale, macaroni, a gag, a banana bag, a tan, a tag, a banana bag again (or a camel), a crepe, pins, Spam, a rut, a Rolo, cash, a jar, sore hats, a peon, a canal. Panama!

Posted by: jackd | January 27, 2006 11:56 AM

Too late. My mind was sufficently blown by listening to NPR this morning where Libby Lewis was reporting on Lewis Libby.

Posted by: RavenT | January 27, 2006 1:38 PM

Ah, perhaps someone here will know the word I'm looking for. What's the name of the device where you spell out a message with the first letters of sentences? Like you write an email where the first letters of each sentence spell out F.U.C.K.Y.O.U. Then you go back and make the first sentence read something like "First of all, ...". The second sentence is something like "Under no circumstances...", third "Considering...", and so on, until every letter has a corresponding sentence.

Is steganography the right word for that, or is there a more accurate word?

Posted by: jonp | January 27, 2006 1:40 PM

Britney Spears was a spokesperson for Pepsi Cola, which is also an anagram of "episcopal." Coincidence? I think not!

Posted by: Jason Powers | January 27, 2006 4:05 PM

"Does anyone think anagrams actually mean anything?"

Lee, apparently the human brain is natively capable of dealing with them, based most likely on the same function that allows it to decode flipped visual images.

There's a computer application for generating web pages called 'Joomla,' and as a joke, when you first install it the default data front page text is garbled English except for the first and last letter of each word.

Similar to the way your brain fills in most of any object you've seen many times before based on familiar visual cues (which probably saves processing labor), it will automatically adjust words (not just their spellings, but the words themselves) into context.

Chances are that people's "Wow" response to anagrams and numerology (like the revived interest in Kabbalah) are similar to older cultural investments in alchemy and astrology. They're clumsy first attempts at organizing phenomena before they are fully understood. In the case of anagrams, my best guess is that the function will prove to be an echo of the random nerve signal response to light that would have to have existed prior to the adaptive development of actual vision. I've always pictured the evolution of vision as being a back and forth process between the eye's ability to encode light cues and the brain's ability to decode them, and I'm stubbornly sticking with conjecture until science comes a long and disproves it.

I found the text:

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe."

So I'm guessing anagrams are probably only meaningful to us as possible hints to a causal description of the eye's evolutionary path. To anyone ignorant of Clarke's Third Law, though, they're witchcraft.

Posted by: Nathan Myers | January 28, 2006 3:09 AM

By the way, this business about texts "garbled except the first and last letter" remaining legible was a monumentally clever hoax. If you look closely at the examples, you find that they are very artfully rearranged. A computer program that really scrambles interior letters produces gibberish that only an anagrammist could love.