I ran across Snap Shirts earlier today. They sell t-shirts which have tag clouds based on famous books or a blog of your choice (which is scraped on the fly). Very cute idea, though I’m not sure I actually want any. What I did like, however, was their counted alphabet shirt, which contains the letters of the alphabet scaled based on their frequency in the 86 800 most common words in English.
After seeing that shirt, I decided I wanted one similar, but taking the relative word frequency into account. The letter frequency in a given language is very useful for solving simple codes (i.e. replace a with l, b with g and so on), and so it’s not too difficult to find a list of letter frequencies for English (I compared it to the letter frequency on this site’s front page - very close).
With the right frequencies in hand, I knocked up a web page with the letters in the right relative sizes and it all ran through a few conversions to get the image in a format to go onto a shirt. If anyone else would like one, you can get your very own alphabet cloud t-shirt from the kstruct cafe press store. No mark-up, since I really just made it for myself, and if you want the same image on some other cafe press item just let me know.
Technorati Tags: t-shirt, alphabet, cryptography, tag cloud
January 28th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
That’s nice. I can’t even see the Q in this picture.
February 2nd, 2006 at 11:01 pm
I’m hoping that when it’s printed up there will just be little dots for the j, q, x and z, but I suspect they may not actually show up at all.
Anyway, once I actually get mine I’ll let everyone know how it turned out.