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#053:Etaoin Schrdlu

Season:  1
Number:  053
Wave:  2
Color:  orange
Suit:  maze suit
Corner:  top left corner
Card's Points:  14
Card Group's Points:  56
Reverse:  generic reverse
Playing Card:  K ♦
Number Marks: 
Official Statistics
For centuries codebreakers have used 'letter frequency analysis' as a starting point
to crack certain types of coded message. The reason being that some letters in the
English langugage appear much more frequently than others. E is the most common,
followed by T, A and O. On the other hand, letters like Z, J, Q and X rarely get a
look in and are a long way behind (although on the plus side they'll score you a
lot of points in Scrabble*).



Assuminy you had plenty of time on your hands and you were able to tot up
all the letters in a book such as 'Alice in Wonderland', the order of frequency
would look like this:



etaoihnsrdluwgcymfpbkvqxjz



You'd get a fairly similar result if you were to do the same for 'Pride and Prejudice':



etaoinhsrdlumcywfgbpvkzjxq



But I digress. As fascinating as all this is it isn't directly relevant to the two-part
puzzle below.




1. READ THE FOLLOWING SENTENCE:



FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF
YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED
WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.



HOW MANY TIMES DOES THE LETTER F
APPEAR WITHIN IT?



2. IN 1969 THE AUTHOR GEORGES PEREC
WROTE A 300 PAGE BOOK CALLED
'LA DISPARATION'. HOW MANY TIMES DOES
THE LETTER 'E' APPEAR WITHIN THE NOVEL?



* Sadly not so for the Polish version of Scrabble where a 'Z' is worth just a single point. Uwierz mi!



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PXCCC 2.0 2007-03-05 22:47:53 PST