phonespelling.com - what does your phone number spell

[mouser]

http://www.phonespelling.com/

kind of fun - probably there are other sites that do this as well.

from stumbleupon.com

[m_s]

I thought you'd just helped me solve a mystery!  Has anyone read Jonathan Safran Foer's 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close'?  It's an interesting book for a whole lot of reasons, and very moving indeed.  There's a couple of pages - 269-271 - that are typed out on a telephone keypad by a character who can't speak.  The pages just consist of numbers, and it's really hard to work out phrases by just holding up a telephone and trying to make sense of them...  I thought this site might have worked, but it can only do 12 characters at a time, and it's not making any sense of the first 12 from page 269...  I've googled, and others have also tried to work out the meaning of these pages, but I haven't (so far) found a full translation - anybody have any other ideas?

[mouser]

the first question youd have to ask is, is the person just pushing the button with the letter they are thinking of, OR are they using a scheme to specifically indicate which of the 3 letters on each button they are refering to.

if the latter, then a simple algorithm could convert it.

if the former, it's MUCH more interesting.  if you know the language it should be feasible to decode it fairly well probabilistically, by estimating the probability of each letter based on surrounding context.  i wonder if such a util exists yet.. it's a great crypto/probability challenge.

[f0dder]

I wonder if it would be a breach of copyright if you scanned/OCR'ed the numeric pages and uploaded them here?

[m_s]

I don't have a scanner, but here's a link to the page previews on Amazon so that you can at least take a look - I think you'll need an Amazon account to view the pages: http://www.amazon.com/gp/sitbv3/reader/103-4287691-8917423?asin=0618711651&pageID=S07X&checkSum=5yvFYlT3Ut29OLsrVsBPx45yPQSWqjbi%20ZVcy%20ufOJk=

[Carol Haynes]

Here is a link to the main page at Amazon for the item: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0618329706

You should be able to look at pages by hovering over the image and clicking on the page you want to look at - does this work for anyone or is the site broken - all I get is a menu on the left and a grey blank area where the page should be.

I have tried it in IE and Firefox and can't get it to work in either.

[m_s]

works for me in firefox on a mac.

[Carol Haynes]

Must have been a glitch yesterday but it does seem to work for me too now (Firefox on Windows)