The vocabulary tester that came by here in the last week suggests that native english speakers of Hacker News have a vocabulary of about 2^15 words. An IPv6 add

The vocabulary tester that came by here in the last week suggests that native english speakers of Hacker News have a vocabulary of about 2^15 words. An IPv6 address could be encoded in 9 words. If we restrict to a common subset of words known by most people, 2^13 words[1], then we need 10 words. If we force the stream of words to make grammatical sense then we get something like 12 words plus another 4 low entropy glue words for a 16 word sentence[2]. It is likely that there are more IPv6 addresses than english language haikus, so that is out.[3] Limericks might cover a large enough space. So, Why? 1) I think reading a sentence to someone over a voice link would be less error prone and take better advantage of people's prewired wetware. Think of diagnosing a problem where someone has a stale DNS lookup from his dopey ISP. 2) Roughly verifying a hash would be easier. You might not remember "Pampas grass wets the friendly carbon against the bound chemical."[4] word perfectly, but you'd probably recognize it as your SSH host signature. [1] I made up this number. [2] I made up these numbers as well. [3] There isn't room in the margin for this calculation. [4] Only 10 words though, need to get to 16 for a 128 bit key. This came from a random sentence generator site, it didn't want to make longer sentences.