Mastering the Internet

[ken]

Peter Fairbrother wrote:

> What's the average per-second entropy of spoken English?

Well I don't know, but I bet some of the people involved in the 
research described in this recent posting on Language Log could 
give you a good answer:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1322
(using a corpus of recorded phone conversations to do stats on 
rates of speech - follow the links, its interesting)

And more on-topic for ukcrypto this posting: 
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1386
discusses the contributions of the late Jack Good to statistics 
used in both biology and linguistics - statistics that he 
started work on with Alan Turing while at Bletchley Park, 
looking for ways to distinguish language from non-language