The ideas behind that list is good, but I think they went overboard with their machine learning approach to find words that were as far apart as possible in pronunciation. Considering one would think that such a list will be used in international contexts, basing it off of Basic English[1] or something would probably have been a better idea. How many non-native speakers (that aren't a fan of Dave Sim's "Cerberus") will know the word "Aardvark" ?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English