Fuzzy numbers etc.

Posted on July 6, 2009, 8:00 am, by Craig Silverman, under Newspapers.

guardianIn the editing process a line was inserted in yesterday’s graphic of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission, giving the average centre-to-centre distance from Earth to the moon as 52,500 miles (The moon shot: How they did it, page 14, G2 special issue). It is 238,857 miles. And to clarify references in an article, Apollo 11 was the mission; its command module was Columbia (The first man on the moon, page 4, G2). Link

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  • http://www.granitegeek.org DaveBrooks

    Sometimes the explanation of errors leaves me scratching my head more than the error did … how did the “editing process” create a number so wildly inaccurate?

    I can't figure out how an editor would accidentally get 52,500 anythings for the distance to the moon.. It's not a mistranslation of metric units, or a dropped zero, or the altitude of geosynchronous orbit, or (so far as I can tell) a number that has anything to do with the moon at all. It's like they hit a random-number generator and plugged it in .. weird.

  • devika_melora

    I like when publications include information about the original article in the correction, especially the page number. I often wondered why more publications don't do this, specifically online media, where it is so easy to add a link to the original article being corrected/clarified.

  • devika_melora

    I like when publications include information about the original article in the correction, especially the page number. I often wondered why more publications don't do this, specifically online media, where it is so easy to add a link to the original article being corrected/clarified.

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