sword-billed hummingbird » Currency

What Typos Mean to Book Publishing – NYTimes.com

recommended — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 23:41:46 +0000

Better and faster (though not exactly). An interesting take on the resurgence of typos as publishers struggle to stay relevant and create product.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will e-mail in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

And this curious (though not wholly unexpected) tidbit:

“Spelling mistakes ‘cost millions’ in lost online sales,” said a BBC headline last week. The article cited an analysis of British Web figures that suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce site can hurt credibility so much that online revenues fall by half.

I’ll admit, I was disgruntled at seeing a typo on the first page (I’m not kidding) of William Vollman’s Imperial. I wish I could remember what the typo was — I think it might have been the word “Imperial”, or something equally ridiculous.

(via NYTimes)

Ways of consuming music

Ben — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 01:22:01 +0000

Of course you know that artists don’t get money when you find their music through less-than-aboveboard avenues; but do you know the difference between buying in-store and, say, through iTunes? Or what the cut is when you stream something over Rhapsody, or download from cdBaby? Dig into this delicious infographic and find out (and read through the comments to stumble through some of the conceptual differences that are harder to portray graphically). (via Information Is Beautiful)

Return of the Rundown

Ben — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 19:59:15 +0000

Timewaster: Typewar. Think you know fonts? Try this game, which you’ll either find completely boring or riveting.
Best aggregated reference word site: Wordnik. My favorite reference site right now. All about words.
Maps of Disaster: Informative, curious, unnerving. View map (or maps) of the world, with icons of disaster superimposed. For added effect, project image onto your office wall. You’ve got things under control. (This is: a service of the Hungarian Emergency and Disaster Information Service)
Best specialty science-writing blog: Tetrapod Zoology. Fascinating, curious, informative, and detailed without alienating those not totally familiar with the science at hand. Aside: I want this book.
Best easily digestible good news story: “Feeling grumpy is ‘good for you’” (via BoingBoing). Bonus: “File photo” used for BBC article appears to have been taken from One Foot in the Grave.

An understandable mistake

Ben — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 22:08:04 +0000

A reply to a question in Notes & Queries yesterday recommended purchasing lion and tiger urine from Chester Zoo to stop neighbourhood cats from urinating in a vegetable patch (G2, page 17). Chester Zoo would like to forestall requests for its big cats’ urine: it asks us to make clear that it does not in fact sell either tiger or lion urine. Many years ago the zoo sold elephant dung, but it no longer does.

(via Regret the Error)

Hippos

Ben — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 04:07:29 +0000

Of course there’s always debate about invasive species, but usually… Well, usually you don’t think hippopotamus, not in the same mental grouping as zebra mussel and starling. But apparently we live on a place where that can happen; where Colombian drug lords decide to create a haven (of sorts) for hippos; and where, even today, the problem lingers. (NYT, via MeFi)
But who’d hijack a hippo? Probably no one. But maybe you want precautions in place, just in case:

The crate was hoisted onto the flatbed with a 120-ton construction crane. For security reasons, there were no signs on the truck indicating that the cargo was a hippopotamus, the zoo said.

(WaPo, via Schneier)
But it’s not all fun and games. (Actually, part of #1 is already treading into the not-fun-and-games category, if you read into it.) Sometimes hippos fight sharks. At least in Italian natural history books from the 60s, maybe. (via Tetrapod Zoology)

Cleaning House (Rundown)

Ben — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:58:46 +0000

It turns out computers can figure out what language you’re speaking without actually hearing you. In at least some controlled circumstances, anyway. (NewScientist, via Monochrom)
“Astonishingly”, (1) people forget their passwords all the time, but (2) the ever-helpful “secret” “questions” are not really either — at least, not as far as security is concerned.
If I had a car I needed to get into on a regular basis (as in, for driving), this would be wicked awesome. It’s not everyone who can open a car with his shoes.
And this video montage is just kinda sweet.
This post is a good example of why I’m recently drawn to reading Tetrapod Zoology on a regular basis. The lead-in sentence (I think) sells itself:

I used to receive random unsolicited emails from an individual who strongly promoted the idea that birds could not not not not be dinosaurs, that the entire dinosaur family tree was screwed up beyond belief, that ‘dinosaurs’ had evolved from random assorted diverse archosaurs, that cladistics was rubbish, and that all mainstream palaeontologists were idiots.

Read on.
I am still waiting for these business cards made out of meat to get real. (No, not like that.)
Without having perused it much, Ficly at minimum stands out as an interesting concept — a place for collaborative story-telling (in a time & place where social networks are, weirdly, moving us away from that kind of collaboration). (via SimpleSpark)

Aliens, astronomers, or super-intelligent aardvarks?

Ben — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 22:22:00 +0000

You decide. Whatever the case, it’s kind of amazing.

(via Ectoplasmosis)

The narratives of refrigerator innards

Ben — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 19:11:25 +0000

This falls into the category of things that are uninteresting in real life, but which become interesting through the act of photography. Or something. (It may simply be that the photographs aren’t accompanied by the rank refrigerator smell that’s always lurking, waiting for the right moment to assault your nostrils.)

The photos are accompanied by brief descriptions of the households they represent.

(in GOOD Magazine, via The Morning News)

Wait, what?

Ben — Thu, 14 May 2009 00:45:36 +0000

(via Ectoplasmosis)

For the record

Ben — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 17:36:36 +0000

We accidentally referred to a “stellar sea lion” (29 November, p 6). The featured mammal is a Steller’s sea lion.

All in good time, all in good time.

(via Regret The Error)