I read the entire book in one sitting after finding it at a local Borders.

Found one goof on page 144, line 7 refers to a "Curtis Shapley", I think it sould say "Harlow Shapley".

BA got the name right here, in the Bitesize Snack, Galaxies--it looks like it was a smushing of Heber Curtis and Harlow Shapely.

AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!

Now that's an embarrassing one. Oh my. Obviously, I was thinking of the Curtis-Shapley debates and somehow got Shapley's name completely wrong. Note it's misspelled there too. Wow.

What's odd is that I got it right on pages 184 and 185, including spelling! I'll have to check my galley proofs and see if I had it right there.

I think I've lurked long enough. I'm the Bad Astronomer's editor at John Wiley & Sons, the publisher of BA's book.

BA can clearly take care of himself here, but I can't stand idly by and let him take all the heat on this one, much as I'd like to: someone at Wiley--me, copyeditor, proofreader, indexer--should have caught "Shapely," especially since the name appears correctly elsewhere. Not to mention the fact that there's no such person as Curtis Shapely.

The perfect book is like a perfect game; it happens, but not as often as one might hope.

Yes, I blame my editors on this one. [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img]

No, actually, I was the instigator. It's funny this one got past me, my technical editor (another astronomer familiar with the topics about which I wrote), my editor and all the copy editors at Wiley and Sons. Weird.

Well, if we sell enough copies and run into a second printing, that'll get fixed. Nice to see you here, BE!

Congrats to Bad Editor and BA on being human. Oftentimes when reading material that one is very familiar with (or not at all familiar with concerning proper names) one's mind inserts the correct spelling. Happens all the time in computer programming. One spends 4-5 hours pouring over the same section of code only to have a co-worker find the spelling error in 10-30 seconds.

It's enough to drive you sane, I tell you.

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Valiant Dancer

When I was in college (just after the last Ice Age), one of my professors (Himmelblau) was unhappy with the text book choices for his specialty course (process simulation). So, he wrote his own (it may have been published by Wiley and Sons!).

He got the galleys just before the fall semester. He had copies made and used them as the text for that class, offering 50 cents for each error a student found. (My roommate looked at as a part time job.)

The final version had amazingly few errors.

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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

I forgot to mention, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, regardless of the typo about Shapley.
It is rare for me to read an entire book in one sitting....

What will be the next book's topic?

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Matthew Ota on 2002-03-30 18:12 ]</font>

Worse Astronomy?

Kids say the Baddest things.

Bad Astronomer:

I thought immediately of the Curtis-Shapley debates.

I think that if anyone wants to write a book, he/she/it will find that errors are going to be there in profusion. If the writer were to make it error free, it probably would be sanitized and boring to read.

Anyway, it is always fun to look for errors, and finding them is exciting. Now, you have a whole slew of people looking for errors, so they are bound to hit pay dirt, even if the pay dirt turns up fool's gold instead of the real stuff.

I have not actually been looking for errors, but I have a few silly topics which are apt to pop up somewhere (and, sadly, have already). I will be more careful about announcing them next time so that I do not end up with more pie-in-the-face.

I have written a message at the top of each of my posts in that thread so that anybody who reads it will realize that my contribution, at least, will be understood to be poorly researched. Then again, finding errors can be so much fun. Darn!

ljbrs [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_biggrin.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_eek.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_rolleyes.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif[/img] [img]/phpBB/images/smiles/icon_confused.gif[/img]

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"There is in the universe neither center nor circumference." Giordano Bruno Born 1548. Torched 1600.