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You laughed at the correction we posted yesterday, but now we have the full story. The author of the New York Times article, Amy Harmon, explained how it all came about.
The Times’ rule is, we correct anything that is wrong, no matter how small or seemingly silly. And I don’t know any of my colleagues who would want to do differently. I hate to get any detail wrong, and when I do, I often have a moment of fantasizing about just letting it slip. But as I sat there that morning, kicking myself for a relatively small mistake that marred a story I had poured my heart into, it seemed so much worse to let it stand. Not correcting it would have undermined the credibility of the other 5,011 words of the story – at least for “My Little Pony” fans. And I think we have seen now that they are not an obsessive subculture to be taken lightly.
Another part of the Times’ corrections policy, which arose after the awfulness of Jayson Blair, is that each correction is entered in a tracking system that includes who was responsible, and an explanation of how the error came to be.
She tells how the error came to the newspaper’s attention, how important it turned out to be in the context of the article, and her explanation for it. Link -via Metafilter
Here’s another contender for the title of coolest error page. The site Nosh is about food, but the video on its 404 page is about… a dead page, of course. Link -via reddit
People make mistakes all the time. Some, however, are bigger than others. Here are some cases where a simple misspelling, punctuation error, or forgetfulness cost someone millions of dollars.
Rogers Communications thought they had an ironclad five year contract with Aliant. However Aliant, being the grammar police that they are, saw it differently. They cited this sentence: The agreement “shall continue in force for a period of five years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five-year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.” Had the second comma not been there, Aliant would have had to honor the first five years of the contract before anything could be changed. But because of the comma, Aliant cancelled it early and almost tripled their prices, costing Rogers Communications $2.13 million.
From the Upcoming 
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What’s up with Google? Has anyone else seen this? Every single search I do on Google now returns "This site may harm your computer," even when I search for … Google!
Update: Seems like this bug was fixed already! Phew!
Some of you might remember the phone order cake mishap post here at Neatorama. Obviously, ordering your cake online won’t guarantee that things will be any better.
