December 31, 2005
an appropriate error:
Anna Airoldi, the translator of Mind Hacks into Italian has noticed a fantastic error in the published book. She writes
(170) 1st paragraph of "How it works"; I'm not entirely sure this is a real typo, considering the topic discussed in the paragraph, but "conservations" shouldn't just be "conversations"?
She's absolutely right - it should be 'conversations' not 'conservations'. But although it is an error, in this case it is an appropriate error, because it appears in Hack #52 'Robust Processing Using Parallelism' which discusses how we can read errorful or ambiguous sentences using multiple interacting levels of information to construct meaning. Normally this is a good thing, but it appears that in this particular instance the meaning was so obvious that our normally diligent editing process didn't spot the mistake (my mistake in origin, incidentally)!
