Ebooks from the library

Just checked out my first Kindle book from my local library!

It works through a site called Overdrive.com, and you link your public library account to it so you can borrow e-books. It works on many devices, and was easier to set up than I thought.

I plan on using this a lot, and it’s embarrassing that it took me this long.

The Typo Half-Life Rule and the Quantum Typo

I wrote a post a while back on the physics of “Editing Half-Lives and the Decay of Typographical Particles”

Basically the theory goes, if you’re editing a manuscript and find half the typos in the first edit, the next time around you won’t get them all, just around half the ones that are left. Third time, half again. And so on.

At some point you think you’ve reached the end of this, since of course you can’t have half a typo, and so it’s off to the publisher.

But theoretical writing physics has advanced!

It turns out that at the end of the editing sequence, there will always be one typo left that nobody at all will find.

It can’t be observed, but the new equations say it’s in there somewhere. It’s a quantum thing.