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Old 12-09-20, 06:16 PM
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jonwvara 
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I didn't mention this earlier, but the equation of time is a sore subject with me. I once wrote a fairly long article about it for Yankee Magazine--they assigned the piece to me, for some reason. This was probably sometime in the early 90s. In addition to some other research, I spent an hour on the phone with an expert from the US Naval Observatory in Washington, and thought I understood it all. Based on my copious notes, I wrote the article, which appeared in the magazine some months later.

A few days after the article came out, I got a call from my editor there, a nice guy named Tim Clark. He said that they'd received a letter from someone claiming that my explanation was completely, ludicrously wrong. "What do you think?" he asked me. "Is the guy just a crank?"
I replied that I was pretty confident about my research, and that the writer probably was a crank. "Okay," Tim said.

A few days later, I got another call from Tim, saying, in essence, okay, we have a whole pile of those letters now--I think we have a problem.

Holy crap! I wrote back to Tim and told him I'd figure out where I'd gone wrong and write a correction and send it in for them to run in the letters column. "Nah," he said, "don't worry, I'll take care of it."

The next month, the magazine ran a selection of the letters taking me to task for being a moron. At the end of them, Tim added a little editor's note in italics, thusly: This is why we usually don't assign these kinds of articles to English majors.

Man, talk about getting thrown under the bus! It hurt, especially because I never was an English major. I briefly considered writing a sharp note pointing out that I did not, in fact, have a college degree of any kind, but then thought the better of it.

At least I deserved to get thrown under the bus. The whole thing was actually kind of a useful learning experience about incorrectly interpreting information in light of what you mistakenly think you already know, and piling error on top of error.

Of course, I still do that pretty often--but maybe not quite often as I might have.

EDIT: After reading back a couple of posts, I can see that I should have subcontracted that story to conspiratemus1.
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