A trio of absurd corrections from the NY Times come from Virginia Postrel and Glenn Reynolds.

First, from Reynolds, a correction that ran yesterday setting the record straight on an item from eight years ago:

An article on Nov. 28, 1994, about the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and his home in Sri Lanka misstated the surname of a University of Tennessee law professor who nominated the writer that year for the Nobel Peace Prize, for his humanist approach to technology. The professor is Glenn Harlan Reynolds, not Roberts. A reader recently brought the error to The Times’s attention.

Then, a Reynolds reader pointed out another correction that ran 49 years late:

In 1919, Goddard wrote a scientific article, “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” describing a high-altitude rocket; this ground-breaking article was published in a Smithsonian report. Misunderstanding the article completely, the New York Times newspaper ridiculed Goddard in a Jan. 13, 1920, editorial, stating that space travel was impossible, and that Goddard “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.” They stated that rocket thrust would not work in a vacuum, apparently believing that Newton’s Third Law (that every force has an equal and opposite reaction) was not valid in space. The NY Times did not print a retraction until 3 days before men landed on the moon (p. 43, July 17, 1969).

Finally, Postrel finds this really amusing correction, which ran this week:

An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), “Beginning Again,” by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.

That last sentence is a keeper.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 17th, 2002 at 5:49 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.