OCR schmOCR

A letter to this month's CAM started:

I’d like to nominate CAM 96 for an ‘understatement of the year’ award. On page 26, Professor Suchitra Sebastian is quoted as saying a milligram of these materials contains 10^²³ electrons

After a certain amount of egg-sucking advice (presumably aimed at grandmothers who don't know what  10²³ means) the writer went on to point out that the editor had made a mistake:

The editor apparently read it as 1,023 and put “more than a thousand”, but a hundred sextillion is indeed more than a thousand – in fact it is a hundred quintillion times as much.

<autobiographical-note>
To save time I keep these magazines (and others, to MrsK's dismay) until the following number comes. Then I read the letters in the latest one, to find out which articles in the old one are worth reading.
</autobiographical-note>

The letter confused me: the quoted text said 10²³, and the editor had presumably seen that; so where was the mistake? When I looked at last month's CAM it became clear. Someone had pulled out a bit of text, summarized it, and set it in a larger font – a pull-out quote. I would expect a sub-editor to do that; hence my confusion. Though in a small office who knows what depths an editor must stoop to?

The text was this:

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains 10²³ electrons and every one of them is interacting with every other one. It is similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows, where collectively they shape-shift and a new form emerges. That potential for completely unimagined forms of physics to emerge is what makes it so exciting.

The pull-out quote was this: 

We understand how a single electron behaves, but a milligram of these materials contains more than a thousand every one interacting with every other one...

But the editor (or whoever) was only partly to blame, as I found when I took a photo of the article, and got Google Lens to copy the text. Because of the limitations of the (otherwise amazingly accurate) OCR transcription, the superscript ²³ was read as 23 making the figure 1023. When working against the clock it would be easy not to stop and think 'Hey, that doesn't make sense; they're jolly small...'. It doesn't take an innumerate arts graduate (the sort of ignoramus who needs to be told that 10²³  "is read as ‘ten to the twenty three’ ", as the letter-writer helpfully explains) to make that sort of slip.

But there is a nit to be picked, one I almost missed, as the image is so descriptive:

...similar to the collective behaviour you see in murmurations of swallows

A beautiful and persuasive image; except that the swallows should have been starlings, the only birds that behave like this, according to this website:

Starlings

Starling murmuration is a fascinating natural phenomenon that is a wonder to behold. The beautiful sight of them flocking and flying in perfect formation is something you don’t forget in a hurry once you’ve seen it, but arguably, the most interesting fact about murmuration is that starlings are the only species of birds who do it. 

How's that for nit-picking? 

In passing

Radio 3's 'Composer of the Week' last week  was César Franck. I was listening ...

<tangent>
Among the many things I dislike about BBC Sounds is that it incontinently splurges out whole series at one swell foop, cluttering up the view of that week's listening, with the result that I oftem find myself listening to live radio and have to change channels when something comes up on the broadcast schedule that I've already heard asynchronously. (The number of Christmas Specials I've already heard is ridiculous.)

The answer, of courese, is to use another app with a more manageable interface – but that involves the converse problem: topical shows become available a month after broadcast.
</tangent>

...on Friday, and learnt that Franck was hurt in a traffic accident involving "a horse-drawn bus". For a moment I was surprised that the presenter resisted the temptation to point out that this sort of carriage with benches was called a char-à-bancs, the source of the English "charabanc" (with the French banc becoming "bang"  – a different [more English] sort of nasal a)...

<tangent>

On the subject of banks, a guest on a recent episode of Tim Harford's Understand the Econmy pointed out that banks (the financial sort) took their name from an obvious (now I think of it) physical object. Those money-lenders  in Lombardy (or wherever) used to offer their services in the open air, on benches.

</tangent>

...Then I realized that the presenter probably didn't know, if he read the report in translation.

Tha's all for today.

b