Items of note, where wrongs of the world are at least temporarily righted.
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Copy-editing vigilantes strike Pratt Institute
In the sculpture park at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, one of the nation’s oldest art schools, a clandestine struggle is under way — over grammar. In recent months, a vandal (or team of vandals) has used permanent markers to correct grammar and punctuation mistakes on the informational placards near the sculptures.
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They’ve had trouble getting the facts right on Anne Bronte’s grave for quite some time.
Anne, who wrote Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, died in Scarborough in 1849 after succumbing to tuberculosis at the age of 29. But her headstone in St Mary’s Churchyard gave her age as 28. Anne’s original gravestone was refaced three years after her death, when Charlotte returned to discover five errors on it. The other mistakes were corrected but the age was not.
“The ropes we use in modern climbing are dynamic–they stretch, which reduces the force,” said Mills. “The ropes [the Wildlings] are using are completely static with no give, so the instantaneous impact force of someone taking a vertical fall would be huge!” Since the force of the fall is concentrated at a single moment, rather than distributed more gradually by rope stretch, there’s also a good chance that the impact could snap this type of rope entirely.
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New Yorker piece on the AP Twitter hack; both the fake story amd the Dow drop it caused were quickly corrected. Bonus for quoting Virgil.
It was the equivalent of giving the town rumormonger a loudspeaker (for that’s all this is, and it’s older than Virgil, who wrote, “Fama volat” (“Rumor has wings”), never faster than when they went digital). High-frequency trading was the cause of the 2010 flash crash. It’s long been about five steps ahead of the regulators, in spite of the best efforts of some in Washington. Dodd-Frank didn’t come to terms with high-frequency trading, and the S.E.C., while making noises for several years about trying to cast some light on the so-called “dark pools” of liquidity in markets far from the public exchanges, keeps falling further behind.
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A cafe macchiato is, literally, a coffee stained with milk. But add liqueur, sambuca maybe, or grappa, and you have what the Italians call a corrected coffee, "caffe coretto." I had one in Spoleto and can’t get it corrected out of mind. What one finds is what this guy in a travel-Italy-forum said:
Even the absolute worst barista in Italy knows how to make an espresso way better than Starbucks. There is a bar every 100 yards everywhere.
I think I met him today, in Terontolo–ashes in the spritz, for example–but its true; its hard to have a bad cup of coffee in Italy. I have been partial to the cappuccino scuro, meaning dark, meaning double.