Baffling Times correction
The article is "One Find, Two Astronomers: An Ethical Brawl", and it's by Dennis Overbye. You know, Dennis Overbye, Times science writer since before M1 supernovaed, the Dennis Overbye that this bio says "studied physics at MIT". The name that is as familiar to us Times science section readers as John Updike is to us New Yorker readers.
The article is interesting, about alleged professional impropriety bordering upon fraud amongst astronomers, but half-way through it says this:
Dr. Pogge was able to trace the computers through the so-called IPP numbers, which the Internet assigns to each computer on it. Those numbers eventually led him to the Web site of the Andalusian Institute. Dr. Pogge said he gasped out loud when it popped up.
Which made me say, "Huh. IPP numbers. That's odd. What does the other P stand for?"
At the bottom of the article is the following:
Correction: Sept. 14, 2005, Wednesday: An article in Science Times yesterday about a dispute between astronomers over credit for the discovery of 2003 EL61, a large icy object in the outer solar system, misstated the term for the identification number assigned by the Internet to every computer. The number, by which American astronomers were able to trace a Spanish group's visits to their Web site before the discovery was announced, is called an IP address (for "Internet protocol"), not IPP numbers.
How does Dennis Overbye not know what an IP address is?
Ghost writing? Moonshine? Willful ignorance? Or further evidence that physicists live on Mars? (Funding is more plentiful there.)
2 Comments:
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Seriously, though, Mr. Overbye may have made an honest typo, or may have typed "IP" only to have it "corrected" to read "IPP" by a misconfigured MS Word spellchecker. Or it may have been a copy editor's mistake. I've also noticed when I type in MS Word that I get an unusual number of repeated letters. This doesn't happen when I type in Open Office. Who knows. Overbye may not have even written the article. It might be the work of some shadowy freelancer.
That's what I meant by the "ghost writing" bit, which is odd but plausible. As far as typos, the error is greater than a single misplaced character. "IPP numbers" is a far typographic cry from "IP address" (What's the Hamming distance between them?), and in this case, the author of the article took the time to include the patronizing "so-called IPP numbers" language, which suggests that he or she had thought at length about the concept of "IPP numbers", considered their level of understandability with respect to the Science Times's target audience, and opted to allow the dullard reader an out by telling them that, jargony though it may be, you don't really need to know that much about "IPP numbers", just that "the Internet" "assigns" them to you.
The problem being, of course, that the considered concept in this case doesn't exist.
Maybe the Times is assuming it's writing to people who think that "the Internet" lives under the big blue lowercase "e" button on their computer's desktop.
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