Fineprint.
Better disclaimers than my own. Damn.
Feast Eve of St. Jonas
Monday was the Feast Eve of St. Jonas, the patron saint of horticulturists. I spend a lot of time growing a website, tending it as if it were garden. Which segued into an exchange of e-mail with a “scientist and student of astrology” correspondent.
Turns out, in my archives, from August of 1996, the monthly column started with an apparently erroneous quote attributed to Einstein.
I’m trying to remember, but I seem to recall I snagged that quote from an online discussion group. After much fire, I’m pretty sure the quote was not authenticated, you know, along the lines of “42% of statistics are made up.” Urban Myth.
From my usage logs, I don’t even remember that page being crawled by any of the search engines, not in recent memory. While it’s not in the current “bottom ten” (least accessed pages), it’s not far from the bottom – along with the other archives.
Doesn’t matter much to me. I’ve found that my current archive, almost covers a decade, is good as I use it as a reference point. I always aim for “no repeats,” and it’s the easiest way to keep that material around. Plus, I see a logical and determined growth pattern, and I like that.
But the question that was posited, should I go back and change that line to indicate that I was working with erroneous data? A fake quote?
I’ve caught another astrologer in a number of technical errors, but I don’t make an issue of it. Then there’s the whole “interpretation” portion of reading just what the planets portend. That’s highly subjective.
I’ve been trying to verify a particular Shakespeare quote, and I regret that I haven’t had to the time to dig around in a text to find the correct attribution. A cursory web search turned up no source. I would never use an incorrect literature quote. However, at least at the time, I apparently did use an incorrect Einstein quote. A fiction, fable, a fever dream from a mad man.
But the real question is, should I take the time to dig around on my own hard drive, find the old text file, change it, and then post the updated material from 5 years ago?
It’s an old archive, it’s about 17 clicks deep into the site, and it’s hard to find. Change it to reflect current scholarship? Then I’d have to correct the non-ASCII characters, and update the html code, and so on. Wow, that’s a lot of work.
In one of my replies, though, I did come up with some new terms, or expressions I’ve never used before. I usually piss off the “fundamentalist astrologers,” the right wing. And I’m a little too realistic for the “woo-woo” Leftist ones, too.
Fundamentalist astrologers. That scares me. That’s something I would change.
