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Precise
Time technicians at the
National Institute of Standards & Technology (Formerly the National Bureau
of Standards) set a new level of precision in 1949 by inventing the atomic
clock. It counted the oscillations of the nitrogen atom in an ammonia
molecule--and was reliable to within one second in three years. More recently
NIST switched to an atomic clock based on the vibrations of cesium atoms. It
will need 300
000 years to gain or lose a single second. But NIST scientists
are working on a still-better model: a single mercury ion will be trapped in a
vacuum by laser beams and cooled to its lowest possible energy level. The
atom's oscillations will then be so stable that the new timepiece should be
accurate to within one second in 10 billion years--the total life span of stars
similar to our sun.── Business Week
reported in Resource
Mar/April
1990.
Maria Fedorovna
the
empress of Russia and wife of Czar Alexander III
was known for her
philanthropy. She once saved a prisoner from exile in Siberia by transposing a
single comma in a warrant signed by Alexander. The czar had written:
"Pardon impossible
to be sent to Siberia." After Maria's
intervention
the note read: "Pardon
impossible to be sent to
Siberia." The prisoner was eventually released. ── Today in the Word
July 14
1993.
Once when President
Franklin D. Roosevelt was preparing a speech
he needed some economic
statistics to back up a point he was trying to make. His advisers said it would
take six months to get accurate figures. "In that case
I'll just use
these rough estimates
" FDR said
and he wrote down some numbers in his
text. "They're reasonable figures and they support my point.
"Besides
" he added as an afterthought
"it will keep my critics
busy for at least six month just to prove me wrong." ── Bits & Pieces
June 25
1992.
In the New York Times
last year: "The 'Candidates on Television' listing yesterday misspelled
the name of the Vice President in some editions. It is Quayle
not Quale. The Times
regrets the error." ── Reader's
Digest.
Accuracy is the twin
brother of honesty; inaccuracy of dishonesty.── Charles
Simmons.
If 99.9 percent is good
enough
then...
- Two million documents
will be lost by the IRS this year.
- 811
000 faulty rolls of 35mm film will be loaded this year.
- 22
000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next 60
minutes.
- 1
314 phone calls will be misplaced by telecommunication services every
minute.
- 12 babies will be given to the wrong parents each day.
- 268
500 defective tires will be shipped this year.
- 14
208 defective personal computers will be shipped this year.
- 103
260 income tax returns will be process incorrectly this year.
- 2
488
200 books will be shipped in the next 12 months with the wrong cover.
- 5
517
200 cases of soft drinks produced in the next 12 months will be flatter
than a bad tire.
- Two plane landings daily at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago will be
unsafe.
- 3
056 copies of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal will be missing one of the
three sections.
- 18
322 pieces of mail will be mishandled in the next hour.
- 291 pacemaker operations will be performed incorrectly this year.
- 880
000 credit cards in circulation will turn out to have incorrect
cardholder information on their magnetic strips.
- $9
690 will be spent today
tomorrow
next Thursday
and every day in the
future on defective
often unsafe sporting equipment.
- 55 malfunction automatic teller machines will be installed in the next 12
months.
- 20
000 incorrect drug prescriptions will be written in the next 12 months.
- 114
500 mismatched pairs of shoes will be shipped this year.
- $761
900 will be spent in the next 12 months on tapes and compact discs that
won't play.
- 107 incorrect medical procedures will be performed by the end of the day
today.
- 315 entries in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English
Language will turn out to be misspelled.
── InSight
Syncrude
Canada Ltd.
Communications Division Communicator
p. 6.
Alexander
Woollcott: In matters of speech
it's not elegance that interest me but
exactness. Precision. Surgical precision. Let me give an illustration--in the
pattern of the old story about Noah Webster
the man who wrote the dictionary.
Of him it used to be told that his wife once caught him in the pantry in the
act of kissing the cook. "Why
Mr. Webster
" she said
"I'm
surprised." "No
my dear
" he replied. "I'm surprised'
you're amazed."
Howard
Teichmann
Smart Aleck.
On
Jan 25
1990
Avianca Flight 52 from Colombia crashed just 15 miles short of
New York's Kennedy International Airport
killing 73 passengers. Reason: The
plane just ran out of gas. Under international regulations
an airliner must
carry enough fuel to reach its destination as well as its assigned alternate
plus enough extra to handle at least 45 minutes of delays. Due to low fuel
condition
the Avianca pilots had requested "priority" (not
"emergency") landing. Because the exact word "emergency"
was not used
and due to heavy traffic and bad weather conditions
the
ill-fated plane was placed on a holding pattern...until it simply ran out of
gas.
Source
Unknown.