Mistakes I've Made In Life

When doing a painting job, don't think you can put down masking tape one day and then come back and do the actual painting a few days later. I tried this and found the tape aged very quickly. Even though it superficially looked okay, the tape that had been in place for a few days had become fragile and in some places allowed paint to seep through. Then when I removed the old tape it left a significant residue. Much better to put the tape on right before the paint job and take it off right after.
Don't buy the very cheapest kind of bristle brushes. They shed bristles into the paint and are worse than useless. Cheap foam brushes are better although they too tend to fall apart after an hour's use.

Interesting Mistakes in Literature

Aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus.
(Sometimes even good Homer nods.)

Greg Egan
George Bernard Shaw
Jules Verne

Greg Egan

I thought of space probes on slingshot orbits to Venus via Jupiter. It was as if we'd had to take the long way around to build up enough velocity - as if Stateless was moving too fast to be approached any other way.
Distress
Venus and Jupiter are probably transposed here. The space probe Galileo traveled to Jupiter with a slingshot around Venus, but to do it the other way, starting from Earth, makes no sense.

George Bernard Shaw

DON JUAN: You forget that brainless magnificence of body has been tried. Things immeasurably greater than man in every respect but brain have existed and perished. The megatherium, the ichthyosaurus have paced the earth with seven-league steps and hidden the day with cloud vast wings. Where are they now?
Don Juan in Hell (from Man and Superman)
The ichthyosaurus was an aquatic reptile strongly resembling a fish, and thus neither paced the earth nor flew. The megatherium was a elephant-sized ground sloth, also noted for its lack of wings.

Jules Verne

"So, my worthy harpooner, if a vertebrate several hundred yards long and with a proportionate width, the surface of whose body therefore consists of millions of square inches, can live at such depths, the pressure it can stand would amount to billions and billions of pounds. How enormous must be the power of resistance of its bone structure and the strength of its organism to be able to bear such pressure!"
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Here and elsewhere, Verne multiplies ambient pressure by the total surface area of a fish (or submarine) to get a "pressure" which is not pressure but a rather meaningless quantity with the dimensions of force. It also does not follow, as Verne seems to think, that a fish at high pressure must be prodigiously strong in order to survive or move.

"The heat in the inner bowels of the globe is cooling, and the temperature of its various strata is decreasing appreciably every century. This will eventually be a calamity to the earth, for this heat is the very life of our planet."
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
The total heat energy reaching the Earth's surface from the interior is about 10^28 ergs in one year [source: Earth, F. Press and R. Siever, 1982]. By comparison the total solar radiation falling on the earth in one year is about 5 times 10^31 ergs per year, or 5000 times greater. So even if the interior of the earth became completely cold, the temperature at the surface would probably not change by more than a fraction of a degree, and most life would continue unaffected. There would be no more volcanic eruptions and I guess the continents would stop drifting. I guess bacteria living in volcanic vents might suffer.

Back to Richard's information page.