Saturday, November 03, 2007
Layers of editors and fact checkers...
New York Times columnist Gail Collins devoted her column this morning to mocking opponents of the Law of the Sea Treaty. There is at least a little evidence, however, that her knowledge of the LOST (or LOSC, as she would have you write it) was, er, hastily assembled. I loved this bit, which slipped by the NYT's layers of editors and fact checkers:
Ronald Reagan rejected it because he was worried about deep sea mining rights — manganese module mining to be exact.
Happily, that’s no longer an issue because:
a) The United Nations fixed the part Reagan had a problem with.
b) Manganese modules not quite as hot an item as they were when disco ruled.
They're manganese nodules, not modules.
Now, typos, gaps in reasoning, and rank errors are rife on this blog, and will continue to be as long as I'm in charge. But I have no ex ante editor (however many ex post editors I have among my readers), and Gail Collins does. Since "manganese modules" appeared twice, rather than once, we cannot escape wondering whether Ms. Collins or her editor actually knew what the heck she was writing about.
4 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Sat Nov 03, 11:07:00 PM:
last two decades of the 20th century saw a glut of nickel production
Which is why nickel is over $13/lb on the London Metal Exchange right now ;->
I sold off a bunch of nickel we had out in the barn for years when the price shot up over $2/lb a few years ago and though I was making out like a bandit.
At $13/lb for nickel and well over $.30/lb for manganese I'll be a lot of people are starting to look at those nodules with a lot more interest these days. The PRC's industrial development has driven world metal market nuts the past few years.
As well as not knowing the difference between a nodule and a module, Collins apparently hasn't checked any metal prices recently.
By Dawnfire82, at
Sun Nov 04, 04:51:00 PM:
"Since "manganese modules" appeared twice, rather than once, we cannot escape wondering whether Ms. Collins or her editor actually knew what the heck she was writing about."
Well of course not. They're columnists, not industrial professionals. They specialize only in criticizing and advocating.
By 
, at
Sun Nov 04, 10:26:00 PM:
Looks like the NEW YORK SLIMES is in favor of BIG BROTHER just like all these liberal left-wing news rags
By , at
Thu Nov 08, 01:27:00 AM:
Perhaps Gail Collins et al. at the NYT can be given some slack given the following:
If you check out:
http://www.aars-acrs.org/acrs/proceeding/ACRS1992/Papers/PS392-10.htm
you will find a rather serious engineering poster co-authored by two researchers from the Metal Mining Agency of Japan and Sanyo Techno Marine, Inc. This paper also includes the typo that Ms. Collins featured, i.e., typing "modules" when she meant "nodules."
As the two keys "n" and "m" are adjacent on the keyboard lowest letter row on the keyboard and these two letters are almost identical phonemes, the mistake seems pardonable.
