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I feel your pain, literally, for my profession is as a Technical Writer who reads and edits technical enginering documents along with manufacturing specifications, test plans, test reports, and FAA certification documents. We don’t write them, but we read through them, and doing the stuff that is easy for us, but difficult for authors, adhering to our internal Style Guide. We use MS Word as everyone is capable of -using- it, but we can’t expect authors to -master- it. That is our job. So, we have extremely smart and capable authors in their fields, but not Word masters. Clean up and fixing errors is just what we do. As I emphasized to interviewees, tedious and repetitive are us. If you can’t do that, this is not a job for you. Fixing hundreds of caption numbers and the cross references to them, fixing page numbering and much, much more. We have a checklist that has hundreds of specific items to check in each document. And we have various levels of checks, along with several types of documents that have varying types of content. And on top of all that Editorial Review, we have a Last Look, another review before releasing, and the document control people also check certain things. And yet, when we get a review back from the regulators, there are errors found, and even occasionally one that got past us that we should have caught.
(All of us Europeans are just keeping quiet, and thinking smug metric thoughts 😉
Before you get to smug just remember it hurts more getting a foot up your ass than meter.
We have a 2.5 year old. Sign up for the “Moms On Call” guide for sleep training. Our kid has slept through the night from about 3 months on. 12 straight hours last night despite the dogs getting me up several times to go out. Total life-changer, we got away from it and it started taking over an hour to get him sleep recently so we re-upped a few weeks ago for advice and now it’s a 15min process. I’d add they’re very responsive if you have questions or problems you run into.
David my man as a manager of over 4 decades 30 years in newspapers, none in editorial, may I suggest a few points.
1. In some you wrote the article, no writer should edit their own columns. As such don’t feel you can’t toss Matt under the bus for not catching the errors he should be editing.
2. The whole mm. Mil etc can be written off to the fact of auto correct. Hell everything nowadays is autocorrect and sometimes they don’t even ask. I believe you can rewrite autocorrect rules for industry specific regular errors. I am 60+ so don’t ask me how.
3. I have read driving a kid who won’t sleep in a car will get the child to sleep. Drive many cars and write how effective they are at getting the kid to sleep. This is God’s work. Every thing else will be forgiven.
As a childless person, I’ve come to the opinion that the sleep deprivation is an evolutionary adaptation, because if any of y’all actually remembered the first couple months clearly, our species would’ve died out a million years ago.
(DT: all is forgiven, obviously. You all clearly care about this site – we’re not worried about you going Herb on us. Take care of the boy, he’s the future.)
By far the most disturbing thing here is the topshot, where little Delmar appears to have two rows of bottom teeth.
Honestly, I’ve been wanting to replace that baby mouth anyway. The esophagus, when you imagine where it should be, is completely in the wrong place. And for sure, those reflections on the tongue that look like teeth are freaky!
That pic of the kid reminds me of the movie Alien.
Out of respect and deference to NHRN, I will refrain from further comment.
For now.
David, I have two things for you to consider:
1) A tiny human completely rewrites your life. There are going to be mistakes along the way. As you said we’re all human and these mistakes don’t define you as a professional. There is a difference between an honest mistake, even when facts are concerned, versus an intentional mishandling of information.
2) Don’t forget about NASA’s little gaff when the Mars Climate Orbiter crashed. Apparently mixing SAE and metric measurements in a guidance system are catastrophic. Teams of engineers missed that one.
At the end of the day, this isn’t the lightning bolt site. We’re not here to berate authors and look for every flaw. This is the accepting culture you created. This is why most of us are here.
I’ll happily forgive all these if you all can start using “forgo” to mean “do without” instead of the extremely questionable “forego.”
“Fore” in forego means before.
I’d like to add that cache is not a thing when referring to the desirability or status of a given item or brand.
The word you are looking for is cachet.
Yes!!
DT, this is an opportunity to add some system to process unit conversion – maybe some regex in Python, if the mainframe even runs it?
It would add even more work revising it (albeit just a little, maybe mark the additions in red), but would help out us natives of NotUSA. Release early on members area and use us as test subjects!
You know what? If you offer a beta program for spotting typos and mistakes, I bet some od us (me included) would gladly join.
Wholeheartedly support inserting Terry Gilliam animation where ever inappropriate. Best to go full Monty with Python.
I was thinking more along the lines of renaming the YouTube channel to “Ethel the Frog”, but that should also work.
*sees top shot*
I knew Delmar (NHRN) would take after his Dad!
Also, I blame the mm thing on the cursed 10mm socket
When my daughter was a baby I unknowingly showed up to work in a customer-facing job with spit up on my shirt multiple times. You do the best you can while operating on lost sleep and, in your case, the anxiety of never having done any of this before. First time parenting involves a lot of trial by error.
It’s survival mode until that baby starts sleeping through the night. Pull that card constantly and shamelessly. Anyone who’s a parent gets it, and anyone who’s not hasn’t earned the right to an opinion on the matter.
Look. I’ve read the article, as well as the articles in question, and I think I have a pretty good reasoning:
This is all Matt’s fault. Maybe a little bit of Torch’s.
If they hadn’t introduced you to the woman of your dreams, if they hadn’t been ride-or-die by your side getting the Autopian off the ground, if they hadn’t poured their hearts and souls into seeing this dream through, none of these typos would have happened.
So yeah. Blame those guys.
(I really wanted to leave it at “it’s Matt’s fault” but I caved to the “but this could be really sweet if you were a not-jerk for 30 seconds” angle. Lousy emotion chip)
I hate that we use the term “mil” for a “thousandth” rather than a millionth. Why don’t we call it a “thou”?
Oh sure, come into the comments all holier-than-mil why doncha
Manufacturing engineer here. In my shop, when we are in imperial, we absolutely say thou. “What’s the tolerance on that? Plus/minus 5 thou” etc. After thousandths is tenths (.0001), and then ten millionths (.000010).
But for whatever reason by the time you get down to ten millionths you usually start going by micron, which is .001 mm, or 39 ten millionths (.000039).
We typically use thous and tenths in our aerospace manufacturing plant, unless it is electronics, then it’s mills.
Even weirder, for angles we use degrees-minutes-seconds, except when we use mil as 1/6400 of 360 degrees.
I think it’s a per-industry thing. I’ve seen “thou” used a lot in different contexts (e.g. shims).
‘Mil’ in this context is from the Latin ‘mille’ which means one thousand, which became the SI prefix milli- meaning ‘thousandth‘.
A better question is why ‘million’ means 1,000,000.
What’s the Autopian parental leave policy?
You’re asking if the guy who refused to hire a couple guys to schlep his stuff across LA would step back for a few weeks to allow someone else to edit?!?
I took 2 weeks off.
Wow – Look at Matt and Thomas diving on grenades for the Boss!
Infant-Induced Sleep Deprivation (IISD) is the real deal, David and you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. If we didn’t love you, we wouldn’t point these things out, but we know you have high standards and that you’d want to know so you could correct these minor mistakes. If spelling and grammar mistakes were de rigueur for this site, we’d just ignore them. Take this as a high compliment on your normally strict standards.
Also – treasure these moments with your little one – they don’t last long! Kids grow up SO fast that you won’t believe it. All my kids are in their 30’s now, but I still remember those hazy days, and especially the terror and awe that we experienced when bringing our first little dude home from the hospital. We couldn’t believe that ostensibly responsible doctors and nurses would actually let us take this little miracle home with us! We had no idea what we were doing! By the 4th one, things were much more relaxed, but that first kid is a life-changer for sure.
As someone who has muddled my way through baby induced sleep deprivation while working in a no room for error industry I wish I could say it gets easier, and in some ways it does, but really it comes down to adjusting to your “new normal”. We also rely on others to double check our work and sometimes you’ve just got to swallow your pride and admit/correct mistakes, we’re all human. You will eventually get more sleep but there will be new and exciting challenges that await at every turn. In the moment they can sometimes be stressful and frustrating, but in hindsight they’ll mark growing milestones and you will probably look back and miss those times, even if they had you pulling your hair out at the time.
meh, none of this is as annoying as commenters pointing out every minor typo/mistake
You didn’t capitalize “meh” or put a period at the end of your comment.
*You’re. Gotta keep the wrong correcting train goin’!
Muphry’s Law strikes again!
Murphy’s* but I bet you did that on purpose.
Actually, Muphry’s Law is different from Murphy’s Law. It states that any comment correcting spelling or grammar will itself have a spelling or grammar mistake in it. 🙂
Foiled again!
It’s recommended to use ‘ in this case, i.e. “commenters’ pointing out…”
Wouldn’t that indicate a possessive? In this case the commentors are doing a thing (pointing out errors), not owning something.
(US English is different enough from regular English that I’m not sure)
It’s the gerund form. It’s falling out of favour, but it’s the traditional construction.
E.g. “he felt that my arguing with my mom was pointless”
David, I hate to break it to you but dear sleeping through the night now is a trap, the 4 month old sleep regression will hit you and you will not know what’s up or down!
From the guy rocking his 18 month old back to sleep for the second time this night
Truth!
Another trap is when I was a zombie with my 3 week old and the pediatrician informed us the definition of “sleeps through the night” for a baby is “sleeps six consecutive hours”.
Please use this at some point this for an actual RSVP. 🙂
Re: the 10mm vs 10mil debate – stuff happens, and people can be their own worst critics. You – individually and collectively – want to do a good job and you collaborate to make that happen. As you indicated, mensches to the last.
I’m more concerned about Matt’s assertion that 1cm = 1/3″ 😮
I think that was me, but 1/2.54 =0.394, which is much closer to 0.333 than it is to 0.25, so I’ll stand by it.
No, it was not you.
And I don’t see where anyone [else] mentioned 0.25.
Yeah, it was: https://www.theautopian.com/we-protected-half-of-our-100000-mile-nissan-murano-crosscabriolet-and-now-were-going-to-torture-it/#comment-659822
I thought someone else said something about 1 cm being a quarter inch, but you’re right, I can’t find any such comment.
I. Was. Not. Talking. About. You.
Scroll up on this page and look at the Slack image just below the ‘NAKED! – XPEL’ image. There you will see MATT indicating that 1cm = 1/3 of an inch. This is what I was referencing when I said “Matt’s assertion”.
If I had been talking about you, I would have said “Hautewheels’ assertion”. This is not rocket surgery. 🙂
Ha ha – maybe not intentionally, but if you look closely, you’ll see that Matt was directly quoting the post that I made. That was a direct copy/paste of my post 🙂
Also, there’s nothing wrong with the statement that 1 cm is 1/3 of an inch. That’s an approximation, of course, and it’s not as close as 2/5 or 10/25 or 400/1000, but for a quick, easy fractional equivalence, it’s pretty close.
Anyone else seriously weirded out by the topshot? Stick with the smiley face emoji, it’s simple and avoids the Uncanny Valley.
Yeah, it’s kind of f’ed up.
It also avoids Baby Delmar looking unfortunately more like comedian Joe List than his own father.
Newest addition to the Tracy household makes upsetting noises, leaks fluid, requires constant care. Also there’s a new baby.
Also, exhaust leaks=exhaustion
I feel the angst with the mm vs mil error. It might be an engineer thing as I was completely berated and dressed down by a former professor in front of the whole class for being careless with units. To this day I probably have ptsd and excessive ocd when it comes to unit consistency.
Yessir. As I always tell my chemistry students: “Numbers without the correct units are meaningless at best and misleading at worst”. (I know, I know, there are a few exceptions to this, like activity coefficients, etc., but it’s usually true.)
I also have a problem with OCD. Specifically, it’s that the letters aren’t alphabetized.
That prof was a jerk. You don’t berate people publicly. It’s cruel.
I always find it best to criticize people behind their backs instead.
I forgive all these errors. It is one aspect that proves this is a human organization. I’d be less happy if we were talking about errors that might cost lives or something truly serious. Not that this isn’t a serious organization, but you know… Besides, how should I think about all my mistakes when I have had no children to blame.
Signed,
Lapsed physicist (retired)
Freddy (not my real name)
Agreed, and I do like these little glimpses behind the scenes. What a great team of people trying to bring us the best content!
“My child is seven weeks old, he cries constantly”
Oh you think he cries a lot now?
Just wait till he has to give up his rust bucket “Holy Grail” for *REASONS!*
;p
Wait until you ask him to take out the garbage.
In the unlikely event that ever happens, he’ll still have to be 18 for the license he needs for the tow truck to haul it away.
Or asks for the keys to the car and is told “No”.