This is an actual New York Times correction, which ran yesterday:
An article on Jan. 16 about drilling for oil off the coast of Angola erroneously reported a story about cows falling from planes, as an example of risks in any engineering endeavor.No cows, smuggled or otherwise, ever fell from a plane into a Japanese fishing rig. The story is an urban legend, and versions of it have been reported in Scotland, Germany, Russia and other locations.
What is it about gravity that gets the Gray Lady into such trouble?
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Where oh where could those layers and layers of factcheckers be?
Duh…gravity is a LAW! Laws are for the little people. Any paper that goes out of its way to support people like Geitner, Rangel, and healthcare wavers certainly can’t be expected to reason about laws.
Yeah, but are those physics laws constitutional?
Well that depends on how Kennedy votes, doesn’t it?
Isn’t almost all of the “reporting” in the Slimes urban legends?
That is, the stuff they don’t just flat make up.
Wowzers. This is some industrial-grade WTFage:
Change the subject to climate change, and that could be the NYT today. It’s good to see their quality hasn’t gone down. Or up.
It took the Slimes until Apollo 11 to apologize to Dr. Goddard for that attack. The science is settled!
Let’s not be too hard on the Times. Remember, Newtonian physics was formulated more than 100 years ago. It was written in a language that few people can understand. It didn’t anticipate the realities of our times. We have to be willing to re-interpret Newtonian physics to make it relevant to the modern world.
Oh, Ezra, you kill me!
After all, science needs to be flexible enough to allow blizzards to be proof of global warming.
Why are you surprised? The people who run the New York Times believe lots of things that just aren’t true! They think that socialism is a workable, sustainable, and just economic system. They think that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. possessed equal amounts of moral legitimacy. Heck, they even believe that Barack Obama is competent and “centrist.”
Well, OK. Maybe even they don’t believe that last one … but they want us to.
“…in this newspaper, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.”
Particulary the bit about entropy, a measure of the energy not available for useful work.
Could it be the Times mistakes “gravitas” for “gravety”?
If the cow had been a TEA partier and used the n-word before impact, would the Times have disavowed the story?
I wonder.
Did they run this by Krugman? I’m sure he could figure out a way to blame Sarah Palin for the cow falling out of the plane.
You really cannot make this stuff up..
Meanwhile the MSM still has issues with bloggers who they claim do not fact check, because they do not have an editor to ensure the facts are correct.
As God is my witness, I thought cows could fly!
FTA “…in this newspaper, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.”
Unless, of course, you’re granted a waiver by the 0bama administration like they did for Mann-made global warming…
Well, it’s a good story that can be used to further the narrative, so it ought to be true. In fact, it’s as good as true! Therefore, if it’s as good as true, then it is functionally equivalent to true and can be accepted as such, much like George Bush’s plastic turkey in Iraq.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to go down to the lobby and polish Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer. No, that’s not a euphemism. Perv.
“Hi diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle . . . “
GLADD boasted not long back that three-quarters of the people who decide what news goes in the NYT are gay. Make of that what you will.
I wonder if they will extend that to politics:
A thermodynamic explanation of politics
I’m surprised about this error as I’ve always found the NYT to be a great physic.
I don’t want to sound like a nerd but … the NYT error from 1920 was not related to gravity but to the law of action and reaction.
Yes, but those laws are needed to escape gravity.
The whole argument that the NYT put forward has nothing to do with thermodynamics, btw.
What’s most disturbing about the argument – that an atmosphere is needed to push against – is that this wasn’t controversial at the time. Any competent physicist or mechanical engineer would have told them that Goddard’s idea is sound.
Which brings me to the disturbing part. This is almost identical to the logic of the 9/11 truthers. Intuition trumps known science.
“The whole argument that the NYT put forward has nothing to do with thermodynamics, btw.”
Yes, of course. But the Simpsons gag was too good to pass up as a headline.
It’s like, you know, why bother? I mean, you know, like with gitting all moxelated, like, with the New York Times. Why bother? WTF!
Like they wrote in that 13 January 1920 editorial we, the new societal vanguard need, “something better than a vacuum against which to react.”