Disingenuous Ed

Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports
1

This may belong in the Pit, but it has to do with a CecilColumn[sup]TM[/sup], so I’m puitting it here. The column in question is Why is Death Valley a national monument rather than a national park?

The original column was written in 1982, at which time Death Valley was still a National Monument. Since then, it’s been changed to a National Park. When revising the column, Ed had to work in this fact, but the way he did it was intellectually dishonest. That is, he makes the original questioner look like he didn’t know that it wasn’t a National Park.

Ed needs to be castigated severely about the head and shoulders for this. Could one of the Administrators take care of it?

2

Cecil is the Perfect Master, but Ed is our boss.

(That’s Dilbertese for “no way.”)

OK, seriously, I’ll call Ed’s attention to this, but there’s stuff going on in his life right now, and I guarantee he won’t bother with it.

Why not just view the Classic Columns as a taste of days gone by, and live with it? I mean, you don’t ask Dostoevsky to update CRIME AND PUNISHMENT because Raskolnikov can call on a cell phone nowadays, do you? OK, so maybe it’s not the same category, but still.

3

It’s not that it’s not the category, but Ed does update the classics. I wish he wouldn’t do that at all except to add addendums to correct errors or point out facts that have come up in the meantime. But, Ed, please leave the original columns alone.

4

It’s definitely not in the same category. No way was Dostoevsky the World’s Smartest Human Being!

5

I apologize for being brusque. This dreadful soi-disant “real life” interfered, and I was having a terrible, horrible, no-good very-bad day. I shall pursue this through channels.

6

Don’t worry about it, Dex. In fact, I thought your post was very Cecil-ish in tone.

7

There’s no good reason for updating the Classic Columns at all, except by addendum, as Cecil occasionally does.

I’ve complained about the pi column for years and no one ever does anything about that

8

Remind me. What was your beef?

9

And which of the at least three columns related to pi?
[ul]
[li]How do scientists go about calculating pi to umpteen decimal places?[/li][li]Did a state legislature once pass a law saying pi equals 3?[/li][li]Is pi an inexact number?[/li][/ul]

10

That’s the one. The person who “corrected” Cecil was wrong themselves. They made a simple conversion error (2 x 10^10 year times 3.2 x 10^7 sec/year times 3 x 10^8 meter/sec times 10^10 angstroms/meter = 1.92 x 10^36 angstroms, which is a hundred times the value that Basescu calculated). I understand that that “correction” appears in a book, but still…

I mentioned it in a thread I started five years ago, and brought it up again a couple years later here and here. I argued that Cecil was basically right in the first place.

11

It’s more a criticism of one of Cecil’s references:

I’m not sure which “learned treatise” that was, but Basecu claims that it’s only 35 places of pi, not 39. However, he screwed up his arithmetic, so even his logic should only require 37–but I don’t think that’s taking into account the leading digit. The quote says “places” not “decimal places,” so it certainly could have meant digits of pi. With that interpretation, 38 places suffice, but not 37–even if Basecu’s figure for the age of the universe is reduced to half that 20 billion years.

Of course, 100 places also suffices, but the claim was not “absurd.”