I note the recent reuse of old columns. Hope the straightdope is still generating new columns. Though I have all the Straight Dope books, I hadn’t previously noticed that the column reprinted today (original day 29-August-1980) has a major error in it, that is so uncharacteristic of Cecil’s info.
"The galaxy in which we presently reside, by way of comparison, is 25-30 parsecs across. "
Nope, sorry. It’s more than a parsec to the nearest star. Sol is about two-thirds of the way out on the galactic disk, and is approximately 8,000 parsecs from galactic center. Since there is no solid-line “galactic boundary”, the actual diameter of the galactic disk is somewhat vague, but a reasonable figure might be 25,000 parsecs.
Doesn’t change the gist, i.e. that we’re talking about a whole lot of flies here, but an error of 99.9% is pretty significant, don’t you think?
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Cecil Adams does not make errors. This must obviously be a mistake by the editor, who incorrectly parsed the sentence and changed kpc to pc, thereby transforming kiloparsec to parsec. Let me tell you, being Mr. Adams’ editor is not always fun and games.
There have always been classic columns posted on the home page along with the newest column. We usually have “staff reports” (where Cecil humors us and let’s us try our hand at answering questions that aren’t worthy of him). Staff reports should be back soon. Until then, you get twice the classic columns for your money.
… but still, come on! 25-30 parsecs for the whole galaxy?! This is off by a factor of a thousand. Hell, the Milky Way galaxy is thicker than this, even way out in the spiral arms!