If I have not seen as far as others, it is because giants were standing on my shoulders. -- Hal Abelson

"The worst checking error is calling people dead who are not dead. . . . Sara remembers a reader in a nursing home who read in The New Yorker that he was 'the late' reader in the nursing home. He wrote demanding a correction. The New Yorker in its next issue, of course complied, inadvertently doubling the error, because the reader died over the weekend while the magazine was being printed." John McPhee, "Checkpoints," in Silk Parachute, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.