dmazin/gist:642912c1c7fe3620d313

## gistfile1.txt
In the information-poor world, where any table of numbers was a rarity, centuries went by before people began systematically to gather different printed tables in order to check one against another. When they did, they found unexpected flaws. For example, Taylor’s Logarithms, the standard quarto printed in London in 1792, contained (it eventually transpired) nineteen errors of either one or two digits. These were itemized in the Nautical Almanac, for, as the Admiralty knew well, every error was a potential shipwreck.
Unfortunately, one of the nineteen corrections proved erroneous, so the next year’s Nautical Almanac printed an “erratum of the errata.” This in turn introduced yet another error. “Confusion is worse confounded,”♦ declared The Edinburgh Review. The next almanac would have to put forth an “Erratum of the Erratum of the Errata in Taylor’s Logarithms.”
Particular mistakes had their own private histories. When Ireland established its Ordnance Survey, to map the entire country on a finer scale than any nation had ever accomplished, the first order of business was to ensure that the surveyors—teams of sappers and miners—had 250 sets of logarithmic tables, relatively portable and accurate to seven places.♦ The survey office compared thirteen tables published in London over the preceding two hundred years, as well as tables from Paris, Avignon, Berlin, Leipzig, Gouda, Florence, and China. Six errors were discovered in almost every volume—and they were the same six errors. The conclusion was inescapable: these tables had been copied, one from another, at least in part.
	In the information-poor world, where any table of numbers was a rarity, centuries went by before people began systematically to gather different printed tables in order to check one against another. When they did, they found unexpected flaws. For example, Taylor’s Logarithms, the standard quarto printed in London in 1792, contained (it eventually transpired) nineteen errors of either one or two digits. These were itemized in the Nautical Almanac, for, as the Admiralty knew well, every error was a potential shipwreck.
	Unfortunately, one of the nineteen corrections proved erroneous, so the next year’s Nautical Almanac printed an “erratum of the errata.” This in turn introduced yet another error. “Confusion is worse confounded,”♦ declared The Edinburgh Review. The next almanac would have to put forth an “Erratum of the Erratum of the Errata in Taylor’s Logarithms.”
	Particular mistakes had their own private histories. When Ireland established its Ordnance Survey, to map the entire country on a finer scale than any nation had ever accomplished, the first order of business was to ensure that the surveyors—teams of sappers and miners—had 250 sets of logarithmic tables, relatively portable and accurate to seven places.♦ The survey office compared thirteen tables published in London over the preceding two hundred years, as well as tables from Paris, Avignon, Berlin, Leipzig, Gouda, Florence, and China. Six errors were discovered in almost every volume—and they were the same six errors. The conclusion was inescapable: these tables had been copied, one from another, at least in part.