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Errata [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-22
A few weeks ago I wrote a piece called Correspondence, based primarily on my memory. However, my memory was not as good as I thought and a couple of times it has failed me. For the most part my memories are reasonably accurate and when I can find corroborating materials I double check them. However one of my memories expressed in that essay was inaccurate. Since my father constantly lied about his past, I have always tried to base my statements on fact, as much as I could, but I’ve failed on several occasion and I am writing this to make things right.
In my essay I made a big deal about the review article I wrote with an associate in New Zealand, which was published in the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Siberian Journal of Zoology. That is accurate. We also published the same article in the UK and it was the most cited journal article published by either one of us. So what did I misremember? The idea that we corresponded by snail mail! In fact this was one of the first publications for which we used e-mail! I confused my earlier correspondence with my co-author and some earlier contact with my Russian correspondent! This is not the first time my memory has failed me, but fortunately it does not happen that often.
A few years ago I wrote a paper on a new species of spider. After some editing it was accepted by the journal. During the final editing I suddenly thought that I had somehow left out an acknowledgement for one of the trips I had made. So I rushed a correction to the editor and it was added. Too late I realized that the person I was giving credit to did not at all deserve it! It was a trick of my memory, conflating two different events! I still feel a bit embarrassed about this, but when I contacted the editor, he said that it was not that important.
In one publication my co-authors and I all overlooked the fact that our illustrator had added a tarsal segment to an illustration of a grasshopper. It was published with the error!
These are all probably not as important as I think, but because of my family background (from my therapy sessions I learned that children of narcissists often become obsessive perfectionists) errors like this drive me a bit nuts. When I brought up a rather egregious mistake that I had made when I was engaged in my oral exam for the Ph.D. to my former major professor (yes, he is still alive), said “Nobody remembers that except for you!” In any case I apologize for the error in the Correspondence essay, mainly because I had made a big deal about it.
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