twenty-seven years and one million words
It is cold and blustery today. So bad that a fireman on a passing firetruck was having trouble getting his cigarette lit. It struck me as slightly odd that a fireman would smoke, though I suppose that's illogical. Just because they see fires lit by careless smoking on a regular basis, and need to be in top physical shape doesn't mean they can't smoke, I guess.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
—Michael Crichton