twenty-seven years and one million words
We'd planned a picnic for today, but called it off because it was raining hard the day before and then continued to rain off and on throughout the morning. We took Dr Zed to Meiji shrine instead, where he was promptly crapped on by a crow. It was bad enough that he felt he needed a new shirt, so we took him to Muji.
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