twenty-eight years and a million words
Today it snowed. There was also hail, and something that Ken called, "rain, i think." I'd have called it sleet from the way it bounced off of everything. Certainly it was different from the hail we'd had the hour before.
So nice to be away from all of the stuffy heat and short-sleeves of Tokyo and back in a manly climate like this!
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