twenty-seven years and one million words
My colleagues and I spent nearly the entire day working through the next version of a client's product. It was one of those rare days when you get to do the ideal part of the job. It's days like this when it's still fun in this line of work, after 23 years. Especially with that being 23 years of watching the profession be turned into a shadow of former itself.
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