News-Record.com

This error has followed me for months. Readers got great pleasure in pointing it out at the time, suggesting that we really should go back to school to learn the difference between million and billion. Several called for my firing, which seemed a bit rash to me, but then I have a personal stake in it. In any case, we shouldn't have made it, obviously.

Still, it makes me feel slightly better to read this one in the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. budget deficit is projected to total $1.2 trillion this year. A page-one World-Wide1 news summary in some editions Jan. 8 incorrectly put the figure at $1.2 billion.

Happens to the best of us.

A reporter who doesn't make many errors sent me a news story about mistakes and brain function. She knows that I make more mindless goofs than normal. And I don't even hold that against her.

According to the story in the Times, some scientists used an MRI tool to see what is happening in the brain when a mistake is made. Cutting to the chase:

As he and his colleagues report in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, no single "blip" or event signals an error. Rather, brain patterns start to change about 30 seconds before an error is committed.

All very interesting. Unfortunately, as the reporter pointed out, the story doesn't tell us how to avoid the careless mistakes. But at least we can explain to readers that the right frontal lobe just became less active.