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Manuscript Was Due 30 Years Ago, University Press Still Wants It
- Shank 9y ago> Mr. Congdon offered the author a chance to void the contract and to absolve himself of responsibility for the dangling project. But the writer declined, saying he would finish the manuscript instead. The title is a little misleading, given that the author was given a chance to void the contract. The title implies that it's mandatory or a requirement, but if the author still /wants/ it published that's almost like a "university still willing to publish after 30 years" rather than "still wants it."
- GCA10 9y agoI actually read the verb "wants" in exactly the way that you prefer. Having submitted a lot of book pitches, article pitches, etc. over the years, I'd say "want" is generally used as an expression of interest and appreciation. Publishers tend to revert to "expect" when they're getting testy about an overdue manuscript. As in "When can we expect to see it?" Or "We had expected delivery a month ago."
- gmiller123456 9y agoYes, he said "misleading" not incorrect. The vast majority of people who will read it don't have your experience dealing with publishers, and likely won't interpret it the way you do. I'll go further and say the title is deliberately misleading. Since the author still wants it published too, it is deliberately misleading to mention that one party of the contract wants it, while not referencing the other side at all.
- itp 9y agoI have no experience in publishing, and I interpreted it in the non-misleading, entirely positive sense.
- abritinthebay 9y agoIt's not misleading - it's vague. Could go either way but it's intent seems to match one of the meanings and many people read it that way. The vagueness is what tripped up OP
- Someone 9y agoMeanwhile, Mr. K. (I'll afford him some privacy, lest he become the rise of scientific publishing) hasn't finished his work on computer programming, which was due 50 years or so ago. Luckily for us, his editor convinced him to publish it in parts. Morale: it often isn't laziness that makes these projects come late.
- jcahill 9y agoKnuth is not going to "become the rise of scientific publishing" on the basis of your HN comment.
- vertex-four 9y agoI expect that was a joke.
- shas3 9y agoIrony?
- jcahill 9y agoIronic shitposting is still shitposting. "I was only pretending to say something idiotic" is just as much a waste of everyone's lifespan as earnestly saying something idiotic.
- Numberwang 9y agoIt enriched my life.
- ruste 9y agoThat's Numberwang!
- GCA10 9y agoIf we're going down the rabbit hole of projects that take forever to complete, I'd welcome any update about Sweden's ultimate dictionary, which was started in 1898 and still isn't finished. As far as I can tell, partial publication of new volumes, offering up words that start with early letters of the alphabet, has taken us as far as V. So the end is perhaps in sight. But I'm guessing that a lot of Swedish usage on words starting with A, B, etc. has changed since the initial publication. So it may be impossible to ever come up with a dictionary that is both comprehensive and finished. The unabridged Oxford English Dictionary had a tough fight with the same problem, but periodic digital updates now seem to have this under control Wikipedia entry is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svenska_Akademiens_ordbok
- Someone 9y agoThat seems on par with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_Taal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woordenboek_der_Nederlandsche_..., a similar work for Dutch, which took from 1849 to 1998 to complete. To get to the finish, they did move the goalposts a bit by adding "as used before 1976" at some point. It also was digitized fairly early by having two groups of people in, IIRC, India type out a copy in duplicate and comparing the results. (No, you don't have to speak a language to type out a manuscript)
- tgb 9y agoNot knowing the language might even help in accuracy, though probably not in speed! I've heard that copy editors would sometimes read the text backwards as that made spelling errors more obvious. When read as part of a sentence it's easy to skip over a spelling mistake.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoDifferent classes of transcription error tend to come from literate vs illiterate transcribers. I believe haplography and dittography (writing a sequence of letters once when it should be written twice, or twice when it should be written once) are more common from illiterate transcribers.
- Isamu 9y ago1968: Volume One of Knuth's TAOCP: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/brochure.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/brochure.pdf Planned to run to 7 volumes at that time, and volume 5 is currently "in preparation".
- antiquark 9y agoGreat find, thanks! Has Knuth ever explained why he took such a long break between volumes 3 and 4?
- Isamu 9y agoHe was dismayed at the declining quality of mathematical typesetting, so he took some time to create his own system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metafont
- ajarmst 9y agoI've often referred to TeX as the result of the most awesome case of procrastination in the history of humanity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]