For a lot of engineering problems, "almost right" isn’t good enough. Remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? Traveling through space for nearly a year, and covering 700 million kilometers, the Orbiter disintegrated after entering the Martian atmosphere at an altitude just one-hundred kilometers lower than planned. That’s like a $100 million dart exploding when you miss the bullseye by less than the width of a human hair. A less dramatic — though more common — failure is the embarrassing auto-correct. After countless convenient corrections, there is inevitably a mistake that calls into question the overall utility of the system. For one contributor to this blog, that moment occurred when the intended "wild beasts" was publicly disseminated as "wild breasts" — on the bright side, that "correction" did seem to increase interest in the text. via