Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: error

Wrost typoch

Penguin cookbook calls for 'freshly ground black people'

Publisher destroys 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible after 'silly mistake' causes outrage

Walnut tagliatelle

Disclaimer ... this plate of tagliatelle contains no 'freshly ground black people'. Photograph: Martin Argles

A recipe for tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto has proved a little too spicy for Penguin Australia, after a misprint suggesting that the dish required "salt and freshly ground black people" has left the publisher reaching for the pulping machine, rather than the pepper grinder.

It's a one-word slip that only came to light after a member of the public got in touch, and which has sent all 7,000 copies of The Pasta Bible at Penguin's warehouse to be destroyed, an exercise which head of publishing, Robert Sessions, told the Sydney Morning Herald would cost $ 20,000.

There are, as yet, no plans to recall copies that have made it into stores, which according to Sessions would be "extremely hard". He was "mortified that this has become an issue of any kind", adding that "why anyone would be offended, we don't know".

Sessions defended proofreaders for letting through a misprint that he suggested came from a spell-check program, explaining that since almost every recipe in the book calls for black pepper at a on each page it was an error he considered "quite forgivable". He went on to attack those who might complain about what he called a "silly mistake" as "small minded".

Meanwhile, the clean-up operation continues, with the publisher releasing a rather more emollient statement on its website offering sincere apologies "for any offence this error may have caused readers", and suggesting that proofreaders "would have been concentrating on checking quantities, a common source of error in cookbooks". Penguin also offered to "willingly replace a copy of The Pasta Bible owned by anyone who feels uncomfortable about having a copy of the book in their possession".

Speaking to the Guardian this afternoon, Sessions was unwilling to add to his earlier remarks, explaining that he had "nothing further to say", and referring to the Penguin website.

Gamma error in picture scaling

There is an important error in most photography scaling algorithms. All software tested have the problem: The Gimp, Adobe Photoshop, CinePaint, Nip2, ImageMagick, GQview, Eye of Gnome, Paint and Krita. Also three different operating systems were used: Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. These exceptions have subsequently been reported: the Netpbm toolkit for graphic manipulations, the developping GEGL toolkit, 32 bit encoded images in Photoshop CS3, the latest version of Image Analyzer, the image exporters in Aperture 1.5.6, the latest version of Rendera, Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1, Pixelmator for Mac OS X and Paint Shop Pro X2.

Photographs that have been scaled with these software have been degradated. The degradation is often faint but probably most pictures contain at least an array where the degradation is clearly visible. I suppose this happens since the first versions of these software, maybe 20 years ago.

A photograph of His Holiness the Dalai Lama was tuned to exploit the problem. If you want to give it a try then scale it down 50% using your best software. (If you cannot download the image to your computer by right-clicking on it then either make a snapshot of the screen or download the image in this zipped file.)

The Dalai Lama

This is what you probably will get once the image is scaled by your software:



How much did you pay for that software? This is a scaling performed by a correct software, which evidently shows the same as the start image: