Thieving Thursday: Factual Errors

Yep, it's time to lighten things up a bit and go with Thieving Thursday. This one comes from the always charming blog of I Do Things. JD and I go way back and it's been a while since I featured one my comments on that blog, so she's is overdue. It was a long comment, but this was the part I wanted to work from:

Factual errors, in my opinion, is not an oxymoron. You can make an error in judgement that has nothing to do with facts - like telling your mother when you actually had sex the first time or mentioning it was in her bed. Clearly, the error, in that case, was using the facts instead of a useful lie.

I'm actually finding it hard to understand why someone would think one can't be factual and still be wrong. One can use a fact, but use it for the wrong situation or in the wrong way. For example, one might know that the acceleration of gravity is 32 f/s2, but if your program is using metric, 32 is the wrong value.

One can have all the facts and still interpret them improperly, thereby making the wrong decision. Like knowing your wife loves coffee and luxurious baths and thinking somehow that making her a coffee bath would really make her happy.

There are the errors that involve using the facts exactly as they were meant to be used and having it be a mistake. Like telling your kid sister the truth about how big her butt really looks in her wedding dress. On her wedding day.

And then there are the errors that don't involve any facts at all. Like picking the wrong number at roulette...unless you want to count the fact that gambling is for idiots.

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