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Misquoted
editI am Bill Jefferys. I corresponded with Rich Rosen about his quotation to get permission to use it in our book, and I am sure that the correspondence gave the quote exactly as it was given in the book, "Discovering Astronomy," by myself and Bob Robbins. Rich Rosen gave permission to use the quote as it was published in our book.
I do not know who wrote the footnote above. It may be Rich, and it may be someone else. If it was written by Rich, it has a significant claim to truth.
How to explain the discrepancy?
It's possible that I misquoted him (but my recollection is that I copied the quote directly out of one of his postings and copied it directly into the manuscript from our correspondence).
It's possible that he used more than one version of the quote in his signature line (Rich would know whether this is true or false).
It's possible that I misquoted him but he didn't notice the misquotation in our correspondence.
Maybe something else.
Rich, if you are watching this page, can you comment? The correspondence is very, very old and I am no longer in possession of the paperwork on copyright and other permissions for the book as I have not been involved in the project for many years.
But, I do know who is currently in charge of the book, and if you wish, Rich, I can let them know and have them fix the problem in the next edition. Bill Jefferys (talk)
- Bill, nice to hear from you! I do recall (as a distant memory) our email discussions about using my "Anything's possible" signature line in one of the chapter introductions in your book. My recollection is that our communications all referred to this wording, which I used exclusively in that signature line, all the way through to the very end. When you sent me a comp copy of the book, I noticed the change to "Many things are possible...". I just assumed it was an editorial change initiated by your publisher. (Having just gone through the process of reviewing and tweaking final proofs over the past few months for the second edition of the Web Application Architecture book, I am very familiar with what can go wrong during that phase of publication.) I was just happy to be referenced in a published book, I thought it was very cool, and I do recall saying to you, repurposing an Oscar Wilde "joke template", that "there is one thing better than being quoted -- being misquoted". :-)
- Assuming it is within your power and not too much trouble, if you can correct the quotation, that would be great and would be appreciated. Nice to hear that Discovering Astronomy is still going strong. Hope you're doing well. Again, nice to hear from you! But at this point we should probably take further discussion off of Wikpedia discussions pages. Feel free to shoot me an email! :-) Rich Rosen (talk) 13:58, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
Hi Rich,
It's good to hear from you too.
It would not be a problem for me to get this correction to the current authors of the book. But I don't know your email address! You'll find mine at my website. Go to the bottom of the page. We can continue this offline.
Best, Bill Bill Jefferys (talk) 03:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)