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Parsec Asteroid Misspelling


horizon2374

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2 hours ago, Asmusr said:

Maybe I'm dreaming, I thought Paul Urbanus posted a few times here on AtariAge recently, but I can't find any trace of him now. Maybe I remember when he commented on the Mega Demo on YouTube? Anyway, I thought it would be fun to ask him if he was aware of the typo.

 

Is he not @urbite (last posted in November)?

 

...lee

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Missing this is also just reflective of how we read words, in a language like English, and how imprecisely we process written words.  Firstly, in that (save in the cases of specific neurological disorders) we do not read on a letter-by-letter basis.  Secondly, in that identification of words is more strongly determined by initial and final characters than characters internal to the word (so that internal transpositions less significantly impede word identification).  Thirdly, in that longer words are processed in a segmented fashion, but fixation points during reading are not selected in order to provide that all text may be perceived with identical and ideal acuity, but rather in order that a sufficiently accurate reading is produced.  Also, in that perception of word contours and prediction of expected character forms plays a role (such that even just vAriATion iN cAse significantly impede cognitive processing of text).  But there is no such change, produced by the transposition, in this case.  
 
It's from all this business that we get the classic (but mostly false) meme:

 

Quote

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

 

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I'm not sure if I corrected that in the source code I typed in a few years ago. Paul Urbanus double-checked it to make sure that it didn't have any introduced errors and that it would assemble properly. One reason that all cartridges have the bug is simple economics: correcting it would have required an updated GROM chip, and TI only updated those if an error caused the program to do something it wasn't supposed to do. Typos weren't fixed (like the prepopulated single/double density prompt in the Disk Manager cartridge: Y meant NO and N meant YES. They just put out a notice to that effect and moved on.

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Wonder how many Parsecs have been started in the last days ... ;-)

 

(and no, I did not notice that either, but as Tim already suggested, this is the moment when you take a deep breath, search for a suitable position when the asteroids start coming in, and have definitely no ambition to check the writing)

(and I am actually someone who spots nearly every error, even before I consciously read the word, which is sometimes a bit awkward for myself ...)

 

 

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