Tecnology (for Technology)

"For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three," wrote Alice Kahn. Some days we can see her point, but most of the time we would feel lost without our iGoogle pages. Tecnology is an example of a missing letter typo - highlighting the ability of the human brain to add information that isn't there to make sense of what one is reading. It is unusual in the fact that the error occurs near the beginning of the word. Tecnology can be found on the C, or moderate probability section of Typographical Errors in Library Databases at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/typoscomplete.html. There are nearly 300 hits for this in WorldCat, so the actual probability of this being found in your catalog trends a bit higher. Sometimes it is interesting to see how universal these problems are. I just checked COPAC, the combined catalog for the major universities in the United Kingdom, and got nearly 100 hits for Tecnology; there were more than 300 at the National Library of Australia.

Today's photo shows a shrine to technology at the Apple store in Midtown Manhattan. The original can be found at http://www.pbase.com/terryballard/image/90813603.