Blemish-free Venus

Venus, who has been our Morning Star since June 3 –

– is in a bad temper because someone has remarked that she is disfigured.  That is, an Amazon review has said that our new book, “Venus, A Longer View,” has typos.  So she has admonished me to put out a revised edition, which I have done.  It is now entirely zit-free, and the dame can hope for more starry reviews

Despite infinite work, and much proofreading, there were flaws, for which I apologize to those who have already bought the book.  Most were minor typos, which you might not notice or could easily correct, but these are the ones I need to mention:

Page 9: “miute” should be “minute.”

39: the Greek for “to sail” is “plein,” not “plain.”

68: “followed 122 1/2 years later” should be “followed 121 1/2 years later.”

75: “16755” should be “1675.”

91: the opening words of the Burns poem were sadly garbled; they should be “My luve.”

134: the last column of the table should be headed “satellites.”

There is a wry saying that “No good deed goes unpunished.”  I wanted to use the Ingram company’s system of printing-on-demand, because it works with the bookstores instead of out-competing them like Amazon.  (I have to keep using Amazon’s stem too, since it makes it easy for you to order without going to a bookstore.)

But Ingram has rigid standards that blobked me for weeks, and to overcome the obstacles I had to learn Adobe InDesign, a huge desktop publishing application, superseding Quark XPress, the one I have long used.

Another proverb: “The bad workman blames his tools” – also on the cynical side, and sometimes unfair.  In InDesign, there is constant peril of introducing errors by touching one of the keys that stand for tools: “f,” “h,” “t,” “v,” “z,” for “frame,” “hand,” “text,” “select,” “undo.”  If you accidentally do this while still in text mode – and it takes careful steps to get out of that and to a safe place – then those letters get into the text, or pieces of text can disappear, sometimes in some place remote from the screen you are looking at.  This accounts for most of those blemishes.

I aim to become a better workman.  But I can’t promise to stop swearing in exasperation.  Venus will put up with it.  She may be perfect-complexioned, but I don’t think she is delicate in her language.

__________

ILLUSTRATIONS in these posts are made with precision but have to be inserted in another format.  You may be able to enlarge them on your monitor.  One way: right-click, and choose “View image”, then enlarge.  Or choose “Copy image”, then put it on your desktop, then open it.  On an iPad or phone, use the finger gesture that enlarges (spreading with two fingers, or tapping and dragging with three fingers).  Other methods have been suggested, such as dragging the image to the desktop and opening it in other ways.

Sometimes I make improvements or corrections to a post after positing it.  If you click on the title, rather than on ‘Read more’, I think you are sure to see the latest version.

This weblog maintains its right to be about astronomy or anything under the sun.