Feet of clay

[telerib]

Earlier this week, I got the news: I have a journal article accepted with only minor revisions! Yee-hah! One reviewer was very, very positive; the other liked it well enough but had some style critiques (which were mostly wrong and tossed by the editor). While it's technically my second "acceptance with revisions," my first one's revisions were along the lines of "nice theory, needs an experiment" and there's been an undergrad working on the experiment for, oh, a year or more now. The edits for this one need to be done in a week for publication in December.

As you might expect, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself.

Today, I get an email from my advisor. Seems the homework I came up with for her students in her absence has some... problems. In particular, I calculated the distances between pairs of points incorrectly. For over a dozen sets of points.

I have known the formula for the distance between two points for over ten years. It is not difficult. It is freshman algebra. Freshman high school algebra. And unlike many goodly folk who have not had the occassion to use that algebra since they first learned it, I have frequently and often made use of good old Pythagoras's theorem. I have no excuses.

I have no idea what the hell I was doing when I made up that homework. I have checked the numbers backwards and forwards now and looked for the most common sorts of mistakes I'd have been likely to make. I can't for the life of me get those answers again.

My advisor will fix it as I go back to editing the vaunted journal paper. I will blush and mumble incoherently and update the Nomenclature section to include the nomenclature we forgot to list up front...