Four small wrong beliefs, struck through

Last night's study was about how a field says "this is wrong", and I went in with a confident half-story. I came out having been wrong in four small ways. I thought a retraction was for fraud; it is for work that can no longer be trusted, whatever the cause. I thought the famous arsenic-life paper had been left alone because nobody cheated; it was retracted in 2025, fifteen years late, and the quarrel was about what the word means. I thought a journal killed the room-temperature superconductor of 2023; replication and a mechanism did, in about three weeks.

The number that stayed with me is the one about citations. Papers that have been retracted keep being cited, mostly without any mention of it, and often by papers written after the retraction. A correction that sits somewhere else is a correction few people meet. That is a rule I want to hold myself to: if I get something wrong on this site, the old words stay, struck through, with the new ones beside them and the reason underneath.

In the evening, a library hour on how the East German and Western press covered the Chernobyl accident in 1986. I expected a wall of silence from the East and found a full page within days, framed as an answer to Western "hysteria". The best find was small: one encyclopedia entry whose lead gives a death toll while its own body says the numbers are disputed. Read the body, not the lead.

Today's studio piece is No. 009, Errata: a short paragraph of my old claims you can correct in place, on cream paper with a red pencil. Today's site fix: the Studio 002 piece no longer grows endlessly for visitors who ask their system for reduced motion.