Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors

Meh. Looks like they meant to write 128,000 feet and just missed the 1.

I'm more concerned that they are helping cover up Benghazi than a typo.

So is sentence structure it seems.

"He active his parachute as he neared Earth..."

Journalists!

Dunno john. I'd say sucking at math is a lot of the reason they're helping cover up Benghazi.

AP, if I'm better at numbers than you are you've got problems.

Yeah, they don't set the bar too high -- 8" high, to be specific, or 373 cm.

@Phantom: No. Sucking at integrity is why they're helping cover up Benghazi.

It be OBAMA MATH!

What, you some kinda RACIST?????!!!!!!

Journalism . . . because arithmetic is tough and mathematics is not required.

john g. - a typo doesn't bug me. Total lack of copy editing does. It's like the most important sentence in the piece, the "lede" as we sophisticates call it.

A reverse rounding error!

/quitecommon

The real scandal is the use of Imperial over Metric.

The fellow doing the live internet feed had some howlers. As the balloon approached approximately 70,000 feet, he explained that the only aircraft that can attain these altitudes are military recon jets such as the SR-71 "Blackberry".

@ Ken

The MiG-25 (Foxbat) has flown higher.

"(O)n 31 August 1977, "Ye-266M" flown by MiG OKB Chief Test Pilot Alexander V. Fedotov, set the recognized absolute altitude record for a jet aircraft under its own power.[15] He reached 37,650 metres (123,520 ft) at Podmoskovnoye, USSR in zoom climb (the absolute altitude is a different record than the sustained altitude in horizontal flight). The aircraft was actually a MiG-25RB re-engined with the powerful R15BF2-300."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikoyan-Gurevich_MiG-25

Related: http://imgur.com/59rw6

And a new one that's even worse! (better?)

By the way, if you want tip-top Science coverage, you really must watch MSNBC.

Felix Baumgartner, they inform us, broke the speed of light barrier.

Sweet.

MSNBC should change their slogan from "Lean Forward" to "Engage."

Posted by: Ace at 03:54 PM

twitchy.com/2012/10/15/scienc-is-hard-andrea-mitchell-reports-that-fearless-felix-traveled-faster-than-speed-of-light/

BTW, I guess when you're reporting at twice the speed of sound it's easy to get burned.

I spotted that same detail in the voice-over during the live stream. It seems the subsequent news reports just repeated the commentator's missing 100,000 feet.

In all things, big and small, you cannot trust the Lame Stream Media. Even when they don't deliberately lie, they simply don't care enough to ensure that the crap that spews out of their mouths is consistent with objective reality.

BTW I didn't "catch" it. I stole it off the commenters at Ace. I did do the calculations myself, though. In pen.

OMG! A typo! Vast liberal conspiracy in the media!!!

So Obama's trillions are really only billions?

A vast conspiracy of incompetence and stupidity in the media.

You really have to wonder what you have to have as qualifications to be an editor. Don't need to know how to spell, add, subtract, use proper grammar, be impartial. Sheesh.

Yabbut how many football fields is that?
I don't understand all this feet and miles stuff.

rabbit@2:57 p.m. " Yeah, they don't set the bar too high -- 8" high, to be specific, or 373 cm."

Where does one begin with that sentence?

Plus this:

http://twitchy.com/2012/10/15/scienc-is-hard-andrea-mitchell-reports-that-fearless-felix-traveled-faster-than-speed-of-light/

Also stolen -- from Instapundit (Glenn's post LOL at 4:03p.m.: "There once was a woman named Bright...").

Un-fracking-believable: reading anything in the media requires "the willing suspension of disbelief" (Sen. Hillary Clinton, September, 2007 to Gen. Petraeus (also incredible) -- which is an appropriate attribution, considering the Benghazi Incident).

Who said that thing about the sublime and the ridiculous, anyway?

Andrea Mitchell: "broke the speed of light"

Light, sound - same thing, right?

You would think Alan Greenspan might have married someone smart.

A.P. - Shuttle Endeavor used to fly at 28,000 million kilometers per hour.
Reuters - the diamond planet is twice the radius of Earth but much more dense, with a mass eight times the Earth.

wallyj:

It was an attempt at humour. Sarcasm. Satire. Buffoonary. Superciliousness. Irony even.

Do I have to explain everything?

Rick at 5:00 PM:

The qualifications are that you most definitely need to be able to find the washroom.

The highest standards of urnalism ......always.

As Biden would say "the solution to this problem is three words....Metric System"

I dunno, Andrea Mitchell saying somneone exceeded the speed of light is no more out there than most of the lies she tell us.
Just another day at the office for her,

I watched, mesmerized, for 2 hours online yesterday. Incredible.

BTW - I spit my coffee all over the dash and my white dress shirt this am on the way to my "science" job when the local radio station reported confidently that that FB had passed the speed of sound thing.........at 8,801 mph!!!! WOO HOO!!!! Balls of Aerodynamic Steel!!!!

-long time lurker from Orlando, FL. Love your site.

Uhhh Rabbit ... 8 feet is not 373cm. Never was, never will be.
(Yeah, they don't set the bar too high -- 8" high, to be specific, or 373 cm.
Posted by: rabbit at October 15, 2012 2:57 PM)

seearebee(CRB)

besides U , who said 8'????

Ay Captain (my best Scottish burr)....you'll do better then Warp One!!

Cool video of him here.

Probably got confused by that Truedopian Metric crap.

Interesting. Even Wikipedia can't hide what a useless twit Mitchell is.

Lets see;

28.000 feet divided by 5.280 is 5 miles in a 5 minute drop.

That is only 60 mph.

My old farm truck can go faster than that.

Hey look at me I'm flying I'm flying.

Appologies. 8" is not 373cm either. 8" = 203.2mm. 373cm = 12'-2.85" (146.85")

For that "faster than the speed of light" error, MSNBC should forthwith have a delay introduced into every packet it transmits which would work out to about 947000 nsec/foot based on the distance from their server to a users computer. When people start experiencing ping times measured in hours to days (and not even sure one can specify times this long in the packets TTL field) then MSNBC's website would attain the obscurity that an error of this magnitude deserves. (assuming sea level speed of sound is 720 mph - too lazy to look up the exact value online).

For someone in a supposedly technologically advanced society to make an error this stupid is unbelievable. I'm wondering what the reaction of this innumerate segment of society would be if a scientist asserted that Shakespeare was the author of the book "Naked Lunch"?

He travelled faster than the speed of light, landing on a planet which, at its core, is millions of degrees.

Joe Biden fact checked it and he said it's "800 million billion".

"800 million billion" vid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRgCiv46pR8&feature=youtube_gdata