The Outer Limits

There's a series of articles right now on Slate.com about procrastination. I was going to post something about it yesterday, but what with one thing and another, I never got around to it. Maybe tomorrow.

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Here's the starting point for a wonderfully well-made and educational subsection of the Smithsonian Institution's website. It's all about mammalian evolution; this section in particular, about how evolution happened, is wonderfully well made, a lesson in how to cram a large amount of information into a tiny space. Most hypnotic: drag the time slider from 270 million years ago to the present day (more or less) and watch the Earth's land masses skate around the surface of the planet and rearrange themselves into our familiar continents.

I suppose it would be churlish of me to point out a typo, but there it is.

It's not something you could catch with a spell-checker, because it's embedded in a graphic. Part of me wonders how this could even happen--is it because "inner" has a matched pair of consonants and people like symmetry?--but it's not a rare mistake; Googling "outter" gives a shocking 614,000 hits.