Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
February 2012
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
- It's a Wonderful Failure
- Stadium Destroyed, Reborn
- Failure to Trust the Astronauts
- Failure and the Baggy Pants Tradition
- Failure at The Happiest Place on Earth
- Saving What Was Lost
- FailureBank: A Social Learning Utility
November 2011
- A Thanksgiving Failure
- Harriet Tubman's Clever Lie
- The Failures of Lemieux
- Failed to Return a Text
- Admitting Failure
- A Leaders Job: Support Failure
October 2011
- [VIDEO] Mistakes with Tasty Dum Dums
- Failure and the Chocolate Chip Cookie
- Failure Goes Digital
- Using AIDS to Fight Cancer
- Victory Despite Obstacles
September 2011
Purposeful Mistakes
If you swear that a word in a dictionary or a spot on a map just can’t be right, you might be correct. Turns out that cartographers and lexicographers make intentional mistakes to thwart people who would steal their work.
The idea, as explained in a Wikipedia article, is that someone who violates copyright would unknowingly duplicate the error, thus proving they had broken then law:
By including a trivial piece of false information in a larger work, it is far easier to demonstrate that someone has plagiarized that work: they will presumably copy the fictitious entry along with other articles.
Another great resource for this is a Straight Dope column on trap streets.
So what’s the message? Reference works aren’t perfect. In fact, they are imperfect on purpose, as a way to prove that they are revered.
You guessed it: Failure is the secret to success!
