‘The FishBike Scale of Big Mistakes’
Everything surrounding this comment is pointless and should be ignored, but this one comment has changed forever the way I think about Mistakes.
Basically, you rate the size of a mistake by which field of study is affected by it.
Category 1: Journalism. Your mistake is big enough to be reported in the news somewhere.
Category 2: History. School children decades from now will be reading about your mistake in their textbooks.
Category 3: Geography. Your mistake is bad enough that maps are different afterwards. Entire towns or cities may have disappeared, or people change place names so they can forget about your mistake.
Category 4: Geology. Millenia from now, scientists will be wondering what made that giant hole in the ground or why that mountain isn’t there any more.
Category 5: Astronomy. Scientists on other planets, peering at our solar system through their telescopes, will see a bright flash and ask themselves “What the fuck was that?”
Gerry Canavan 
Lots of room for expansion at the bottom end:
Category 0: Facebook Your friends mention it in their status updates, but it doesn’t actually make the news.
Category -1: Eyebrows People notice and you see it in their faces, but no one actually comments on it publicly.
Category -2: Psychology You notice and feel it, but no one else does.
Category -3: Vanishing You don’t even notice.
…and arguably at the other end too:
Category 6: Astronomy2 Scientists in other galaxies wonder what happened to yours
Category 7: Metaphysics People in other universes wonder why there’s one less parallel universe than there ought to be
Category 8: Vanishing No one, in any universe, ever notices anything anymore ever
Stephen Frug
December 15, 2011 at 11:32 am
Yeah, I had the same thought, though I didn’t peg the Facebook thing (that’s funny): mine was just 0 (human relations: friends, family, coworkers) and -1 (psychology) and 6 (theoretical physics).
gerrycanavan
December 15, 2011 at 11:34 am