I don't see how this means that Gladwell wasn't in error. All it says is that the webmaster missed the error when he uploaded the text version to the site. So what? he/she's a webmaster, not a copyeditor.
The error had to come from somewhere originally, right? It couldn't have come from the correct version that appeared in the magazine or its PDF version. The comment mumbles something about HTML editors and their "errors", but it's ridiculous to suggest that an HTML editor would change 'eigenvalue' to 'igon value' when automatically importing text from PDF. No sane program would do that, least of all an HTML editor. It couldn't have been an autospell error either because "igon value" isn't in any spellcheck list.
No, it remains likely that "igon value" was there in the article as Gladwell wrote it, got fixed by the New Yorker's famously punctual fact-checkers, and the fix was ignored by Gladwell as the original text version was posted to the site and later made it to the book.
The error had to come from somewhere originally, right? It couldn't have come from the correct version that appeared in the magazine or its PDF version. The comment mumbles something about HTML editors and their "errors", but it's ridiculous to suggest that an HTML editor would change 'eigenvalue' to 'igon value' when automatically importing text from PDF. No sane program would do that, least of all an HTML editor. It couldn't have been an autospell error either because "igon value" isn't in any spellcheck list.
No, it remains likely that "igon value" was there in the article as Gladwell wrote it, got fixed by the New Yorker's famously punctual fact-checkers, and the fix was ignored by Gladwell as the original text version was posted to the site and later made it to the book.