The Scribe’s Advantage

Sources

Sources, chapter by chapter

Every claim in the book that was run to a source, where it sits in the text, what the check found, and the source itself: 751 claims across 30 sections of The Scribe’s Advantage, V34 (2026-09-28). Nothing that failed is hidden. Corrections show the old wording and the new; contested claims keep their verdict and say what the dispute is.

How to read this page

Two reviewers checked V32 against sources: the 643 rows of Fable 5.1's claim tables (its summary counts 644) and Astra's 50 items. V33 and V34 corrected what failed, and V34 added the Greenwood passage with a source for every fact. Reviewer items that a correction resolved are folded into that correction. Line anchors marked approx point to the paragraph that best matches the claim; chapter anchors point to the chapter heading.

Line numbers refer to the V34 manuscript, one line per paragraph, counting the title as line 1. Each claim has its own link: copy the line reference to cite it.

Corrected 90
Changed in V33 or V34 after a reviewer flagged it, or added in V34 with its sources; the old and new wording are shown.
Contested 157
The source supports a reading, but specialists or sources disagree; the dispute is noted.
Accurate 442
Checked against the source given and found to hold.
Unverified 62
The reviewer could not reach a source in the time available. Listed so nothing is hidden.

Reconstructed scenes

The Author’s Note names three scenes as reconstructed and promises their sources here. In each, the events are documented and the interior (thoughts, rooms, some quoted lines) is the author’s. Below: what the record holds, what was built on it, and the sources the scene is built from.

Chapter 9, V34 line 427

Pu Songling in the examination hall

Chapter 9 tells the 1687 provincial examination from inside Pu Songling's head. The facts of his life and of that sitting are documented; his thoughts in the hall are the author's reconstruction, and quotation marks inside the scene hold both his published words and invented lines.

Documented. Born 1640, died 1715; first in the county, prefecture and circuit examinations at eighteen or nineteen under Shi Runzhang; tutor to the Bi family at Xipu from 1679; disqualified in 1687 for skipping a page; gongsheng at seventy-one in 1711; the 1679 preface to Strange Tales (Giles's translation); the blind monk who judges essays by smell (Si Wen Lang).

Reconstructed. His private thoughts, the room, and the lines in quotation marks that are not from his own writing.

Built from

Claims checked in this scene: line 431, line 429, line 408.

Chapter 20, V34 line 1012

The Cambodian teacher who hid his glasses under a tile

Chapter 20 opens in a Phnom Penh kitchen on April 17, 1975. The teacher is a composite: his name is not recorded, and no witness survives for his kitchen, his glasses or his route. What happened around him is documented.

Documented. The fall of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975; the three-day evacuation pretext and the loudspeakers; the targeting of glasses, soft hands and education; teachers and doctors hiding their training; the death toll among the educated; S-21 in a former high school.

Reconstructed. The man himself, his apartment, the tile by the stove, the glasses, his thoughts and his walk out of the city.

Built from

Claims checked in this scene: line 1018, line 1013, line 1018, line 1013, line 1013, line 1018, line 1019, line 1023.

Chapter 25, V34 line 1270

The Palace Museum crates, told by the clerk who rode them to Taiwan

Chapter 25 tells the crossing of the Palace Museum crates in the first person of the clerk who rode them, Na Chih-liang (1908 to 1998). The events and his role are documented, and some lines follow his published memoir; his interior voice, and lines such as “what I remember is the silence,” are the author's reconstruction.

Documented. Na entered the palace in January 1925 at seventeen on Chen Yuan's recommendation and counted objects for seven years; the order of February 4, 1933, martial law, the carts through the Meridian Gate to the West Station and the 2,118 crates of the first night (a 2,412 variant exists); the three wartime routes; the 2,972 crates shipped to Taiwan in 1948 and 1949; about 700,000 objects in the National Palace Museum today.

Reconstructed. The first-person voice, his closing interior monologue, and quoted lines not traceable to a page of his memoir.

Built from

Claims checked in this scene: line 1271, line 1273, line 1270, line 1275, line 1269, line 1270, line 1272.

Author’s Note

from V34 line 7 · 1 corrected, 1 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 line 10

    re and made a roomful of strangers lean forward. Yet the question that haunted me as I studied those greats was never adequately answered by the histories I read: what made them great? Was it individual genius? Was it the words they grew up wit

    Dolly Parton death reference is not an error as of this review date. Current reporting confirms death on August 25, 2026. Her official site records over 325 million gifted books by June 2026; reporting in September gives over 330 million.

    Checked by Astra #39.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 13V34 #25 [11a]

    Was: a few people are composites drawn from documented cases, where the record kept what happened and lost the name.

    Now: a few people are composites drawn from documented cases, where the record kept what happened and lost the name.

    Page: “A few scenes are reconstructed”, with none named and no source trail (Astra UNVERIFIABLE #45, #49, #50). The three scenes are now named.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

Prologue: The Account

from V34 line 19 · 3 contested, 28 accurate, 3 unverified · top

Chapter 1: Red on the Snow

from V34 line 70 · 1 corrected, 2 contested, 11 accurate, 2 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 70

    World population c. 3300 BC ≈ 14 million

    Durand/Clark 14M for 3000 BC; McEvedy & Jones similar.

    Checked by Fable F1-A26.

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 70

    Egypt literacy ~1% (Baines & Eyre 1983)

    Range 1-5% in other estimates.

    Checked by Fable F1-A29.

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 70

    Clerical celibacy binding for secular clergy from 12th century

    Checked by Fable F1-A32.

    • Lateran I/II 1123/1139
  • ContestedV34 line 74

    "The flint arrowhead, nearly three centimeters long"

    Museum and forensic papers give ~2 cm (some summaries 1.3 cm; a few 2.7 cm). "Nearly three" is at the top of the range; "about two centimeters" is safer.

    Checked by Fable F1-C1.

  • AccurateV34 near line 76

    Ötzi: ~46, 3,210 m, 61 tattoos, ibex/red deer/einkorn <2 h before death, 14 arrows/2 finished, right-hand cut, found Sept 1991 by two Germans, copper axe 99.7% from Tuscany ~500 km, c. 3300 BC

    Age estimates 40-50 ("about 45"); "46" is museum figure. Arrowhead length: see C1.

    Checked by Fable F1-A25.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 79

    "The number who could externalize knowledge... was perhaps a thousand" (3300 BC)

    Plausible order of magnitude; flag as estimate.

    Checked by Fable F1-U3.

  • AccurateV34 near line 87

    Sargon ~1,000 years after the Uruk tablet; Akkad ~two centuries

    Checked by Fable F1-A27.

    • standard: c. 2334-2154 BC
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 88V34 #1 [1a]

    Was: and when the body died the knowledge died with it, every time, without exception, for three hundred thousand years.

    Now: and when the body died, whatever it had not yet handed on died with it, every time, for three hundred thousand years. What it had handed on crept forward slowly, one apprentice at a time, and one bad winter could undo a century of it.

    Page: “when the body died the knowledge died with it, every time, without exception” while the same chapter rests on Ötzi’s accumulated craft (copper smelting, chamois tracking learned from parents). Astra ERRORS #1. Now matches the one definition: oral knowledge accumulates slowly and fragilely.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 88)
  • UnverifiedV34 near line 93

    the record, with a pile that compounds. The age decides what can happen next. Ötzi had a forge, a real one, charcoal and green rock and copper at 99.7 percent, and it made the best axe in the valley. Nobody stood beside it with a reed. When his

    Ötzi personally made or forged his copper axe. Museum research supports the axe and Tuscan copper provenance; possession does not establish that Ötzi was its maker. Treat personal manufacturing as reconstruction unless a source specifically supports it.

    Checked by Astra #44.

  • AccurateV34 near line 99

    Homer: Eurycleia bought for twenty oxen; Eumaeus born a prince, sold as a boy

    Checked by Fable F1-A28.

    • Od. 1.430-31; 15.403ff
  • AccurateV34 near line 100

    Karmin et al. 2015: 8-4 kya, female/male Ne up to 17:1; Zeng, Aw & Feldman 2018 clan hypothesis

    See C17 for interpretation.

    Checked by Fable F1-A23.

  • AccurateV34 near line 100

    Antioquia: ~94% European Y, ~90% Native mtDNA (Carvajal-Carmona 2000)

    0.94 European Y; 90% Amerindian mtDNA.

    Checked by Fable F1-A24.

  • ContestedV34 line 100

    "the Y-chromosome star cluster... borne today by an estimated sixteen million men"

    Correct figure (~16 million, 0.5% of world's men), correctly hedged on Genghis attribution. A 2016 follow-up (Wei et al.) pushed the lineage's origin earlier than Genghis; consider noting.

    Checked by Fable F1-C16.

    • Zerjal et al. 2003, AJHG 72:717
  • AccurateV34 line 104

    Satire of the Trades c. 1950 BC; "greater than any profession... none like it"

    Lichtheim: "it's greater than any trade, there's none like it in the land", wording is a fair paraphrase. Book's "on earth" ≠ Lichtheim's "in the land"; minor.

    Checked by Fable F1-A30.

  • AccurateV34 near line 106

    Tiro a slave until 53 BC

    Checked by Fable F1-A31.

  • AccurateV34 near line 109

    Moorjani et al. 2013: Indian groups stopped mixing ~1,900-4,200 years ago

    Checked by Fable F1-A33.

    • AJHG 93:422

Chapter 2: The Agricultural Down Payment

from V34 line 112 · 2 contested, 12 accurate, 1 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 near line 113

    Uruk: 20,000-40,000 people, largest city; beveled-rim bowls ≈ 3/4 of sherds; White Temple platform ~12 m; cone mosaics

    Peak 50-80k slightly later.

    Checked by Fable F1-A34.

  • AccurateV34 near line 121

    Talhelm et al. 2014 rice/wheat China

    Checked by Fable F1-A35.

    • Science 344:603
  • AccurateV34 near line 123

    Alesina, Giuliano & Nunn 2013, QJE 128:469-530; persists among immigrants' children

    Checked by Fable F1-A36.

    • QJE
  • UnverifiedV34 line 123

    Boserup 1970 quote "predominantly male labor forces"

    Boserup's usual phrasing is "male farming systems"; check the exact quotation against Woman's Role in Economic Development p. 24-35 before keeping quotation marks.

    Checked by Fable F1-U4.

  • AccurateV34 near line 125

    Salic law c. 500; daughters set aside 1316/1328; clause "found" 1358 by a monk of Saint-Denis

    Checked by Fable F1-A38.

    • Richard Lescot, 1358
  • AccurateV34 near line 125

    Philip V 1713 semi-Salic; Ferdinand VII 1830; three Carlist wars

    Checked by Fable F1-A39.

  • ContestedV34 line 125

    "Dube and Harish (2020) tracked eighteen European realms... 3,586 years of rule... a woman held the throne in about one year in six"

    Paper: 18 polities, 1480-1913, 193 reigns, queens in 18% of reigns; 3,586 is the number of polity-year observations, not "years of rule" per se. 18% of reigns ≈ one in 5.5, not one in six, and it is reigns, not years. Minor but a reviewer who opens the paper will notice.

    Checked by Fable F1-C3.

  • AccurateV34 line 126

    Anthony Reid quote "the value of daughters was never questioned in Southeast Asia as it was in China, India, and the Middle East"

    Verbatim.

    Checked by Fable F1-A37.

  • AccurateV34 near line 126

    Japan's eight reigning empresses (six 6th-8th c., Meishō, Go-Sakuramachi); Meiji 1889 Imperial House Law; 1947 law kept bar

    Kōgyoku and Kōken each reigned twice (10 reigns, 8 women), text is correct.

    Checked by Fable F1-A40.

  • AccurateV34 near line 126

    Seondeok 632; Cheomseongdae oldest surviving observatory in East Asia; Wu Zetian 690, 15 years

    Checked by Fable F1-A41.

  • AccurateV34 near line 126

    Aceh four queens 1641-1699, ended by fatwa from Mecca

    Checked by Fable F1-A42.

  • AccurateV34 line 127

    Tomoe Gozen quote "a warrior worth a thousand, ready to confront a demon or a god, mounted or on foot"; 300 riders at Awazu 1184

    McCullough 1988 translation, verbatim.

    Checked by Fable F1-A43.

  • AccurateV34 near line 128

    Trung Sisters 40 CE; Joan of Arc burned 1431, men's clothing charged with Deuteronomy

    Checked by Fable F1-A44.

  • AccurateV34 near line 129

    Ki no Tsurayuki wrote Tosa Diary in 935 as a woman

    Checked by Fable F1-A45.

  • ContestedV34 line 129

    "Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji... most often called the world's first novel"; "the Heian court's literary culture grew in a society where women held property... because... rice cultivation had never excluded them"

    Facts about Genji/Sei Shōnagon/Tosa Diary (935) are correct. The causal chain rice→female property→women writers is the contested part: Heian women's property rights derive from uxorilocal marriage and Ritsuryō law, and the kana gate explanation the text itself supplies does the real work.

    Checked by Fable F1-C15.

    • see critic hole H1

Chapter 3: The Sneakers Strike Back

from V34 line 133 · 1 corrected, 3 contested, 12 accurate, 2 unverified · top

  • ContestedV34 line 136

    "By 1000 BC... Perhaps a hundred million people alive"

    McEvedy & Jones and Durand: 50 million; only Biraben gives 100M. Ch 1 uses the low-end 14M for 3300 BC, so the book switches from low-end to high-end series between chapters. "Fifty to a hundred million" would be honest.

    Checked by Fable F1-C4.

  • AccurateV34 near line 138

    Pre-industrial England ~10 maternal deaths/1,000 births; 17th-c. peak 1.7%; lifetime risk 5.6% (1 in 18); 4-6 children

    CAMPOP: 1.2% average, 1.7% peak 1650-74, lifetime 5.6%/1-in-18 for 1550-1800. "Seventy-five times today" ≈ 10‰ vs 0.13‰ = 77×.

    Checked by Fable F1-A46.

  • ContestedV34 line 146

    “Plutarch says a daughter, Suetonius a son.” (Julia’s child)

    Fable read the son tradition as Velleius's and Suetonius as silent on the child's sex; the V33 source check found Velleius, Suetonius and Lucan give a son and Plutarch and Dio a daughter, so the book's pairing was kept.

    Checked by Fable W13 (Errors list); V33 hold H8.

  • AccurateV34 near line 148

    Julia: b. c. 76 BC (22 in 54 BC), married Pompey 59 BC; 55 BC toga miscarriage; died Aug 54 BC; child (son/daughter per source) died days later; buried Campus Martius over consul Domitius Ahenobarbus; Caesar in Britain; games 46 BC; Caesar's pyre beside her tomb

    Ancient sources split on the infant's sex: Velleius (2.47) says a son; the daughter tradition is usually credited to Plutarch (Pompey 53), though many editions leave the sex unstated; Suetonius (Jul. 26) does not specify.

    Checked by Fable F1-A47.

  • AccurateV34 near line 152

    Loudon 2000: MMR plateau to mid-1930s; sulfonamides 1936-37; decline precipitous

    18th-c. "750-1,050" and Sweden/Finland "900 in 1800" not directly re-verified (page 403'd) but consistent with Loudon's tables.

    Checked by Fable F1-A48.

  • AccurateV34 near line 152

    UK MMR 13 per 100,000 in 2022

    Checked by Fable F1-A49.

    • MBRRACE 2020-22: 13.41
  • UnverifiedV34 line 152

    "The lifetime risk for a woman in Britain fell... to about one in 4,800"

    WHO 2020 lifetime risk for UK is ~1 in 6,300-7,000 depending on edition. Check which series.

    Checked by Fable F1-U6.

  • AccurateV34 near line 154

    Women first out-earned men in US bachelor's degrees in 1982

    1981-82: 479,634 F vs 473,364 M.

    Checked by Fable F1-A50.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 154V33 #24

    Was: Today they earn nearly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 65 percent of master’s.

    Now: Today they earn nearly 60 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s.

    'Nearly 60' holds; 65 was high.

    Resolves Fable F1-W1 (wrong).

  • AccurateV34 near line 155

    England pre-1857: divorce by private Act; ~324 acts 1670-1857; four to wives; first 1801

    379 sought, 324 granted, 8 by wives, 4 granted. Jane Addison 1801 (husband's adultery with her sister).

    Checked by Fable F1-A51.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 155

    "two husbands had taken up with their wives' sisters, and two had married again" (the four wives' acts)

    Addison 1801 and Turton 1831 were incestuous adultery; the two bigamy cases (Battersby 1840, Hall 1850) are plausible but unconfirmed.

    Checked by Fable F1-U5.

  • AccurateV34 near line 162

    Pickford: 27, Campbell ranch, Judge Frank Langan, AG Leonard Fowler sued, NV Supreme Court 1922, married Fairbanks March 28, 1920 at minister's home in Glendale; eloped with Moore at 18

    Ranch was at Genoa (Douglas Co.), court in Minden. See C2 for decree date.

    Checked by Fable F1-A52.

  • ContestedV34 line 162

    "She got her divorce on March 2, 1920, sixteen days after she arrived"

    Record-Courier/Nevada Appeal (from court records): arrived Feb 15, decree granted March 3; Pickford Foundation and others say March 2. Also: she swore she came "to regain her health," not only to make Nevada her home. Wikipedia's timeline oddly dates her departure for Nevada as March 2.

    Checked by Fable F1-C2.

  • AccurateV34 near line 166

    Nevada residency 6 mo → 3 mo (1927) → 6 weeks (1931); Balzar signed divorce and gambling laws March 1931; 1930 census ~91,000, smallest state

    March 19, 1931; census 91,058.

    Checked by Fable F1-A53.

  • AccurateV34 near line 166

    Reno 10,313 divorces July 1945-June 1946

    Verbatim match.

    Checked by Fable F1-A54.

  • AccurateV34 near line 168

    NY added grounds 1966; California Family Law Act signed 1969, effective 1970, Reagan divorced; NY no-fault 2010; Indiana 1850s, Sioux Falls 1890s divorce mills

    Checked by Fable F1-A55.

  • AccurateV34 line 172

    Douglass: "would forever unfit him to be a slave"; "From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom"

    Original: "it would forever unfit him to be a slave."

    Checked by Fable F1-A56.

    • Narrative, ch. VI
  • AccurateV34 line 173

    Northup kidnapped 1841; "I was in slavery nine years, and always watchful and on the alert, before I met with the good fortune of obtaining a sheet of paper"; maple-bark ink, duck-feather pen

    Checked by Fable F1-A57.

    • Twelve Years a Slave, ch. XVII

Chapter 4: Those Who Bronze Together

from V34 line 175 · 3 contested, 9 accurate, 2 unverified · top

  • ContestedV34 line 177

    "one of thirty-eight men in the kingdom who can do what he does: thirty-eight hands identified" (repeated: "thirty-eight carriers in one building")

    Held in V33. Fable counted Pylos hands at about 32 (Palaima 1988), but Godart, Les scribes de Pylos (2021), attributes the tablets to 38 identified scribes, so the book's 38 is the newest count. Fable's reading: No published count gives 38. Palaima, The Scribes of Pylos (1988) identified 32 hands.

    Checked by Fable F1-W2.

  • ContestedV34 line 178

    "the ratio of tin to copper is guild knowledge, one part in nine"

    ~10% tin is the textbook bronze; Mycenaean bronzes vary 5-15%. Fine as a round number, but "guild" is anachronistic for LH IIIB.

    Checked by Fable F1-C11.

    • general metallurgy
  • AccurateV34 near line 179

    Pylos: PY Tn 316 (po-ro-wi-to-jo, pa-ki-ja-ne, gold cups and women to Potnia, Manasa, Posidaeia, Thrice-Hero, do-po-ta), untidy and unfinished

    Checked by Fable F1-A58.

    • Palaima; Chadwick
  • AccurateV34 near line 181

    Bay of Navarino/Sphacteria; 2,800 kylikes; bathtub with cups; octopus floor; Polycaste bathes Telemachus

    2,853 kylikes. "Only confirmed fluted columns in Mycenaean architecture", not verified (see U-list).

    Checked by Fable F1-A59.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 181

    "the only confirmed fluted columns in Mycenaean architecture" (Pylos hearth)

    Pylos columns are known from fluted impressions; Tiryns and Mycenae also show fluted column evidence. Soften to "among the few."

    Checked by Fable F1-U7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 182

    Blegen's first trench April 4, 1939; tablets in Bank of Greece vaults until 1950

    Checked by Fable F1-A60.

  • ContestedV34 line 182

    "Blegen... finds the first of what will be six hundred tablets in the season's digging"

    Wikipedia says "around 1,000 Linear B tablets were found" in 1939; other accounts say ~600 in 1939 with the total reaching ~1,100 after 1952. Either state ~600 with a citation or say "hundreds."

    Checked by Fable F1-C9.

  • AccurateV34 near line 183

    Alice Kober d. May 1950 at 43, Brooklyn College, 180,000 cards in cigarette cartons, inflection/grid

    Checked by Fable F1-A61.

  • AccurateV34 line 184

    Ventris BBC July 1, 1952 at 29; Etruscan paper at 18; Chadwick "mere philologist"; killed Sept 6, 1956, Barnet Bypass, parked lorry, aged 34, weeks before book

    "Driven out to his in-laws' to fetch his wallet", not in any standard account (see U-list).

    Checked by Fable F1-A62.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 184

    Ventris "had driven out to his in-laws' to fetch his wallet"

    Not in Wikipedia, Cambridge Classics page, Robinson's biography summaries or the inquest reports ("driving home late at night"). Drop or source.

    Checked by Fable F1-U8.

  • AccurateV34 line 192

    Ramesses III c. 1186-1155; Medinet Habu "conspiracy in their islands," "camp... in Amurru"; Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen, Weshesh

    Checked by Fable F1-A63.

    • Medinet Habu inscription, Breasted trans.
  • AccurateV34 line 199

    Philip ~3 years hostage in Thebes, "zealous follower of Epaminondas" (Plutarch); Pangaion >1,000 talents (Diodorus 16.8.6)

    Checked by Fable F1-A64.

    • Plut. Pelopidas 26; Diod. 16.8
  • AccurateV34 near line 200

    Alexander 335 BC Getae grain flattened with sarissas (Arrian 1.4); Thebes >6,000 dead, >30,000 sold (Diodorus 17.14); Pindar's house spared (Arrian 1.9)

    Checked by Fable F1-A65.

    • Arrian; Diodorus
  • AccurateV34 near line 201

    Arrian 2nd c. AD from Ptolemy; Seleucia on the Tigris; Cleopatra learned Egyptian, predecessors didn't (Plutarch Antony 27); Egypt Roman 30 BC

    Checked by Fable F1-A66.

Chapter 5: What the Genome Actually Says

from V34 line 207 · 3 corrected, 12 accurate, 3 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 near line 211

    Manusmriti: Brahmin mouth, Kshatriya arms; anuloma/pratiloma

    Checked by Fable F1-A67.

    • Manusmriti 1.31; 10.5ff
  • AccurateV34 near line 218

    Finnish Disease Heritage: 36 disorders; bottleneck ~4,000 years ago

    Checked by Fable F1-A68.

  • AccurateV34 near line 218

    Florida panther: 20-30 left early 1990s; eight female Texas pumas released 1995; kinked tails, cowlicks, heart defects, cryptorchidism

    Checked by Fable F1-A69.

  • AccurateV34 near line 219

    CREBRF (Minster et al. 2016): ~25% of Samoan chromosomes, >1 BMI point per copy, lower diabetes risk, positive selection

    Allele freq 0.26; +1.36 kg/m² per copy; T2D OR 0.59. (Wikipedia CREBRF page lacks this; cite the paper.)

    Checked by Fable F1-A70.

    • Minster et al., Nature Genetics 48:1049 (2016
  • UnverifiedV34 line 219

    "In 2019 roughly fifty men of Samoan descent were playing on NFL rosters, about three percent... nearly forty times their share"

    Widely repeated journalism figure; no roster census found. Label "by one count."

    Checked by Fable F1-U10.

  • AccurateV34 near line 221

    Amish Ellis-van Creveld traced to Samuel King and wife, arrived 1744; ~half with heart defect

    Wikipedia gives 60% with ASD; "about half" acceptable. Founder couple per McKusick.

    Checked by Fable F1-A71.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 221

    "About five hundred Amish adults crossed... between the 1730s and about 1770"

    Lancaster Amish are usually said to descend from ~200 founders; "five hundred" may be total Amish immigrants. Check Hostetler/McKusick.

    Checked by Fable F1-U11.

  • AccurateV34 near line 222

    Samaritans: 146 in 1917; ~860 today; Paleo-Hebrew-derived script; own Torah

    2024: ~900. Colour-blindness/deafness rates: see U-list.

    Checked by Fable F1-A72.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 222

    Samaritans: colour blindness "roughly a quarter of the men," high congenital deafness

    Bonné 1963/1966 reported high colour-blindness among Samaritan males; exact figure needs the citation.

    Checked by Fable F1-U9.

  • AccurateV34 near line 223

    Nakatsuka et al. 2017: many Indian groups with founder events stronger than Ashkenazim/Finns

    81 of 263 groups.

    Checked by Fable F1-A73.

    • Nature Genetics 49:1305
  • AccurateV34 near line 224

    Born in Bradford: 11,396 babies 2007-11; anomaly rate ~2× national; consanguinity doubled risk; ~31% attributable; maternal university education roughly halved risk (Lancet 2013)

    Checked by Fable F1-A74.

    • Sheridan et al., Lancet 382:1350 (2013
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 225V34 #8 [3a]

    Was: the places that held more exam quotas still put their children through more school (Chapter 15).

    Now: the places that had produced more jinshi, the exam’s top degree, still put their children through more school (Chapter 15).

    Page: “the places that held more exam quotas still put their children through more school (Chapter 15).” Ch 15 (line 703): Chen, Kung and Ma measured jinshi produced, not quota, and the shengyuan “quotas left no significant mark on schooling today.” Ch 5 now says what Ch 15 says.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 225)
  • AccurateV34 near line 226

    Joshua ben Gamla ordinance; Botticini & Eckstein 2012

    Checked by Fable F1-A75.

    • The Chosen Few
  • AccurateV34 line 227

    Polish bracteates with Hebrew "Mieszko, king of Poland"; Mieszko never crowned

    Checked by Fable F1-A76.

    • Mieszko III bracteates
  • AccurateV34 near line 229

    Carmi et al. 2014: Ashkenazi bottleneck ~350 people, 600-800 years ago; Tay-Sachs 1/30 vs ~1/250; Gaucher 1/15

    Checked by Fable F1-A77.

    • Carmi et al., Nat Commun 5:4835
  • AccurateV34 near line 231

    Dor Yeshorim founded 1983 by Rabbi Josef Ekstein after losing four children; Tay-Sachs incidence down >90%; Israel free ancestry-based screening since Jan 2013

    Checked by Fable F1-A78.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 231V33 #33

    Was: Since January 2013 Israel’s Ministry of Health has offered couples planning a child, or already expecting one, free carrier screening, and the state picks the panel by ancestry: Jews by the community their families came from, Arabs and Druze by religion and home town, the Bedouin of the Negev by tribe.

    Now: From January 2013 Israel’s Ministry of Health offered couples planning a child, or already expecting one, free carrier screening, and until November 2024 the state picked the panel by ancestry: Jews by the community their families came from, Arabs and Druze by religion and home town, the Bedouin of the Negev by tribe.

    Past tense for the ancestry panel; the sorting-in-reverse line and the dragon line (Will 9/26 18:14) stand.

    Resolves Astra #4 (wrong).

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 231V33 #34

    Was: The lines the old gates drew are the lines the state now reads to decide what to test for.

    Now: The lines the old gates drew were the lines the state read to decide what to test for.

    Tense only.

    Flagged by Astra (WRONG 4).

Chapter 6: The Spoken Word, Its Magic and Misery

from V34 line 245 · 2 corrected, 2 contested, 5 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 near line 250

    Madjedbebe 65,000 years; Nunn & Reid 2016, 21 coastal locations; Rottnest/Carnac/Garden Island 7,500-8,900 ya; Wellesley Islands

    Checked by Fable F1-A79.

    • Nunn & Reid, Australian Geographer 47:11 (2016); Clarkson et al., Nature 2017
  • ContestedV34 line 250

    "In 2023 a team of marine archaeologists at Murujuga... two freshwater springs now fourteen meters under the water of Flying Foam Passage... Timmy Douglas knew them"

    The published finding (Benjamin et al., PLOS ONE 2020; fieldwork 2017-19) is one submerged spring at −14 m with a single artefact, minimum age 8,500 cal BP. The "2023," "two springs," and the Timmy Douglas anecdote could not be verified; if they come from a later press piece, cite it.

    Checked by Fable F1-C5.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 251V34 #2 [1b]

    Was: and for fifty thousand years the carriers held. And they could not compound.

    Now: and for fifty thousand years the carriers held. And they could compound only at a crawl.

    Page: “And they could not compound.” Ch 7 line 329 says “Both systems compound. They compound at different rates.” Swapped to the rate definition; the next paragraph’s “That is a hard sentence to say” still lands.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 251)
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 252V34 #3 [1c]

    Was: The song preserves. It does not build. Each performance is a retrieval, not an addition. The knowledge stays alive, beautifully alive, but it stays the same size.

    Now: The song preserves. It builds only as fast as memory will stretch, a verse or a landmark in a lifetime, and it loses a verse whenever a singer dies before passing it on. Most performances are retrievals, not additions. The knowledge stays alive, beautifully alive, but it grows at the pace of memory.

    Page: “It does not build… it stays the same size” is the absolute denial Astra quotes. The same chapter’s Nunn/Reid songlines (coastlines drowned seven millennia ago) show additions entering the song. Swapped to slow, lossy growth; “It could not accelerate” is kept.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 252)
  • AccurateV34 near line 256

    Thylacine gone from mainland ~3,500 ya after dingo (~3,500-4,000 ya); dingo never reached Tasmania

    Checked by Fable F1-A80.

  • ContestedV34 line 258

    "When the sea rose over the land bridge roughly twelve thousand years ago" / "twelve thousand years alone on its island" (Tasmania)

    Published dates for Bass Strait closure range from ~14,000 to ~8,000 years ago depending on which sill is meant; Henrich's own paper uses ~10,000. "Ten to twelve thousand" is defensible; a flat "twelve" is not.

    Checked by Fable F1-C6.

  • AccurateV34 near line 259

    Tasmania: bone points and fish gone ~3,500-4,000 ya; Henrich 2004; Kline & Boyd 2010; Vaesen et al. 2016 critique

    Good that the critique is cited.

    Checked by Fable F1-A81.

  • AccurateV34 near line 260

    Truganini b. c. 1812 Recherche Bay; mother killed by sailors; fiancé drowned by timber-getters; sisters taken by sealers; Robinson 1829; Oyster Cove 1847; d. May 8, 1876; pop. 3,000-8,000 in 1803

    Checked by Fable F1-A82.

  • AccurateV34 near line 260

    Fanny Cochrane Smith recordings 1899 and 1903; d. 1905

    Checked by Fable F1-A83.

Chapter 7: The New World Meets the ‘Civilized World’

from V34 line 262 · 5 corrected, 7 contested, 20 accurate, 3 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 262

    Feral-horse exclosure studies: less grass, less shrub, more bare ground on horse side

    Great Basin exclosure data support it.

    Checked by Fable F1-A93.

    • Beever & Brussard 2000, Western N. Am. Naturalist; Beever et al. 2008
  • ContestedV34 line 263

    spine of a continent and governed ten to twelve million people through a road network of forty thousand kilometers, the Qhapaq Ñan, a system of paved highways, suspension bridges, and relay stations where message runners called chasquis could c

    Scribal working lifespan inferred from population mortality. High child mortality or low life expectancy at birth does not by itself establish the remaining lifespan of an already trained adult scribe.

    Checked by Astra #20.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 263V33 #25

    Was: About nine hundred survive in the world’s museums today.

    Now: About fourteen hundred survive in the world’s museums and collections today.

    'and collections' added because the 2021 count includes private collections.

    Resolves Fable F1-W3 (wrong (outdated)).

  • AccurateV34 line 265

    Guaman Poma (c. 1615): "Why doesn't it tell me? The book doesn't even talk to me!" ; Xerez printed Seville 1534

    Checked by Fable F1-A85.

    • Nueva corónica f. 385
  • AccurateV34 near line 266

    alpa threw it away. Valverde cried sacrilege. Pizarro gave the signal. The Spanish opened fire with arquebuses and falconets into a crowd of unarmed people in an enclosed courtyard. The killing lasted less than two hours. Between two thousand a

    Cheatgrass can reinforce a grass/fire cycle. The mechanism of invasive annual grass, increased fire frequency and impaired sagebrush recovery is supported. Frequency and direction vary with environment; avoid making every site identical.

    Checked by Astra #28.

  • AccurateV34 near line 266

    Cajamarca Nov 16, 1532: 168 men, 62 horses; litter of 80 lords; 5-6,000 attendants; 2,000-7,000 dead; no Spaniard killed; ransom room 22×17 ft; 13,420 lb gold, 26,000 lb silver; executed July 26, 1533

    Aug 29 alternative is discredited.

    Checked by Fable F1-A84.

  • AccurateV34 near line 267

    Toledo 1573 mita to Potosí ~13,000/yr

    Checked by Fable F1-A86.

    • standard ~13,500
  • ContestedV34 line 267

    "The Third Council of Lima in 1583 ordered the burning of quipus as instruments of idolatry"

    The council ordered destruction of quipus used to record non-Christian offerings/idolatry, not all quipus; colonial courts continued to accept quipu testimony for decades. The absolutism serves the "cheatgrass" argument but overstates the order.

    Checked by Fable F1-C8.

  • ContestedV34 line 269

    "an invasive grass called Bromus tectorum arrived accidentally in the 1890s, mixed into crop seed"

    First US record is 1861 (NY/PA); the Intermountain West/Great Basin introduction is ~1889-1894 (Mack 1981) via contaminated grain/packing. Say "reached the Great Basin in the 1890s." Sagebrush fire-return 60-110 yr is for Wyoming big sagebrush; mountain big sagebrush is 15-40.

    Checked by Fable F1-C12.

  • AccurateV34 near line 273

    Cortés enters Tenochtitlan Nov 8, 1519; Montezuma d. June 29, 1520; city falls Aug 13, 1521; 13-20 pre-conquest codices survive

    Checked by Fable F1-A87.

  • AccurateV34 line 276

    Maní July 12, 1562; 27 books by Landa's count; ~5,000 idols, 13 altars, 197 vessels; 4,500 tortured, >150 dead, 13 suicides; "regretted to an amazing degree..."; trial in Spain, absolved 1569; Knorosov 1952

    158 deaths in Clendinnen.

    Checked by Fable F1-A88.

  • AccurateV34 near line 277

    Dresden Codex 78 pages; four surviving Maya codices; Long Count base 3114 BC; Venus table ~2 h error over ~5 centuries

    Checked by Fable F1-A89.

  • ContestedV34 line 277

    "The Maya had calculated the solar year... close to the modern value of 365.2422"

    Already hedged in text; many Mayanists reject the "365.2420" tropical-year claim as an artefact of correlation arithmetic. Keep the hedge.

    Checked by Fable F1-C14.

    • Mayanist literature
  • AccurateV34 near line 279

    Quispe Sisa/Inés, daughter of Huayna Capac; daughter Francisca married uncle Hernando Pizarro (prisoner at La Mota) at ~18

    Checked by Fable F1-A90.

  • AccurateV34 near line 280

    Tenochtitlan-Cajamarca ≈ 3,700 km

    Checked by Fable F1-A91.

    • great-circle ≈ 3,730 km
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 280V34 #5 [2a]

    Was: No trade route connected the two empires. No messenger system linked them.

    Now: No embassy had ever passed between the two empires, and whatever trade crept between them went hand to hand through peoples who carried goods, not news. No messenger system linked them.

    Page: “No trade route connected the two empires”, and the next paragraph (line 281) has smallpox “traveling south along trade networks.” Contradiction on the page (Astra ERRORS #2).

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 280)
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 280V34 #6 [2b]

    Was: magnificently engineered within its borders, and without a single corridor out.

    Now: magnificently engineered within its borders, and without a single diplomatic or intelligence corridor out.

    Same paragraph: “without a single corridor out” is contradicted by line 281. Now names the bottleneck: diplomatic or intelligence corridor.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 280)
  • Corrected in V34V34 line 280V34 #7 [2c]

    Was: no codex painter could read, and the gap was absolute.

    Now: no codex painter could read, and not one word of it crossed.

    Page: “the gap was absolute”, followed by “But something did cross that gap.” Replaced the absolute with the specific thing that did not cross (the warning). Punch kept.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 280)
  • AccurateV34 near line 281

    Smallpox reached Inca 1524-27, killed Huayna Capac and heir

    Checked by Fable F1-A92.

  • ContestedV34 line 284

    he plaza at Cajamarca, and the herds that went feral behind them now work the Great Basin harder than any cow a rancher has to answer for. Studies that fenced them off found the horse side with less grass, less shrub and more bare dirt, and bare dirt is where

    Universal feral-horse versus managed-cattle comparison. Horse exclosures establish effects of horses, not the universal claim that horses damage the Great Basin more than any accountable rancher’s cow. Stocking rates, season, drought, site and grazing history matter.

    Checked by Astra #10.

  • ContestedV34 near line 284

    nd the natives all suffer together, because the newcomers are better competitors and will always win the war for a resource that was never theirs to begin with. Very American West. The same fence has a price, and the pronghorn pays it. A pronghorn is

    Ecological inevitability used as a historical law. Cheatgrass/fire feedback is well supported; inevitable victory in every unmolested sagebrush pocket is not.

    Checked by Astra #11.

  • AccurateV34 line 284

    y cow a rancher has to answer for. Studies that fenced them off found the horse side with less grass, less shrub and more bare dirt, and bare dirt is where cheatgrass goes. The seed does not walk. It rides. It rides under a saddle and stuck to a spur

    Horse grazing can reduce herbaceous biomass. The USGS-hosted multisite exclosure study supports reduced total herbaceous and grass biomass. Its finding does not by itself support all shrub, bare-ground or plant-community claims; those need their separately cited studies.

    Checked by Astra #25.

  • AccurateV34 line 284

    the guts of the cattle and sheep the ranchers move from allotment to allotment, in horse dung, and now in the tread of the trucks and quads that go where no saddle ever bothered to. Draw the line across the land and you can see where people an

    Viable cheatgrass seeds can pass through horses. King and colleagues experimentally germinated cheatgrass from feral-horse feces. This validates the mechanism, not its primacy over other vectors. The study explicitly calls for comparative work on livestock, wildlife and horses.

    Checked by Astra #26.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 284

    "Grass is better on the inside of the wire than the outside... The outside belongs to the horses"

    Fine as field observation; do not present as a study finding.

    Checked by Fable F1-U13.

  • AccurateV34 line 285

    o crawl under. Biologists who build wildlife-friendly fence set the bottom strand smooth, sixteen to eighteen inches off the ground, for exactly that animal. But the hole is always in the same place, the wind always blows the same way, and the tum

    Pronghorn-friendly bottom-wire clearance. Official wildlife guidance supports a smooth bottom wire 16-18 inches above ground; pronghorn commonly pass under fences. This does not independently verify the scene’s tumbleweed/coyote observations.

    Checked by Astra #27.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 285

    an thistle, another stowaway, pile up against the wire until the crawl space is gone. The coyotes learn which corner the pronghorn get walked into. The line that saves the steppe can kill the sprinter. A fence is not good or bad. It depends on wh

    Coyotes learning fence corners in this described setting. The fence specifications and movement constraint are independently supported. I did not locate a study or dated field record establishing the particular learned-predator behavior narrated here.

    Checked by Astra #46.

  • AccurateV34 near line 285

    Pronghorn: fastest in N. America, crawls under fences; wildlife-friendly bottom wire smooth at 16-18 in; Russian thistle a Eurasian stowaway piling against fences

    Standard spec: smooth bottom wire ≥16 in (18 preferred).

    Checked by Fable F1-A94.

    • Montana FWP / Paige 2012 A Landowner's Guide to Wildlife Friendly Fences
  • AccurateV34 near line 287

    San Sabá March 16, 1758, ~2,000 warriors; Terreros killed; Molina survived; Twin Villages Oct 1759

    See C7 on numbers.

    Checked by Fable F1-A95.

  • ContestedV34 line 288

    "Colonel Diego Ortiz Parrilla led six hundred men north"; presidio "four miles away"

    Sources give ~500 soldiers plus Apache auxiliaries (some say ~600 total); presidio was ~3 miles (4.8 km) away. Attackers were Comanche, Wichita/Taovaya, Tonkawa, Hasinai, Bidai, Yojuane, "Comanche, Wichita, and allied" is fine.

    Checked by Fable F1-C7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 294

    Pueblo Revolt Aug 1680, 12 years; Comanche Peace 1786; Quanah surrendered Fort Sill June 1875; Cynthia Ann taken at 9, recaptured 1860

    Checked by Fable F1-A96.

  • AccurateV34 near line 296

    Hongi Hika 1820 England, George IV, Samuel Lee at Cambridge, muskets traded in Sydney; Musket Wars c. 1807-45, 20,000-40,000 dead; Waitangi 1840

    "Three hundred muskets" is the usual figure; Wikipedia says "several hundred."

    Checked by Fable F1-A97.

  • AccurateV34 near line 307

    Yamen 1279 (21 years after 1258); Romer Nobel 2018; Yuan exam lapse until 1315; Ming exam 1370; Chanyuan 1005

    Checked by Fable F1-A98.

  • AccurateV34 near line 317

    Laurion strike 483 BC, Themistocles, 200 ships (Herodotus 7.144); Nicias 1,000 slaves at an obol a day (Xenophon Poroi 4.14)

    Aristotle's Ath. Pol. says 100 ships, worth a footnote.

    Checked by Fable F1-A99.

    • Herodotus; Xenophon
  • UnverifiedV34 line 327

    "Aboriginal communities have managed fire for at least eleven thousand years, and perhaps forty thousand"

    No standard 11,000-year figure; cite (Bowman? Gammage?).

    Checked by Fable F1-U12.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 331V34 #4 [1d]

    Was: the expensive, slow-maturing, vulnerable one is the only one that compounds.

    Now: the expensive, slow-maturing, vulnerable one is the only one that compounds at speed.

    Page: “the only one that compounds”, two paragraphs after “Both systems compound.” Astra ERRORS #1 names this return to one-system compounding. Two words added. This is outside the Ch 1/Ch 6 swaps the brief named, so it is flagged for Sol.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 331)

Chapter 8: The Scribe’s Advantage

from V34 line 341 · 2 corrected, 15 contested, 18 accurate, 2 unverified · top

Chapter 9: The Dragon Learns to Take a Test

from V34 line 407 · 5 corrected, 3 contested, 14 accurate, 2 unverified · top

Chapter 10: Caste and Calculus

from V34 line 455 · 7 corrected, 5 contested, 15 accurate · top

  • ContestedV34 near line 456

    Ch 10. Caste and Calculus Sometime around 1490, in the village of Trkkantiyur on the Malabar Coast of southwestern India, in what is now Kerala, a man named Nilakantha Somayaj

    Kerala mathematics equals calculus in every meaningful sense. The achievement of infinite series is secure; equivalence to the later general differential/integral calculus is a historiographical claim, not a settled synonym. Ramasubramanian argues for calculus with a specified scope.

    Checked by Astra #14.

  • AccurateV34 near line 459

    Nilakantha b. 1444 at Trikkantiyur (46 in 1490); pupil of Damodara, son of Parameshvara; Parameshvara's 55 years of eclipse observations

    Checked by Fable F2-A31.

  • ContestedV34 line 459

    "Nilakantha wrote a number into the palm leaf that Europe would not produce for nearly two centuries ... Leibniz would publish in 1682"

    Gregory had the arctan series in 1671, Leibniz found π/4 in 1673 (published Acta Eruditorum 1682). 1490→1671 = 181 years, so "nearly two centuries" holds, but a reviewer will ask why Gregory is absent.

    Checked by Fable F2-C18.

  • ContestedV34 line 460

    "They had, in every meaningful sense, calculus"

    Katz, Bressoud, Plofker: Kerala had power series and term-by-term integration for specific functions but no general concept of derivative/integral or fundamental theorem. The book already hedges elsewhere; this sentence does not.

    Checked by Fable F2-C19.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 462V33 #1

    Was: The palm-leaf manuscripts sat in illams along the Malabar Coast, copied by hand within the Namboodiri Brahmin community that produced every major figure in the school, and they stayed there.

    Now: The palm-leaf manuscripts sat in illams along the Malabar Coast, copied by hand within the Namboodiri Brahmin and temple-caste households that produced every major figure in the school, and they stayed there.

    Variyar (Sankara Variar's family were temple-assistants) and Pisharody are Ambalavasi temple castes, not Namboodiri; the book names both men in this chapter.

    Resolves Fable F2-W3 (wrong (and internally contradicted)); Astra #15 (contested).

  • AccurateV34 near line 465

    Euler: ~300 correspondents, ~3,000 (3,100-3,200) letters survive; Catherine's academy recalled him from Berlin 1766

    Checked by Fable F2-A33.

  • AccurateV34 near line 467

    Madhava late 14th c.; Yuktibhasa c. 1530 (Malayalam prose); school 14th-16th c.; Rajagopal rediscovery 1940s; no manuscript evidence of transmission to Europe

    Book's hedge on C. K. Raju matches consensus.

    Checked by Fable F2-A32.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 467V34 #10 [4a]

    Was: That is roughly one successful transmission event every forty-five years.

    Now: That is roughly one named handoff every forty-five years, and a named handoff is only the part of the traffic the palm leaves happened to keep.

    Page: “one successful transmission event every forty-five years” treats five named teachers as a census (Astra ERRORS #5, CONTESTED #15). Now “named handoff”, with the survival bias stated in one clause.

    Resolves Fable F2-C20 (contested).

  • AccurateV34 near line 468

    Leibniz π/4 series published Acta Eruditorum 1682

    (see C18)

    Checked by Fable F2-A34.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 468V34 #11 [4b]

    Was: Hundreds of transmission events in the time it took Kerala to manage four.

    Now: Hundreds of transmission events in the time Kerala’s surviving leaves record four.

    Page: “in the time it took Kerala to manage four”, the phrasing the brief bans. Now it is what the surviving leaves record.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 468)
  • AccurateV34 near line 470

    First press in India Goa 1556; first in Kerala Vypeekotta/Cochin 1577 (Jesuit)

    Checked by Fable F2-A35.

  • AccurateV34 near line 473

    Kerala rainfall ~120 in/yr; Neelakurinji blooms every 12 years; lion-tailed macaque, Malabar civet endemic

    Checked by Fable F2-A36.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 474V33 #2

    Was: The caste system that gave the Namboodiri Brahmins the leisure to do mathematics also ensured that nobody outside their community learned what they had done.

    Now: The caste system that gave the Namboodiri Brahmins the leisure to do mathematics also ensured that nobody below the temple castes around them learned what they had done.

    Same error in the same chapter: Variyar and Pisharati were outside the Brahmin community and learned it.

    Flagged by Sol, Fable (W2), Astra (#15): same error, same chapter.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 475V34 #12 [4c]

    Was: a little more dependent on the next student showing up, until eventually one did not.

    Now: a little more dependent on the next student showing up, until the students came to keep the texts and stopped coming to extend them.

    Page: the tradition lasted “until eventually one did not” [student showed up]. Line 486’s Whish scene has living learned men in 1820 (“Living men, not ruins”, the Raja’s brother an “acute mathematician”). Reconciled.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 475)
  • AccurateV34 near line 478

    Aryabhata 499 at Kusumapura; Brahmagupta 628 at Bhillamala (zero as number); Sindhind embassy c. 770 to al-Mansur; Baghdad founded 762; al-Khwarizmi; Fibonacci Liber Abaci 1202, learned at Bugia

    Checked by Fable F2-A37.

  • AccurateV34 near line 482

    His evidence was that the men who used the rules could not prove them. For a while Whish accepted it. The men who recited the verses had not shown him why they were true. Then he found the Yuktibhasa, Jyeshthadeva’s prose, in the language he had w

    Whish temporarily accepted European-origin arguments. Do not falsely flag this as invented. MacTutor explicitly quotes Warren’s report that Whish changed his view, then recovered his earlier view after finding proofs.

    Checked by Astra #34.

  • ContestedV34 line 482

    "Whish's paper ... published by the Royal Asiatic Society in 1834"; "read at the Royal Asiatic Society on 15 December 1832"

    Published Trans. RAS vol. 3 (1834). MacTutor says it was presented "in December 1832, in Madras" (Madras Literary Society, RAS auxiliary); the Transactions header reads "Read 15th December 1832". Say "read in December 1832". Wikipedia's Kerala page says 1835, the book's 1834 is right.

    Checked by Fable F2-C16.

  • AccurateV34 line 484

    Warren, Kala Sankalita 1825: "a native astronomer ... gave me the well-known series"; Hyne's note "The Hindus never invented this series; it was communicated with many others, by Europeans, to some learned Natives in modern times"

    Wording matches.

    Checked by Fable F2-A39.

  • AccurateV34 line 486

    Whish 1834 quotations: "most eminently jealous", "mine of wealth in mathematics", "by frequent intercourse with this interesting society", Kadathanad Raja's brother "a very intelligent man and acute mathematician", "not, even to this day, known to the eastward of the range of Ghats"

    Standard quotations from the paper.

    Checked by Fable F2-A40.

  • AccurateV34 near line 487

    demonstrations themselves. The paper was read at the Royal Asiatic Society on 15 December 1832. That year the Company’s list had him as acting judge at Cuddapah, in the dry country east of the Ghats where, by his own sentence, nobody had heard

    Whish’s presentation, death and posthumous paper. MacTutor documents presentation on December 15, 1832, death April 14, 1833 aged 38, and publication in 1834. The narrative’s chronology here checks out.

    Checked by Astra #33.

  • AccurateV34 near line 487

    Whish b. 1794, d. 14 April 1833 at Cuddapah aged 38 (tombstone); paper in Trans. RAS 3 (1834); second paper never written

    Checked by Fable F2-A38.

  • ContestedV34 line 488

    De Morgan 1843 "clever hoax"; C. P. Brown 1863 "constructed under Mr. Whish's guidance in A.D. 1820, by Ayya Sastri"

    De Morgan's "Viga Ganita" (Penny Cyclopaedia vol. 26, 1843) and Brown's Carnatic Chronology (1863, "On Some Fraudulent Documents") are confirmed; the verbatim quotations could not be checked online. Keep with page citations.

    Checked by Fable F2-C17.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 489V34 #13 [4d]

    Was: Three hundred years of silence, not because the work was lost

    Now: Three hundred years of silence beyond the Ghats, not because the work was lost

    Page: “Three hundred years of silence” when Whish found living interlocutors. Scoped to beyond the Ghats, which echoes Whish’s own sentence at line 486 (“not… known to the eastward of the range of Ghats”).

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 489)
  • Corrected in V33V34 near line 494V33 #3

    Was: The monopoly was confined to Namboodiri Brahmins, the class regulated itself, and no competing tradition existed in the region.

    Now: The monopoly was confined to Namboodiri Brahmins and the temple castes around them, nobody below got in, the class regulated itself, and no competing tradition existed in the region.

    The gate admitted the temple castes around the Brahmins and nobody below.

    Flagged by Sol (WRONG 1), Fable (W2).

  • AccurateV34 near line 496

    Gautama Dharmasutra 12.4: ears filled with molten tin or lac; one of the oldest dharmasutras

    Checked by Fable F2-A41.

  • AccurateV34 near line 496

    Namboodiri primogeniture + sambandham with Nair women

    Checked by Fable F2-A42.

  • AccurateV34 near line 497

    Malabar: Act V of 1843; Travancore proclamation 24 June 1855

    Checked by Fable F2-A43.

Chapter 11: The Stolen River

from V34 line 500 · 5 corrected, 6 contested, 14 accurate, 3 unverified · top

  • UnverifiedV34 near line 501

    of Arab navigators, compressed into a single crossing. He bartered away his continent for cab fare. Ibn Majid wanted passage: home, or onward, or simply the favor of the men with the guns on the ships. What he traded for it was the key to the India

    The pilot’s private cash motive. Neither the disputed identification nor later tradition establishes the named man’s private motive. The cab-fare formulation is an authorial analogy, not a recoverable historical thought. Preserve it only with that epistemic distinction visible.

    Checked by Astra #48.

  • AccurateV34 near line 501

    Ibn Majid b. c. 1432 Julfar; Kitab al-Fawa'id

    Checked by Fable F2-A44.

  • ContestedV34 line 503

    "Malindi to Calicut was two thousand miles of open water"; "Twenty-three days"

    Great-circle ≈ 2,600 statute miles (~2,300 nmi). Crossing 24 Apr-20 May 1498 = 26 days by most chronologies; "23 days" is a common secondary figure.

    Checked by Fable F2-C21.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 503V33 #14

    Was: Ibn Majid (or a navigator matching his description; the sources argue) guided da Gama across.

    Now: A Gujarati pilot the ruler of Malindi lent him guided da Gama across; later tellers put Ibn Majid’s name on the man, and the specialists have taken it back off.

    Ibn Majid keeps the opening portrait and the Kitab al-Fawa’id; the man at the tiller becomes the unnamed Malindi pilot, with Ibn Majid as the later attribution.

    Resolves Fable F2-C22 (contested, hedge is correct); Astra #16 (contested).

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 503V33 #15

    Was: The accumulated knowledge of three generations of Arab navigators, compressed into a single crossing.

    Now: The accumulated knowledge of generations of Arab and Gujarati navigators, compressed into a single crossing.

    'Three generations' described Ibn Majid's family; the documented pilot was Gujarati.

    Flagged by Grok, Astra (follows from #14).

  • ContestedV34 line 505

    "The overland Silk Road ... became obsolete in a single generation"

    Overland trade had already declined with the Ming/Timurid break-up; caravan trade continued into the 17th c. Historians (Rossabi) reject "obsolete in a generation".

    Checked by Fable F2-C23.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 505V33 #16

    Was: Ibn Majid wanted passage: home, or onward, or simply the favor of the men with the guns on the ships.

    Now: The pilot wanted passage: home, or onward, or simply the favor of the men with the guns on the ships.

    Subject swap only.

    Flagged by Grok, Astra (follows from #14).

  • AccurateV34 near line 510

    Landa's Maní auto-da-fé 1562; three complete codices + fragment of a fourth survive

    Checked by Fable F2-A55.

  • AccurateV34 near line 512

    Teutonic Knights in Prussia 1230 (Golden Bull of Rimini 1226; papal bull of Rieti 1234); Old Prussian extinct c. 1700-1710; Prussia took the name

    Checked by Fable F2-A45.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 516

    Abel Will letter of 26 July 1559 to Funck; Georg von Eichicht, captain at Grünhoff; Megott's 1595 petition; Will blind, hospital 1575; Megott Tolk "since at least 1547"; Duke Albrecht's 1554 order; Biegiethen farmhouse

    Almost certainly from Trautmann, Die altpreussischen Sprachdenkmäler (1910) / Mažiulis. Cite.

    Checked by Fable F2-U2.

  • ContestedV34 near line 517

    old Prussian lord of the dead, standing in for the place. It went slowly, and on July 26, 1559, Will wrote to Funck to say why. He had hoped to use his Tolk at this work in peace, “so that such work would go forward so much the faster, since he

    Exact date and evidentiary basis of Abel Will’s labor complaint. The translation, interpreter and pressure on his labor are documented. A historical-commission discussion also gives a 1554 request concerning the interpreter, while the scene specifies July 26, 1559. These may be different letters.

    Checked by Astra #17.

  • AccurateV34 line 517

    into the Prussian language.” The book came out of Hans Daubmann’s press in Königsberg in 1561, with a preface by the duke, and it is the longest thing the Prussian language ever left behind. The duke’s preface proposed schooling poor Prussian

    Abel Will, Paul Megott and the 1561 Enchiridion. The translation’s date and the collaboration of Will with the Prussian-speaking interpreter are supported by linguistic scholarship. Confidence about their exact spoken exchanges or mental states is separate.

    Checked by Astra #35.

  • UnverifiedV34 near line 517

    ndangon. When the Creed reached the descent into hell, the word that went on the page was Pickullien: the old Prussian lord of the dead, standing in for the place. It went slowly, and on July 26, 1559, Will wrote to Funck to say why. He had hoped to

    A particular pagan-to-Christian substitution as proof of the translator’s intent. Old Prussian texts preserve relevant lexical material, but a gloss’s etymology and the translators’ deliberate intention are different propositions. The Elbing glossary already pairs Pyculs with hell.

    Checked by Astra #47.

  • AccurateV34 near line 518

    1561 Enchiridion: 132 pages, Abel Will (pastor at Pobethen), Paul Megott (interpreter, probably illiterate), printed by Hans Daubmann, Königsberg, Duke Albrecht's preface; "Tāwa Noūson kas tu essei Endangon"

    Pickullien for hell is in the Enchiridion (Pickūls = lord of the dead).

    Checked by Fable F2-A46.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 518V33 #32

    Was: Everything anyone knows about how the Old Prussians said their own words was taken down by a German who could not speak them from a peasant who could not read them, on the days the captain let him sit.

    Now: Past two thin catechisms of 1545 and a few word lists, everything anyone knows about how the Old Prussians said their own words was taken down by a German who could not speak them from a peasant who could not read them, on the days the captain let him sit.

    Keeps 'everything anyone knows' and makes it true by scoping it.

    Resolves Astra #2 (wrong).

  • AccurateV34 near line 519

    Lithuania officially pagan until 1387; Jogaila baptised 1386 for Polish crown

    Checked by Fable F2-A47.

  • AccurateV34 near line 525

    Alhambra Decree 31 March 1492; deadline 31 July extended to 2 Aug; Columbus sailed from Palos 3 Aug

    Checked by Fable F2-A48.

  • ContestedV34 line 526

    Zacuto: "His Almanach Perpetuum, completed in 1478"; "his tenure, his observatory"

    1478 is the Hebrew Ha-ḥibbur ha-gadol; Almanach Perpetuum is Vizinho's Latin abridgment printed at Leiria 1496. Zacuto had no observatory.

    Checked by Fable F2-C24.

  • ContestedV34 line 527

    Expulsion "removed an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people"

    Modern range 40,000-200,000 (Kamen ~40k; older figures much higher). Fine with "at least".

    Checked by Fable F2-C25.

  • AccurateV34 near line 528

    Zacuto b. Salamanca 1452; João II; Vizinho's Latin/Castilian; Manuel I 1497 forced conversion; died c. 1515 (Damascus/Jerusalem)

    (see C24)

    Checked by Fable F2-A49.

  • AccurateV34 near line 531

    Goa 1510, Malacca 1511, Hormuz 1515; Ottomans took Mamluk Egypt 1517

    Checked by Fable F2-A50.

  • ContestedV34 line 537

    d peace. In the version of his speech that has come down to us, he told the war council: “Your enemies are like the sands in the bed of your rivers; when taken away they only give place for more to come and settle there.” He was describing cheatgrass a generation before

    Numaga quotation has a traceable but retrospective provenance. The language is traceable to Myron Angel’s 1881 History of Nevada, page 151, reconstructing an 1860 speech. The manuscript’s “version ... come down to us” qualification helps.

    Checked by Astra #12.

  • AccurateV34 line 537

    Numaga: "Your enemies are like the sands in the bed of your rivers; when taken away they only give place for more to come and settle there."; 76 of ~105 militia killed incl. Ormsby

    Wording matches Myron Angel's 1881 History of Nevada reconstruction. The text's "in the version of his speech that has come down to us" is the right hedge, it is an 1881 literary reconstruction, not a transcript.

    Checked by Fable F1-A100.

  • AccurateV34 near line 537

    First Battle of Pyramid Lake 12 May 1860: 76 killed of ~105 militia incl. Maj. William Ormsby; Fort Churchill built 1860

    Checked by Fable F2-A51.

  • AccurateV34 line 537

    Numaga: "Your enemies are like the sands in the bed of your rivers; when taken away they only give place for more to come and settle there", book correctly hedges "in the version that has come down to us" (Myron Angel 1881)

    Checked by Fable F2-A52.

  • AccurateV34 near line 540

    Newlands Act 1902; Truckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake Settlement Act, P.L. 101-618, signed 16 Nov 1990 (Bush)

    "130 years from the battle" = 1860→1990.

    Checked by Fable F2-A53.

  • AccurateV34 near line 542

    Petrarch owned a Greek Homer (from Sigeros) 1354 and could not read it

    Checked by Fable F2-A54.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 546V33 #17

    Was: Ibn Majid gave away an ocean and did not know it was gone.

    Now: Da Gama’s pilot gave away an ocean and did not know it was gone.

    Subject swap in the chapter close; the rest of the triple is untouched.

    Flagged by Grok, Astra (follows from #14).

Chapter 12: A River in Chains

from V34 line 547 · 3 corrected, 4 contested, 14 accurate · top

  • ContestedV34 line 550

    "At any given snapshot between 1600 and 1860, somewhere between a quarter and a half of the human beings alive on earth were formally barred"

    No source aggregates this. A reviewer will demand the arithmetic (serfs + slaves + caste + devshirme populations vs. world population).

    Checked by Fable F2-C34.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 553

    Atlantic trade: ~12.5 million embarked, ~10.7 million disembarked (SlaveVoyages)

    Checked by Fable F2-A56.

  • AccurateV34 near line 553

    Manning: Africa's 1850 population roughly half its no-trade counterfactual (~50M vs ~100M)

    Checked by Fable F2-A57.

  • AccurateV34 line 555

    Northup: free in Saratoga 1841, three children, Champlain Canal rafting, violin; "A slave pen within the very shadow of the Capitol!" (ch. 3); driver 8 years; "wear a whip about my neck in the field"; "marvelous dexterity and precision ... hair's breadth of the back, the ear, the nose"; "as if in agony"; Patsey.

    Verbatim confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F2-A58.

  • AccurateV34 line 557

    Armsby episode: "hitherto a stranger"; Marksville ~20 miles; picayunes; "I understand I've got a larned nigger, that writes letters, and tries to get white fellows to mail 'em"; "How could I write a letter without any ink or paper? There is nobody I want to write to, 'cause I haint got no friends living as I know of".

    Verbatim confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F2-A59.

  • AccurateV34 line 560

    Bass, Canadian carpenter, 1852; night meeting in the weeds by candle; letters written on a Sunday in Marksville (dated 15 Aug 1852); postscript "he that is writing for me runs the risk of his life if detected"; Northup: "To the postscript more than to the body ... am I indebted for my liberation"; rescued Jan 1853.

    Checked by Fable F2-A60.

  • AccurateV34 near line 562

    Omar ibn Said: b. c. 1770 Futa Toro; 25 years' study; captured 1807; Charleston; escaped, recaptured Fayetteville; Owen family; 1831 Arabic autobiography, only known one by an enslaved person in the US; opens with Surat al-Mulk; conversion doubted by scholars

    15 pages per Library of Congress.

    Checked by Fable F2-A61.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 564V34 #23 [10a]

    Was: And the mechanism of that decline was the scribe’s advantage compounding forward at full force:

    Now: And alongside the uprisings of the enslaved and the armies and navies that finally enforced the verdict, the mechanism of that decline was the scribe’s advantage compounding forward at full force:

    Page: “the mechanism of that decline was the scribe’s advantage” names the pen as the only mechanism (Astra HOLES #5). Coercion, resistance and war are added. The paper argument is untouched.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 564)
  • AccurateV34 near line 566

    Montesquieu 1748 Book XV; Clarkson Latin prize essay 1785, English 1786; Wilberforce 12 May 1789; 1791 bill rejected (163-88); 1807; 1833 Act freed ~800,000

    Sugar boycott "300,000 households" is Clarkson's own estimate, cite him.

    Checked by Fable F2-A62.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 567V34 #24 [10b]

    Was: The scribes did not fire a shot. They outlasted the plantation lobby in a war fought entirely on paper.

    Now: The scribes did not fire a shot. Others did. At Christmas 1831 as many as sixty thousand enslaved Jamaicans rose behind a Baptist deacon named Samuel Sharpe, and the missionaries’ accounts of the reprisals reached the Commons before the act did. The Royal Navy spent half a century seizing slave ships off West Africa at gunpoint.

    Page: “a war fought entirely on paper”. The 1831 to 1832 Jamaica rising (Sharpe, up to 60,000 enslaved) “played a major part” in the 1833 Act, and missionaries’ testimony on the reprisals preceded its passage. The West Africa Squadron enforced the trade ban 1808 to 1867.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

  • AccurateV34 near line 569

    Davis: 1-1.25 million Europeans enslaved by Barbary 1530-1780

    Davis (2003); contested by some but it is what Davis estimated.

    Checked by Fable F2-A63.

  • AccurateV34 line 570

    Flagpole cut down May 1801 (10 or 14 May); Philadelphia aground 31 Oct 1803, Bainbridge + 307; Decatur 16 Feb 1804 aged 25, Nelson "most bold and daring act of the age" (reported); Preble's five bombardments Aug-Sep 1804; Derna 27 Apr 1805, 8 Marines + ~400-500 mercenaries, ~500 miles from Alexandria.

    Checked by Fable F2-A64.

  • AccurateV34 near line 570

    William Ray, Horrors of Slavery; or, The American Tars in Tripoli (1808); 19 months captive

    Checked by Fable F2-A65.

  • ContestedV34 line 573

    "The North had six factories for every one in the South ... more than twice the railroad ... ninety-seven percent of the country's firearms"

    ~110k vs ~18-20k establishments (≈6:1); 22k vs 9k rail miles; 97% of firearms is a widely repeated figure (1860 census of manufactures) but some historians put Southern share higher counting small shops.

    Checked by Fable F2-C33.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 576V34 #22 [9a]

    Was: Every condition this book has named favored the North. That alone predicted the war before Fort Sumter.

    Now: Every condition this book has named favored the North. Read from this side of Appomattox, that alone calls the war before Fort Sumter does.

    Page: “That alone predicted the war before Fort Sumter.” Nobody ran that prediction before 1861; it is a retrospective fit (Astra HOLES #9). Now it is framed as read backward from Appomattox, and “calls the war before Fort Sumter does” keeps the punch.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 576)
  • AccurateV34 near line 577

    3.9 million enslaved in 1860; Thirteenth Amendment ratified 6 Dec 1865

    Checked by Fable F2-A66.

  • ContestedV34 line 577

    "Six hundred and twenty thousand ... newest count, from the census, puts it near three quarters of a million"

    Hacker used census cohort analysis, so "from the census" is fair.

    Checked by Fable F2-C32.

  • AccurateV34 near line 579

    1861: >23 million privately owned serfs, ~38% of population; state peasants 1866

    Checked by Fable F2-A67.

  • ContestedV34 line 581

    "Istanbul slave market operated openly until 1847"

    Abdülmecid closed the Istanbul market in 1846 (some sources 1847).

    Checked by Fable F2-C31.

  • AccurateV34 near line 582

    Saudi Arabia & Yemen 1962; Mauritania 1981 (last), criminalised 2007, UN rapporteur Shahinian 2009-10 found it continuing

    1865+97 = 1962 checks.

    Checked by Fable F2-A68.

  • AccurateV34 near line 583

    ILO 2021 estimate: 50 million in modern slavery (27.6M forced labour, 22M forced marriage)

    Book's "twenty-eight million" is a rounding.

    Checked by Fable F2-A69.

Chapter 13: The Flight of the Dragon

from V34 line 586 · 2 corrected, 9 contested, 12 accurate, 6 unverified · top

  • ContestedV34 line 589

    News of the fall: "Genoa read it around June 17 ... Negroponte had known since June 3 ... Doge's palace ... June 29 ... Rome had it on July 8"

    The Genoese podestà of Pera (Lomellino) dated his report 23 June, so Genoa could not have read that letter by 17 June; another courier is possible. Check against Pertusi, La caduta di Costantinopoli.

    Checked by Fable F2-C36.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 589

    "Genoa read it around June 17"; Negroponte governor "had known since June 3"; the crowd in the piazza shouting at the Doge

    Venice 29 June / Rome 8 July are standard (Runciman). Check Pertusi for Genoa/Negroponte.

    Checked by Fable F2-U1.

  • AccurateV34 near line 590

    Constantinople fell 29 May 1453; Bessarion b. Trebizond 1403, legate at Bologna 1450-55, came to Italy 1438 (Ferrara-Florence), twice near the papacy (1455, 1471); 1468 donation 482 Greek + 264 Latin codices at 65; nucleus of the Marciana

    Checked by Fable F2-A70.

  • ContestedV34 near line 592

    Bessarion's "letter to Francesco Foscari ... July 13" 1453 from Bologna

    Bessarion was legate at Bologna 1450-55 (confirmed), born 1403 (so 50 in 1453, confirmed). The 13 July 1453 letter to Foscari is well known in the literature; keep.

    Checked by Fable F2-C35.

  • AccurateV34 near line 595

    Satire of the Trades, Kemyt, Instruction of Amenemhat = Middle Kingdom school texts c. 1950 BC, copied at Deir el-Medina on ostraca; Solon's Egyptian priest (Timaeus)

    "copies run down to about 500 BC" not verified (late copies exist; check Parkinson).

    Checked by Fable F2-A72.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 595

    "surviving copies of the Instruction of Amenemhat run down to about 500 BC"

    Late Period copies exist; confirm date.

    Checked by Fable F2-U5.

  • AccurateV34 near line 596

    Papyrus Harris I (c. 1155 BC): Amun temple 421,362 cattle, >84,000 people, ~80% of temple land

    Wikipedia table: 84,486 persons (Breasted: 86,486); either way ">84,000" holds.

    Checked by Fable F2-A71.

  • ContestedV34 line 597

    "Constantine VII ... fifty-three thematic categories" ; "Suda ... thirty thousand entries"; "Photius ... two hundred seventy-nine"

    Fine.

    Checked by Fable F2-C28.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 597V33 #11

    Was: It held them for a thousand years, copied them faithfully, catalogued them brilliantly, and never once argued with them.

    Now: It held them for a thousand years, copied them faithfully, catalogued them brilliantly, and argued with them rarely, and never with an institution behind it.

    Philoponus argued with Aristotle in writing in the 6th century; Plethon was Byzantine. Brief's own wording: 'rarely, and never with an institution behind it.'

    Resolves Astra #3 (wrong).

  • AccurateV34 near line 599

    Leontius Pilatus Florence 1360-62; Chrysoloras 1397-1400 invited by Salutati; Plethon at Council of Florence 1439; Ficino commissioned 1462; Aurispa 1423 with 238 MSS; Chalkokondyles's Homer, Florence 1488; Aldine Press 1494; Mehmed reinstated a Patriarch (Gennadios) 1454

    (see W4 on pupils)

    Checked by Fable F2-A73.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 599V33 #18

    Was: His students (Guarino da Verona, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini) became the first generation of Italian humanists who could read the originals instead of relying on medieval Latin versions, some made word for word from the Greek and some come the long way round.

    Now: His students (Guarino da Verona, Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli) became the first generation of Italian humanists who could read the originals instead of relying on medieval Latin versions, some made word for word from the Greek and some come the long way round.

    Niccoli is a callback to Ch 8's Lucretius borrower.

    Resolves Fable F2-W4 (wrong (poggio) / loose (guarino)).

  • UnverifiedV34 line 605

    "Vatican ... papal library would have absorbed"; "Venice... printing industry about to become the largest in Europe"

    Argumentative; fine.

    Checked by Fable F2-U9.

  • ContestedV34 line 607

    "Same hoard. Same city ... Nothing like the Italian outcome occurred there"

    Ottomanists will cite Mehmed II's Greek library, Ali Qushji's Istanbul astronomy, Piri Reis, the Süleymaniye complex. The comparative point holds; "nothing" is a hostage.

    Checked by Fable F2-C30.

  • UnverifiedV34 near line 608

    "Baghdad changed hands fourteen times between 1258 and 1932"

    Depends on counting rules; give the list in a note.

    Checked by Fable F2-U3.

  • AccurateV34 near line 609

    Venice 150-200 presses by 1500; Vatican 1481 inventory 3,498 MSS; 1727 Ottoman printing permission; gap 272 years from 1455

    Checked by Fable F2-A74.

  • ContestedV34 line 609

    Taqi al-Din observatory "built in 1577 ... demolished January 22, 1580 ... after the chief mufti declared it an affront to God"

    1577 construction and 22 Jan 1580 demolition confirmed (bio page says completed 1579). Cause: the Şeyhülislam's fatwa is the traditional story; Wikipedia and Ottomanists (Sayılı, Tezcan) stress court politics, Grand Vizier Sinan Pasha vs. the Sokollu faction, the 1577 comet prophecy failing.

    Checked by Fable F2-C26.

  • ContestedV34 line 609

    "the Ottoman Empire did not permit Arabic-script printing until 1727"

    The supposed 1485/1515 sultanic "bans" rest on a single late European report and are doubted by Ottomanists; non-Arabic-script presses (Hebrew 1493, Armenian 1567, Greek 1627) operated in Istanbul. "Did not permit" is fine; "ban" would not be.

    Checked by Fable F2-C27.

  • ContestedV34 line 609

    "Uraniborg ... ran for roughly twenty-one years under multiple patrons"

    Cornerstone 1576, operational ~1580, abandoned 1597: 17-21 years depending on start; two patrons (Frederick II, Christian IV, the second withdrew support).

    Checked by Fable F2-C37.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 609

    Topkapı "held roughly 120 [manuscripts] that were not Islamic"

    Deissmann's 1933 catalogue is the source; figure varies (120-143).

    Checked by Fable F2-U4.

  • AccurateV34 line 610

    Qianlong 1793 → Opium War 1839 = 46 years; "China's own bite in 1487" consistent with Ch 9

    Checked by Fable F2-A80.

  • ContestedV34 line 610

    Qianlong 1793 quote "Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance..."

    This is the standard English text; sinologists (Hevia, Cranmer-Byng) note the "barbarians" rendering and the tone are Backhouse's; the edict is genuine.

    Checked by Fable F2-C29.

  • AccurateV34 near line 612

    Florence 1490s pop. 40-50k; Pico's 900 theses; Leonardo in Milan for Sforza; Constantinople 1478 survey ~80-100k

    Checked by Fable F2-A75.

  • AccurateV34 near line 613

    ory is demolished. Ibrahim Muteferrika learns it when his printing press produces roughly seventeen titles and outlives his death in 1745 by four titles in thirty years. The first book came off the press in his own house, in the Yavuz Selim quarter

    Müteferrika’s seventeen-title production. The seventeen-title corpus is consistent with Sabev’s book-history research. This confirms the corpus count, not every press-run, price or inferred failure claim in the scene. The commercial evidence should inform rather than merely decorate the diagnosis.

    Checked by Astra #36.

  • ContestedV34 near line 614

    ns it when his printing press produces roughly seventeen titles and outlives his death in 1745 by four titles in thirty years. The first book came off the press in his own house, in the Yavuz Selim quarter of Istanbul, on the last day of Januar

    Müteferrika death year. 1745 appears in a traditional interpretation, while modern reference work often uses 1747. The discrepancy involves a tomb inscription and chronogram. Select and cite a modern archival biography rather than silently presenting one contested date as certain.

    Checked by Astra #18.

  • AccurateV34 near line 614

    Müteferrika: b. Kolozsvár 1674, Unitarian convert; Said Efendi saw presses in Paris 1720; ten-reason treatise; first book (Vankulu Lügati, 2 vols) 31 Jan 1729; 17 titles by 1742-43; d. 1745; religious books excepted; four proofreaders (kadis of Istanbul, Salonica, Galata + Kasımpaşa Mevlevi sheikh)

    Page counts 666/756, 500 copies, 35 kuruş price, ~13,000 volumes and ~70% sold, horse valued at one Vankulu, two kadis inheriting the press: these come from Orlin Sabev's estate-inventory studies (Waiting for Godot, 2006/2007) and could not be re-checked online; consistent with what I know of Sabev.

    Checked by Fable F2-A76.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 617

    Müteferrika's interpreter pay "a kuruş and a half a day"; horse = one Vankulu

    Sabev.

    Checked by Fable F2-U7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 621

    Pacioli's Summa, Venice, November 1494; Florentine double-entry c. 1300

    Checked by Fable F2-A77.

  • AccurateV34 near line 625

    Hunayn ibn Ishaq b. al-Hira c. 808; searched for Galen's On Demonstration as far as Alexandria, found half a copy in Damascus; >100 Galen works; Ishaq ibn Hunayn translated Euclid & Ptolemy; Toledo 1085; Cordoba 1236; Justinian closed Athens 529; al-Ma'mun = al-Mansur's great-grandson

    Checked by Fable F2-A78.

  • AccurateV34 near line 628

    Timbuktu: ~350,000 manuscripts moved to Bamako 2012-13

    Checked by Fable F2-A79.

Chapter 14: Latin: A Republic of Letters Across Borders and Time

from V34 line 637 · 1 corrected, 8 contested, 18 accurate, 1 unverified · top

Chapter 15: Institutional Divergence

from V34 line 679 · 4 corrected, 3 contested, 7 accurate, 4 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 679

    Height gap 3-8 cm, adolescents up to ~11 cm (Schwekendiek)

    Consistent with Schwekendiek's series.

    Checked by Fable F3-A18.

  • ContestedV34 line 680

    "Frozen solid that winter … a flat white field", Taedong River, "December 1950"

    The Taedong at Pyongyang typically freezes late Dec-Jan. If the scene is meant for the 4-5 Dec evacuation, the river was open water. Either date it late December or lose "frozen solid." Also "three hundred meters wide": the river at Pyongyang is nearer 400-500 m.

    Checked by Fable F3-C2.

    • no single source; famous Max Desfor photo 4-5 Dec 1950 shows refugees on a wrecked bridge, not ice
  • AccurateV34 near line 682

    North Korean land reform March 1946; songbun formalised 1957-60; hostile class ≈27% (core 28 / wavering 45)

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A17.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 682

    "the pharmacist who had trained in Osaka," the aunt's "Japanese normal school," etc.

    Composite/illustrative scene; not checkable and not presented as sourced.

    Checked by Fable F3-U8.

  • ContestedV34 line 686

    "Half the refugees in Korea made it to Busan … a port of three hundred thousand … by 1951 it held over a million"

    300,000 is the 1945 figure (1949 census ~470,000); wartime peak c. 840,000 resident + ~1M refugees passing through. "Half the refugees" unsupported. Gamcheon "eight hundred wooden shacks": the 800 figure in sources is Taegukdo devotees resettled there in 1955, not shacks.

    Checked by Fable F3-C11.

  • ContestedV34 line 688

    "Families spent an average of twelve percent of household income on private education … twenty percent in Seoul"

    Recent estimates run 14-20% of disposable income nationally; the 12%/20% split is undated. Give a year.

    Checked by Fable F3-C12.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 688

    Korea: "A top-tier hagwon instructor earned more than a surgeon"; "hagwons … employing more teachers than the formal system"

    Both are common journalism claims; no official count found.

    Checked by Fable F3-U6.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 688V33 #22

    Was: By the 1980s, hagwons were a parallel education system larger than the public schools themselves: over a hundred thousand of them by the twenty-first century, employing more teachers than the formal system, operating from afternoon until midnight, their fluorescent-lit classrooms visible from every apartment block in Seoul and Busan and Daegu.

    Now: By the 1980s, hagwons were a parallel education system larger than the public schools themselves: over seventy thousand of them by the twenty-first century, employing more teachers than the formal system, operating from afternoon until midnight, their fluorescent-lit classrooms visible from every apartment block in Seoul and Busan and Daegu.

    No official count reaches 100,000.

    Resolves Fable F3-W5 (wrong (inflated)).

  • AccurateV34 near line 692

    "Samsung's R&D budget alone is worth about four-fifths of North Korea's entire economy"

    Samsung Electronics R&D 2024: ₩37.74T; BOK nominal NK GDP 2024: ₩43.68T → 86%. "Four-fifths" is if anything conservative.

    Checked by Fable F3-A19.

  • AccurateV34 near line 694

    Cybernetics condemned as bourgeois pseudoscience until mid-1950s; Kolmogorov, Landau, Kapitsa, Pontryagin

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A23.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 695V34 #15 [5a]

    Was: But Korea is a living experiment. The border is manned.

    Now: But Korea is a living experiment, and a natural one: nobody drew that line at random, and the occupations and the war that drew and redrew it are part of what the line measures. The border is manned.

    Page: “Korea is a living experiment”, with no statement that it is natural rather than assigned. The phrase “controlled experiment” is not applied to Korea anywhere on the page (see NOT NEEDED), so the fix names the limit in one clause and keeps the living/ghost/knowledge triad at line 710.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 695)
  • UnverifiedV34 line 698

    Habsburg-Ottoman "military frontier … Croatia, Serbia, and parts of Romania"

    True of the Military Frontier, but the Becker et al. sample is Poland/Ukraine/Romania/Serbia/Montenegro (the text later says so), the two sentences describe different lines.

    Checked by Fable F3-U7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 700

    Becker, Boeckh, Hainz & Woessmann (2016), Economic Journal: Habsburg side more trust in courts/police, less bribery; no effect on trust in president/parliament or interpersonal trust; ~90 years after

    Matches abstract; five-country list (Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine) matches the paper's border sample as I recall.

    Checked by Fable F3-A20.

  • AccurateV34 line 702

    Chen, Kung & Ma, "Long Live Keju!", Economic Journal Oct 2020: 278 prefectures, doubling jinshi/10,000 → +8.5% schooling in 2010; pine-and-bamboo river-distance instrument; 2010 CFPS; channels (culture, schools, social capital, elites)

    All confirmed. 51,624 jinshi = the Beijing Confucian Temple stele count (Yuan-Qing); correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A21.

  • AccurateV34 near line 702

    Keju abolished 1905

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A22.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 703V34 #9 [3b]

    Was: Chapter 5 called these the places that held more exam quotas, and the paper is sharper than that.

    Now: Chapter 5 counted these places by the degrees they won, not the seats they were handed, and the paper shows why.

    The callback “Chapter 5 called these the places that held more exam quotas” would be false after 3a. It now points to the corrected Ch 5 wording, and the quota sentences that follow are unchanged.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 703)
  • UnverifiedV34 line 707

    "Old agricultural terraces in the Mediterranean show in vegetation composition two thousand years after"; "Charcoal from indigenous burning … ten thousand years" (Australia)

    Plausible legacy-effect literature; no citation given.

    Checked by Fable F3-U9.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 710V34 #16 [5b]

    Was: Each transect holds the continuous variables constant and isolates the discontinuity at the line.

    Now: Each transect holds the smooth gradients steady and isolates the discontinuity at the line, which is as close to a controlled experiment as history allows and no closer.

    Page: “Each transect holds the continuous variables constant and isolates the discontinuity” is the controlled-experiment claim in all but name. Now it is bounded as the closest approach history allows.

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 710)

Chapter 16: The Gate and the Gatekeeper

from V34 line 711 · 1 corrected, 4 contested, 22 accurate, 2 unverified · top

Chapter 17: Challenge and Response

from V34 line 821 · 1 corrected, 5 contested, 13 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 821

    Haiti pre-quake: GDP/cap under $800; 77% under $2/day

    Correct (77% is the World Bank 2001 figure).

    Checked by Fable F3-A49.

  • AccurateV34 near line 823

    Park Chung-hee: youngest of seven; schoolteacher (Mungyeong); Manchukuo academy as Takagi Masao; coup 16 May 1961 (age 43); shot at dinner by KCIA chief Kim Jae-gyu, 26 Oct 1979; KIST 1966

    Correct except "top of class" (C8).

    Checked by Fable F3-A44.

  • ContestedV34 line 823

    Park Chung-hee "graduated at the top of his class" (Manchukuo Military Academy)

    Wikipedia: "among the top five" at Manchukuo (1942); 3rd at the Tokyo academy. Also "five foot two" is unsourced; standard sources give ~160-164 cm.

    Checked by Fable F3-C8.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 823V33 #20

    Was: Less than Sudan, less than Bolivia, less than the Congo. Less than Haiti.

    Now: Less than Sudan, less than Bolivia, less than the Congo. Less than Ghana.

    Haiti was poorer than Korea. Ghana is the classic 1960s Korea comparison and was about twice as rich.

    Resolves Fable F3-W1 (wrong (haiti)).

  • AccurateV34 near line 827

    Singapore expelled 9 Aug 1965; Lee wept on TV; age 41; Cambridge lawyer; ~2M people; British pullout announced 1968, done 1971; GDP/cap ≈$500; Konfrontasi ended 1966; PAP since 1959; GDP/cap >$60k

    All correct. PISA "first or second … consistently for decades" slightly generous (2009: 2nd/4th/5th; 2012: 2nd/3rd/3rd).

    Checked by Fable F3-A45.

  • AccurateV34 near line 833

    Morris Chang brought home 1985 to ITRI; TSMC 1987 with state largest shareholder

    Correct (government 48%, Philips 27.5%).

    Checked by Fable F3-A46.

  • ContestedV34 line 834

    "the earthquake … lasted thirty-five seconds" (Haiti)

    Wikipedia: "less than 30 seconds"; other reports 35 s.

    Checked by Fable F3-C21.

  • AccurateV34 near line 838

    VOC chartered 20 Mar 1602, >6M guilders; Amsterdam exchange building 1611; Wisselbank 1609; oldest share receipt 9 Sep 1606, Enkhuizen, Pieter Harmensz, 150 guilders; charter expired end 1799; Sichuan notes 1024; Pacioli 1494

    All correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A47.

  • AccurateV34 near line 842

    Haiti 12 Jan 2010, 16:53, M7.0; government 316,000 dead vs 46,000-160,000 independent; National Palace collapsed

    Correct. "Twelve miles southwest" should be ~16 miles (25 km) WSW, near Léogâne.

    Checked by Fable F3-A48.

  • ContestedV34 line 842

    "The United Nations headquarters collapsed, killing the mission chief and a hundred and one staff."

    Held in V33. Fable counted 102 UN dead across the whole earthquake; UN News reports 102 staff lost when the mission building collapsed, which matches the book's chief plus 101. Sources disagree. Fable's reading: 102 UN personnel died in the whole earthquake (Annabi included).

    Checked by Fable F3-W2.

  • ContestedV34 line 843

    "Fourteen heads of state in the twenty years preceding the quake" (Haiti)

    Plausible only if provisional/junta figures are counted individually; give the list or say "a dozen or more."

    Checked by Fable F3-C20.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 845

    Tōhoku 11 Mar 2011, M9.0-9.1; ~1,400× Haiti's energy; 40 m run-up (40.5 m Miyako); ~20,000 dead; ~470,000 displaced; 127M people, 47 prefectures; NRA created 2012

    Energy ratio 10^(1.5×2.1)≈1,400 checks.

    Checked by Fable F3-A50.

  • AccurateV34 line 847

    Aneyoshi stone (post-1933): "High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants. Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build your homes below this point." 2011 water stopped ~300 ft short

    Inscription correct; "300 feet" is the NYT (Apr 2011) figure.

    Checked by Fable F3-A51.

  • AccurateV34 near line 853

    Northcote-Trevelyan: report Nov 1853, presented Feb 1854; Gladstone commissioned; Trevelyan Haileybury, 12 yrs Company writer (1826-38, Delhi & Calcutta), married Hannah Macaulay 1834

    Correct. "Twenty-three pages" is the usual description.

    Checked by Fable F3-A52.

  • AccurateV34 line 853

    Meadows, Desultory Notes (1847): "the advancement of men of talent and merit only"

    Quote confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F3-A54.

  • AccurateV34 line 854

    Trevelyan, The Irish Crisis (1848): "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence"; "the sharp but effectual remedy"; KCB 27 Apr 1848

    Quotes and date confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F3-A53.

  • AccurateV34 line 856

    Lord Granville, Lords, 13 Mar 1854: "that examinations took place in China, and that, therefore, we were not to take a similar course"

    Verbatim in Hansard; debate is on the Northcote-Trevelyan report.

    Checked by Fable F3-A55.

  • AccurateV34 near line 857

    Charter Act 1853; Macaulay committee 1854; first ICS open exam 1855; Order in Council 21 May 1855 (Civil Service Commission, nomination retained); 4 Jun 1870 (Lowe), open competition from 1 Oct, Foreign Office excepted

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A56.

  • ContestedV34 line 859

    "twenty-seven changes of government between 1855 and 1945"

    Counting new PMs/ministries 1855-1945 gives ~30 depending on rules (coalitions, caretaker 1945). Say "some thirty."

    Checked by Fable F3-C19.

    • list of UK ministries

Chapter 18: The Deadweight Loss of Exclusion: Lost Einsteins

from V34 line 863 · 3 corrected, 3 contested, 11 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 line 865

    Hamer: born 1917, youngest of 20, Montgomery Co., moved to Sunflower at 2; evicted 1962 (age 44); Freedomways Spring 1965 (Jack O'Dell), "I was six years old…", "crackerjacks and sardines", "never did get out of his debt", Paris Green, school four months, left after sixth grade, polio.

    Quotes confirmed verbatim.

    Checked by Fable F3-A57.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 872V33 #4

    Was: Kerala’s non-Brahmin mathematician who never existed because the caste gate never let him in.

    Now: Kerala’s low-caste mathematician who never existed because the caste gate never let him in.

    Two of the named mathematicians were non-Brahmin; the lost Einstein is the one from below the temple castes.

    Flagged by Sol (WRONG 1: 'contradicted by the book’s own roster').

  • AccurateV34 near line 873

    Bell, Chetty, Jaravel, Petkova & Van Reenen: >1M inventors; top-1% children 10× more likely to patent than below-median; 3rd-grade scores; Minneapolis medical devices; exposure by technology class; girls respond to female inventors only

    Confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F3-A59.

  • AccurateV34 near line 876

    Simon-Ehrlich bet 1980: chromium, copper, nickel, tin, tungsten; all fell; cheque $576.07; Simon d. 1998; Ehrlich lepidopterist; Population Bomb 1968; Ultimate Resource 1981

    Correct, including the 2000-2010 counterfactual hedge.

    Checked by Fable F3-A60.

  • AccurateV34 line 880

    Ende "pintrix et Dei aiutrix" (Girona Beatus, 975); Guda "peccatrix mulier scripsit et pinxit hunc librum"; Diemut of Wessobrunn ~40-45 MSS; Herrad's Hortus Deliciarum burned Strasbourg 1870; Cynthia Cyrus's catalogue (2009)

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A61.

  • AccurateV34 near line 882

    Trota of Salerno, 12th c.; Trotula >100 MSS (≈140 Latin + 60 vernacular); printed 16th c.; renamed male ("Eros" 1566; "Trottus" 1921)

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A62.

  • AccurateV34 near line 883

    Ruff: third "faeder" male morph described 2006, ~1% of males

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A63.

  • AccurateV34 line 883

    Germain: 13 at the Bastille; candles confiscated; "LeBlanc"; Lagrange; Gauss correspondence 1804-07; revealed via General Pernety; Gauss "noblest courage" letter; d. 27 Jun 1831 breast cancer; certificate "rentière"

    Correct (except W3/W4).

    Checked by Fable F3-A64.

  • ContestedV34 line 883

    "He arranged for the University of Gottingen to grant her an honorary degree. She died … before it could be conferred"

    Fable's adjudication downgraded this to contested: Gauss recommended the degree, and the standard telling is close to the book's. Fable's reading: Gauss recommended her for one.

    Checked by Fable F3-W4.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 883V33 #21

    Was: She corresponded with Carl Friedrich Gauss for three years as LeBlanc, produced work on Fermat’s Last Theorem that stood as the most significant progress on the problem for the next century, and only revealed herself when Napoleon’s army occupied Gauss’s Brunswick and she wrote to a French commander asking him to protect the mathematician’s life.

    Now: She corresponded with Carl Friedrich Gauss for three years as LeBlanc, produced work on Fermat’s Last Theorem that stood as the most significant progress on the problem until Kummer, a generation later, and only revealed herself when Napoleon’s army occupied Gauss’s Brunswick and she wrote to a French commander asking him to protect the mathematician’s life.

    Not a century: Kummer came about a generation later (MacTutor prints 1840; Kummer's ideal-number work is 1847. 'A generation later' is true either way).

    Resolves Fable F3-W3 (wrong (overstated)).

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 884V33 #35

    Was: Boys are not affected by the gender of the inventors around them. Girls are.

    Now: Boys take their cue from the men inventing around them. Girls take theirs from the women.

    The exposure effect is same-sex for both; 'the deficit reproduces itself' still follows.

    Resolves Astra #5 (wrong).

  • AccurateV34 near line 886

    Hsieh, Hurst, Jones & Klenow (2019): 20-40% of U.S. growth 1960-2010 from reduced occupational misallocation; white men 94% of doctors/lawyers in 1960, 62% in 2010

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A58.

  • AccurateV34 near line 886

    World Bank 2018 Unrealized Potential (Wodon & de la Brière): $160T, $23,620 per person; Missed Opportunities: $15-30T

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A65.

  • ContestedV34 line 886

    Bell/Chetty: "women were 7 percent of the American inventors born in 1940 and 18 percent of those born in 1980"; "rise by 164 percent"; "118 years"; "four times the inventors"

    Tool's PDF read returned ~5.5%→~16% for the cohort shares; 7→18 is what I recall from the QJE figure and it reproduces the 118-year extrapolation. Check Fig. 6 of Bell et al. (QJE 2019).

    Checked by Fable F3-C18.

  • AccurateV34 near line 887

    Mary Dixon Kies, 5 May 1809, first U.S. patent to a woman in her own name (straw with silk)

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A66.

  • AccurateV34 line 888

    Ramanujan: letter 16 Jan 1913, age 25, Port Trust clerk (30 Rs/month ≈ £20/yr), ~120 theorems, nine pages of mathematics; Baker and Hobson returned papers; Hardy "defeated me completely," "one romantic incident in my life"; failed college twice; d. 32; Andrews 1976

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A67.

  • ContestedV34 line 890

    Ramanujan "Lost Notebook … about a hundred and thirty pages"

    Andrews/Berndt describe ~138 pages; Wikipedia says "87 unorganised pages." Either way "about 130" is defensible; cite Andrews.

    Checked by Fable F3-C16.

Chapter 19: She’s Working 9 to 5, and Then Some

from V34 line 899 · 1 corrected, 6 contested, 18 accurate, 3 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 line 901

    Robert Lee Parton: illiterate tobacco farmer, "smartest man she ever knew"

    Dolly's repeated statement.

    Checked by Fable F5-A33.

  • AccurateV34 near line 902

    Dolly Parton: b. 19 Jan 1946, fourth of twelve; father Robert Lee Parton illiterate; doctor paid in cornmeal; left for Nashville the day after graduation (1964); >3,000 songs; Imagination Library 1995 (age 49); Buddy Program dropout 35%→6%; father d. 2000

    Correct. (Buddy Program itself dates to 1991; the Foundation to 1988, the sentence elides this.)

    Checked by Fable F3-A68.

  • AccurateV34 line 904

    "She died on the twenty-fifth of August, 2026, at eighty, of cancer"

    Wikipedia: hospitalised Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center 21 Aug 2026; died 25 Aug 2026, age 80, after a "brief battle" with cancer; private funeral 28 Aug, Woodlawn. Confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F3-A69.

  • AccurateV34 near line 904

    Imagination Library: five countries (US, Canada, UK, Australia, Ireland); 60 books birth-to-five; "Book Lady"

    Countries and design confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F3-A70.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 904

    Imagination Library "more than three hundred and thirty-two million books … roughly three and a half million books a month … about one in six American children under the age of five"

    Latest figures I could fetch: 200M (2023), 2-3M/month, 1 in 7 (2024). 332M by Aug 2026 is arithmetically plausible (200M + ~40 months × 3M); "one in six" and "3.5M/month" need a 2026 Dollywood Foundation citation.

    Checked by Fable F3-U1.

  • AccurateV34 near line 911

    Mary Pickford Nevada divorce 1920

    Correct (Minden, March 1920).

    Checked by Fable F3-A83.

  • AccurateV34 near line 914

    Cambridge full degrees to women 1948; Napoleonic Code

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A72.

  • AccurateV34 near line 915

    Joseon 1392-1910; hangul devised 15th c. and regendered as "women's script"

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A73.

  • AccurateV34 near line 916

    Taliban 1996-2001; ~3.5M Afghan girls in school by late 2010s; 2021 ban

    3.6M girls in 2018.

    Checked by Fable F3-A74.

  • ContestedV34 line 919

    "Singapore, where women are more than sixty percent of university graduates"

    No source found for 60%+; Singapore's female share of university graduates has hovered ~50-52%. Likely conflated with UAE (~70%) or Iran (~65%), both of which are well attested.

    Checked by Fable F3-C9.

  • AccurateV34 near line 923

    UAE women ≈70% of university graduates; Iran women ≈65% of university enrollment (reform era); Saudi women majority of university students; 2017 driving/guardianship reforms

    Standard figures.

    Checked by Fable F3-A75.

  • ContestedV34 line 924

    Japan: "the workforce participation curve still has the M-shape in it, dipping at marriage and childbirth and never fully recovering"

    The Japanese M-curve has largely flattened since ~2015; female LFPR for 30-34 now exceeds 75%. "Never fully recovering" reads as 1990s data.

    Checked by Fable F3-C10.

    • OECD/MHLW labour-force series
  • AccurateV34 near line 936

    Iran: Family Protection Law 1967 (amended 1975); women ≈1/3 of enrollment; female judges; post-1979 marriage age to 9; 2012 quotas barring women from 77 fields at 36 universities; Mahsa Amini 2022, "Woman, Life, Freedom"

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A76.

  • AccurateV34 near line 937

    Ebadi: judge March 1969 (age 21); president of Bench 24, Tehran, 1975; demoted to clerk; licence 1992 (Wikipedia: could not practise until 1993); Nobel 2003, first Muslim woman and first Iranian; daughter Negar b. 1980

    Confirmed. The dialogue (Bani-Sadr, "free Iranian… enslaved attorney," the purging committee, "experts," fifteen-year pension) is from Iran Awakening (2006) and matches that book as I know it; not independently checkable online.

    Checked by Fable F3-A77.

  • AccurateV34 line 938

    I’m not stepping down voluntarily

    Ebadi’s demotion and the headscarf encounter are sourced. Ebadi’s Nobel autobiography supports the judicial-demotion core; the authorized excerpt from Iran Awakening corroborates the headscarf encounter, threat of demotion and quoted refusal.

    Checked by Astra #41.

  • ContestedV34 line 949

    Hürrem "sat at a writing desk and composed a letter… She wrote it herself. Not dictated to a scribe" (1534)

    Peirce: her early letters are in high chancery style and an elegant hand, "most likely by a harem scribe"; her own less-stilted Turkish appears in later notes. Seven letters to Süleyman survive. The literacy point survives; the 1534 "in her own hand" scene does not.

    Checked by Fable F3-C5.

  • ContestedV34 line 949

    "born Aleksandra Lisowska in a Ruthenian village"

    No 16th-c. source records her premarital name; "Aleksandra/Anastazja Lisowska" is a later Polish tradition. Say "said to have been born…"

    Checked by Fable F3-C6.

  • AccurateV34 near line 953

    Hürrem married Süleyman (c.1534, unprecedented); Haseki complex; letters to Sigismund II Augustus; Sultanate of Women 1533-1656; Kösem strangled 1651 by Turhan's faction

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A78.

  • AccurateV34 near line 957

    First Ottoman state girls' schools 1858; Halide Edib educated at the American College for Girls; Sultanahmet rally 23 May 1919 (~200,000)

    College confirmed; rally date and 200,000 are the standard Turkish figures (Wikipedia flags citation needed).

    Checked by Fable F3-A79.

  • AccurateV34 near line 959

    Turkey: 1926 Swiss-derived civil code; 1928 alphabet; women's suffrage 1930 municipal / 1934 national (before France 1944, Italy 1945, Switzerland 1971); Istanbul Convention withdrawal 2021; female LFP ≈34%, lowest in OECD

    Correct (LFP 34-36% depending on year).

    Checked by Fable F3-A80.

  • ContestedV34 line 965

    Korea: "by 2008 the official count put female literacy at 97.6 percent"; "women earn more than half of all university degrees"; "highest female university enrollment on earth"

    2008 National Literacy Survey reported ~98.3% adult literacy overall; women-specific 97.6% not located. "Highest female university enrollment on earth" needs an OECD citation (Korea leads on overall tertiary attainment; female share ~ parity).

    Checked by Fable F3-C24.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 969

    Enheduanna first named author; nadītum scribes at Sippar; Xue Tao, Yu Xuanji, Li Ye; Li Qingzhao; Meiji Gakusei 1872; 1889 Imperial House Law bars women

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A81.

  • AccurateV34 near line 973

    Sarah Winnemucca: Life Among the Piutes 1883, ed. Mary Peabody Mann; first autobiography by a Native American woman; granddaughter of Truckee (guided Frémont); "tro-kay" = "all right"; met Hayes; Peabody Indian School near Lovelock (1885-87); d. 1891 of TB, ~47

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F3-A82.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 991

    "one well-known pair of studies reports an effect size around 0.04" on caregiver-child reading

    Cannot locate a 0.04 effect size; the commonly cited quasi-experimental IL studies (e.g., Tennessee, Ohio) report small-to-moderate effects (d≈0.1-0.3 on reading behaviours). Check the number.

    Checked by Fable F3-U2.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 992V33 #36

    Was: A book arriving at the house with a child’s name on the label is exposure delivered past every gate that normally filters it: no library card, no transportation, no literate parent required to initiate anything, no form, no eligibility determination, no caseworker.

    Now: A book arriving at the house with a child’s name on the label is exposure delivered past every gate that normally filters it: no library card, no transportation, no literate parent required to initiate anything past a single signup, no income test, no caseworker.

    There is a signup and a coverage area; there is no means test.

    Resolves Astra #6 (wrong).

  • AccurateV34 line 997

    "9 to 5" written 1980 on set, acrylic nails as percussion; "Jolene"/"I Will Always Love You" same day; turned down Elvis (Parker wanted half the publishing) at 28 (1974)

    Parton's own accounts; the "same day" claim is hers and is sometimes questioned.

    Checked by Fable F3-A71.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 997

    "Whitney Houston's recording … returned royalties that, by Parton's account, helped fund the work she cared about most"

    Parton has said she invested the royalties in a Black neighbourhood in Nashville in Houston's honour; linking them to the Imagination Library is not in any account I know.

    Checked by Fable F3-U3.

  • ContestedV34 line 1002

    She kept that pipeline running with her own money for thirty-one years

    The wording overstates personal financing. Dolly’s financial support is not in doubt, but read as the explanation of the entire worldwide mailing system, this conceals the distributed model. The program assigns local partners the cost of books and shipping.

    Checked by Astra #21.

Chapter 20: The Twentieth-Century Resets

from V34 line 1011 · 25 corrected, 8 contested, 26 accurate, 4 unverified · top

Chapter 21: The Summer of Civilization

from V34 line 1055 · 3 corrected, 7 contested, 20 accurate, 4 unverified · top

Chapter 22: The Student and the Teacher

from V34 line 1091 · 2 corrected, 16 contested, 27 accurate, 3 unverified · top

Chapter 23: The Dragon We Made Burns Us All

from V34 line 1137 · 1 corrected, 14 contested, 20 accurate, 4 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1137

    Microplastics in human blood and lungs

    Checked by Fable F4-A77.

    • Leslie et al. 2022 (Environment International); Jenner et al. 2022 (Science of the Total Environment
  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1137

    ~150 million metric tons of plastic in the ocean; a garbage truck a minute

    EMF/WEF 2016 figures (Wikipedia's 86 Mt is a 2013 stock estimate; the 150 Mt is the commonly cited 2016 figure). Cite EMF.

    Checked by Fable F4-A78.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 1138V34 #26 [12a]

    Was: The president still dreamed about the substations.

    Now: The president still dreamed about the substations, which is a neat trick for a war nobody has fought yet.

    Page: the fiction runs 18 paragraphs before “It is a fine campfire story” (line 1156) signals it (Astra THESIS). The first paragraph now says it hasn’t happened, dryly, and doesn’t tip “It is not the fire.”

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

    • Internal consistency: checked against the book's own text (V34 line 1138)
  • ContestedV34 line 1155

    "marsupial sabertooths"

    Thylacosmilus is a sparassodont metatherian, not a marsupial sensu stricto. "Marsupial-relative sabertooths."

    Checked by Fable F4-C30.

  • ContestedV34 line 1155

    "the Isthmus of Panama rose ... three million years ago ... about half the mammal genera in South America today descend from the ones that walked across"

    Interchange peaked ~2.7 Ma; Wikipedia gives 49% of species in relevant groups, not genera. Also some geologists date closure to ~10 Ma (Montes 2015).

    Checked by Fable F4-C31.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1159

    CO2 ~50% above pre-industrial; unprecedented in 800,000-year ice cores; methane ~80x CO2 over 20 years

    422 ppm vs 278 = +52%; GWP-20 CH4 = 81-83.

    Checked by Fable F4-A74.

  • ContestedV34 line 1159

    "NASA's comprehensive survey of the permafrost region from 2000 to 2020 confirmed it is already a net contributor to global warming, the methane from its lakes and wetlands tipping the entire Arctic carbon balance into a source"

    Correct that the region was a net GHG source over 2000-2020 on a GWP-100 basis including CH4 and N2O; on CO2 alone it was a small sink, and the sign is sensitive to lake/wetland flux uncertainties. "Confirmed" is stronger than the paper.

    Checked by Fable F4-C32.

  • ContestedV34 line 1159

    "In the 1970s, sixty-three percent of Mongolia was underlain by permafrost. Today, twenty-nine percent remains."

    Figures are 1971 (63%) and 2015 (29.3%) for area with temperatures able to sustain permafrost. "Today" = 2015 data; and only ~5% of area thawed completely; the 63→29 is climatic suitability, not ground ice loss.

    Checked by Fable F4-C34.

  • ContestedV34 line 1160

    "Permafrost holds methane. Warming thaws the seal. ... a feedback loop that no amount of human behavioral change can reverse once it starts, and it has started"

    IPCC AR6: permafrost carbon feedback is real but currently a modest amplifier (~tens of GtC by 2100), not a runaway; "no amount ... can reverse" is not the consensus position. Reviewers will call this the doomer overreach.

    Checked by Fable F4-C33.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1161

    Iceland classified AMOC collapse as a national security threat

    "In late 2025, Iceland's National Security Council elevated the potential collapse of the AMOC to a national security risk."

    Checked by Fable F4-A75.

  • ContestedV34 line 1161

    "Greenland's ice sheet is losing mass at a rate that may slow or shut down the Atlantic current"

    Consensus: AMOC weakening likely; collapse before 2100 "medium confidence unlikely" (AR6), though 2024-25 papers push risk up. Fine as "may."

    Checked by Fable F4-C35.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1161

    "One study puts the probability that this collapse is already locked in ... at ten to twenty-three percent"

    Unnamed study; nothing matching this range found. Needs a citation (author, journal, year) or deletion.

    Checked by Fable F4-U10.

  • AccurateV34 line 1163

    "In one 2024 study every placenta tested, sixty-two of sixty-two, came back positive"

    Garcia et al., Toxicological Sciences 2024: microplastics in all 62 placentae.

    Checked by Fable F4-A76.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1165

    US life expectancy fell three consecutive years from 2015 (deaths of despair)

    78.9 (2014) → 78.7 → 78.7/78.6 → 78.6 (2017); "decreased for 3 consecutive years after 2014."

    Checked by Fable F4-A79.

  • AccurateV34 line 1165

    "Two in five adults clinically obese"

    41.9% (2017-20).

    Checked by Fable F4-A80.

  • ContestedV34 line 1165

    "The highest infant mortality and the highest maternal mortality of any developed country on the planet"

    True within Commonwealth Fund's 10-14 high-income peers. Across all OECD members Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Turkey have higher infant mortality. Say "of any wealthy peer nation."

    Checked by Fable F4-C36.

  • ContestedV34 line 1165

    "Then the pandemic dropped it another two and a half years in two seasons"

    78.8 (2019) → 76.4 (2021) = 2.4 years.

    Checked by Fable F4-C37.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1168

    Derby Dam; Pyramid Lake dropped eighty feet; cui-ui nearly vanished

    "By the mid-1970s, the lake had lost 80 feet."

    Checked by Fable F4-A81.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1175

    Mostaque quotes: "You are Trithemius..."; "enough to survive, not enough to matter"; "when nations panic..."; "intelligence is a commons, not a commodity"; "August 2025"

    The book site confirms the three-futures names and author but not these sentences or the publication month. Verify against the printed text.

    Checked by Fable F4-U11.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1176

    Mostaque, Stability AI founder; The Last Economy; three futures named Digital Feudalism, Great Fragmentation, Human Symbiosis

    Names confirmed on the book site. (Quotes and date in U-list.)

    Checked by Fable F4-A82.

  • AccurateV34 line 1177

    Declaration of the Rights of Man adopted Aug 26, 1789; Article 11: "Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom"

    Verbatim (Avalon translation).

    Checked by Fable F4-A83.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1177

    Austrian Netherlands annexed 1795; Batavian Republic 1795; Helvetic 1798; sister republics down Italy; Jews citizens 1791 (first in Europe); Batavian 1796; Civil Code 1804; wife as legal dependent

    27 Sept 1791; Batavian 2 Sept 1796.

    Checked by Fable F4-A84.

  • AccurateV34 line 1178

    Woman has the right to mount the scaffold

    Olympe’s scaffold/rostrum passage is in Article10. The 1791 primary text contains the scaffold/Tribune comparison in Article 10. The manuscript quotes a central excerpt, not the entire article, which also discusses opinions and public order.

    Checked by Astra #42.

  • ContestedV34 line 1178

    "Marie Gouze of Montauban, a caterer's widow"

    En-wiki: "caterer"; fr-wiki: "cuisinier et officier de bouche de l'intendant." Either is defensible.

    Checked by Fable F4-C40.

  • ContestedV34 line 1179

    "The bill-sticker she hired read it, declined to paste it, and reported her instead" (de Gouges)

    Blanc's account (afficheur Meunier refused and denounced) is the source; fr.wiki has Bourdon de l'Oise denouncing her at the Jacobins. Both are in the literature; cite Blanc.

    Checked by Fable F4-C39.

  • AccurateV34 line 1180

    De Gouges: Declaration Sept 1791, dedicated to Marie Antoinette; Article 10 wording; arrested July 20, 1793 over Les Trois Urnes; Abbaye → Petite-Force infirmary → private maison de santé; trial Nov 2, 1793 (a Saturday); age 45; no defender ("assez d'esprit").

    fr-wiki confirms prisons (incl. Mahay maison de santé), pregnancy sequence, scaffold quote (police inspector Prévost); en-wiki confirms the judge denied counsel because she could represent herself. Nov 2, 1793 computes to a Saturday.

    Checked by Fable F4-A85.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1180

    "The indictment was built on four of her titles anyway" (de Gouges)

    The acte d'accusation cites Les Trois Urnes, La France sauvée, and other writings; the count of four not confirmed.

    Checked by Fable F4-U13.

  • AccurateV34 line 1183

    Feuille du salut public: "Elle voulut être homme d'État, et il semble que la loi ait puni cette conspiratrice d'avoir oublié les vertus qui conviennent à son sexe"

    Standard, widely reproduced quotation; French wording matches.

    Checked by Fable F4-A86.

    • Feuille du salut public, 17 brumaire an II (reprinted Moniteur, 29 brumaire); Blanc 2003
  • ContestedV34 line 1183

    "Two weeks later Chaumette ... told the city hall to 'Remember the shameless Olympe de Gouges, who was the first to set up women's clubs, who abandoned the cares of her household to involve herself in the republic'"

    Nov 17 is 15 days after the trial, fine. French: "cette virago, cette femme-homme, l'impudente Olympe de Gouges, qui la première institua des sociétés de femmes, abandonna les soins de son ménage, voulut politiquer et commit des crimes." "Shameless" ≈ "impudente".

    Checked by Fable F4-C42.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1185

    Acemoglu, Cantoni, Johnson, Robinson: French-occupied German lands urbanized faster, especially after 1850

    AER 2011.

    Checked by Fable F4-A87.

  • ContestedV34 line 1185

    "the usual list of holdouts runs to three countries" (metric)

    US, Liberia, Myanmar is the meme; Liberia and Myanmar have officially adopted metric (2018/2013). "The usual list" hedges it correctly.

    Checked by Fable F4-C38.

  • ContestedV34 line 1185

    "The Terror's courts handed down about seventeen thousand death sentences ... thousands more died in its prisons or were shot without a trial"

    16,594 official sentences (Greer); 10,000-20,000 died in prison or without trial, "tens of thousands," not "thousands." Vendée "well over a hundred thousand" is fine (117k-250k+).

    Checked by Fable F4-C41.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1186

    Carlsbad Decrees (1819): works under twenty sheets to the censor; university watchers; held ~29 years; Metternich resigned March 13, 1848

    Issued 20 Sept 1819, abrogated 2 Apr 1848; "twenty sheets" ≈ 320 pages at 16 pp/sheet.

    Checked by Fable F4-A88.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1188

    Mostaque on his son: "they told me there was no cure, no treatment"; "I think it was the people and the AI"; "he eventually went to mainstream school"

    Story is widely reported in interviews (2022-24); exact wording not located. Needs interview citation.

    Checked by Fable F4-U12.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1189

    Customer-service AI: least skilled +34%, best barely moved

    Brynjolfsson, Li, Raymond: 14% average, 34% novice/low-skilled.

    Checked by Fable F4-A89.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1189

    Writers: weakest improved most (Noy & Zhang)

    Science 2023.

    Checked by Fable F4-A90.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1189

    BCG/Dell'Acqua: below-average +43%; outside the frontier 19 percentage points less likely correct

    Abstract figures: 43% (below-avg), 17% (above-avg), 19 pp.

    Checked by Fable F4-A91.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1189

    Acemoglu 2024 Nobel co-laureate; leading AI-growth skeptic

    Checked by Fable F4-A92.

  • ContestedV34 near line 1191

    By 2100 the loop completes

    The permafrost study does not establish a2100 completion deadline. NASA’s account describes a complex, timescale-dependent greenhouse-gas balance and substantial projection uncertainty. It does not demonstrate the quoted universal endpoint or establish AI as the exclusive available response.

    Checked by Astra #23.

Chapter 24: A Printing Press in Every Pocket

from V34 line 1192 · 2 corrected, 11 contested, 33 accurate, 6 unverified · top

  • ContestedV34 near line 1192

    novelty

    Declining disruption is not zero discovery. Park, Leahey and Funk report declining disruptiveness alongside stable absolute numbers of highly disruptive works. This supports a declining share/yield claim, not the extinction of insight.

    Checked by Astra #24.

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1192

    Nobel prize-work age rose 7-13 years depending on field

    Jones & Weinberg 2011: +7.4 (medicine), +10.2 (chemistry), +13.4 (physics).

    Checked by Fable F5-A23.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1194

    Anthropic: federal judge, June 2025, destructive scanning of purchased books = fair use

    Alsup, N.D. Cal., 23 June 2025. Books bought in bulk incl. from Better World Books (library discards).

    Checked by Fable F5-A7.

  • ContestedV34 line 1207

    "roughly a quarter of tenure-track faculty in the United States have at least one parent with a doctorate"

    Morgan et al. 2022: 22.2% have a parent with a PhD (25× the general population), nearly doubling at prestigious universities. "Roughly a quarter" is a generous rounding of 22%.

    Checked by Fable F5-C18.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1207

    "roughly a quarter … at the most selective departments the concentration is sharper still"

    Supported by Morgan et al. ("nearly doubles at prestigious universities").

    Checked by Fable F5-U6.

  • ContestedV34 line 1208

    Park, Leahey & Funk 2023: 45M papers, 3.9M patents; average paper's disruptiveness fell "92 to 100 percent," patents "79 to 92 percent" 1980-2010

    Abstract figures are 91.9-100% (papers) and 78.7-91.5% (patents); rounding is fine. But Holst et al. (2024) show the decline is driven by zero-reference database artefacts and that random citation behaviour reproduces it; Macher/Rutzer/Weder (2024) find measurement bias in the CD index.

    Checked by Fable F5-C1.

  • AccurateV34 line 1211

    "seven billion hours a year… 3.4 million people"

    Tax Foundation 2025: 7.1B hours = 3.4M FTE. (2024 figure was 7.9B / 3.8M.)

    Checked by Fable F5-A11.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1211

    US attorneys 1 per 695 (1951) → ~1 per 250 today; 1.3 million lawyers

    ABA: ~1.33M active lawyers.

    Checked by Fable F5-A9.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1211

    "the income tax law of 1913 ran about twenty-seven pages; it is now twenty-seven hundred pages of statute"

    Widely repeated (Tax Foundation/CCH lineage); the 27-page figure refers to the income-tax section of the 1913 Revenue Act. Citable but folkloric.

    Checked by Fable F5-U3.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1211

    "Saturation crossing" dates: attorneys ~1990s, marketing ~2000s, journalism ~2010s, finance early 1980s, bureaucrats 1980s, media mid-2020s, science 1970s

    Author's own construct; no series shown. See holes.

    Checked by Fable F5-U4.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1212

    Madison arrived Philadelphia eleven days early; "Vices" compiled in New York, April 1787; age 36; 54 other delegates

    Arrived May 3 for May 14 opening; 55 delegates attended.

    Checked by Fable F5-A12.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1212

    Gouverneur Morris 35, wooden leg; Preamble drafted by Morris on Committee of Style in four September days

    Born Jan 31, 1752; Committee of Style Sept 8-12, 1787.

    Checked by Fable F5-A13.

  • ContestedV34 line 1212

    "Preamble, fifty-two words that have governed three hundred million people for two and a half centuries"

    52 words correct; 1787→2026 = 239 years; US population ≈340M. Minor.

    Checked by Fable F5-C13.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1213

    Median new lawyer debt $137,500; $112,500 law school alone

    Exact match.

    Checked by Fable F5-A10.

  • ContestedV34 line 1213

    "now produces more nondisclosure agreements per year than the total number of laws passed by every state legislature combined"

    No NDA count exists. Flag as rhetoric, not a fact.

    Checked by Fable F5-C17.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 1214

    Ogilvy Rolls-Royce headline lifted from a British motoring review

    1958; Ogilvy credited The Motor's technical editor.

    Checked by Fable F5-A14.

    • Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1214V33 #19

    Was: He put it in the middle of a white page with acres of empty space around it, and he wrote two words at the top: “Think Small.”

    Now: His art director, Helmut Krone, put it in the middle of a white page with acres of empty space around it, and his copywriter, Julian Koenig, wrote two words at the top: “Think Small.”

    Bernbach keeps the car, the look, and the credit for the idea; the page and the two words go to the men who made them.

    Resolves Fable F5-W1 (wrong (attribution)).

  • ContestedV34 line 1215

    "There are now more people employed in content marketing in the United States than there were literate adults in most European countries when Gutenberg pulled his first proof"

    Probably true (literate adults in a 1450 kingdom ≈ tens of thousands) but no figure for US content-marketing employment is given or citable.

    Checked by Fable F5-C16.

    • ,
  • UnverifiedV34 line 1215

    "A/B tested for a 0.3% improvement in click-through rate"

    Rhetorical.

    Checked by Fable F5-U5.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1216

    Woodward 29, Bernstein 28 (never finished college), June 17, 1972; "CIA" whispered at arraignment

    Woodward b. 26 Mar 1943; Bernstein b. 14 Feb 1944, dropped out of U. Maryland.

    Checked by Fable F5-A15.

  • AccurateV34 line 1218

    "Since 2005, American newspapers have lost roughly two-thirds of their newsroom employees"

    Medill 2023: nearly two-thirds of newspaper journalists.

    Checked by Fable F5-A8.

  • ContestedV34 line 1218

    "the research is unambiguous: when the reporter leaves the room… municipal borrowing costs rise, public corruption go undetected longer, and voter participation decline"

    Borrowing-cost effect (+5-11 bp) and turnout effects are real, but "unambiguous" is too strong; the corruption-detection claim is inferential, not measured.

    Checked by Fable F5-C14.

  • ContestedV34 line 1218

    "Since 2005 … More than 3,200 newspapers have closed"

    Medill 2024 said 3,200+; Medill 2025 (which the same paragraph cites for the 136 figure) says nearly 3,500. Use one report's numbers.

    Checked by Fable F5-C9.

  • AccurateV34 line 1219

    er since before it had a paved street. The Carson Daily Appeal put out its first issue on May 16, 1865, a year after Mark Twain left the territory, and for most of the next century and a half it came out six days a week, in a capital small enough that

    Appeal first-publication date. Library of Congress catalog/history independently confirms May 16, 1865 for the Carson Daily Appeal. The name distinction from later Nevada Appeal titles is useful and should remain.

    Checked by Astra #29.

  • AccurateV34 line 1219

    al small enough that the paper and the legislature could hear each other breathe. In July 2018 the owners cut the Appeal to two printed days, Wednesday and Saturday. The Record-Courier down the valley in Gardnerville went to two. The Lahontan V

    Appeal’s 2018 print-frequency reduction. Nevada Press Association’s July 3, 2018 report confirms six days to Wednesday/Saturday for the Appeal, three to Thursday/Saturday for the Record-Courier, and one weekly edition for the Lahontan Valley News.

    Checked by Astra #30.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1219

    Carson Daily Appeal first issue May 16, 1865

    Founders McElwain, Barrett, Robinson; editor H.R. Mighels. Nevada's oldest paper.

    Checked by Fable F5-A1.

  • AccurateV34 line 1219

    "a year after Mark Twain left the territory"

    Twain left Virginia City for San Francisco in late May 1864.

    Checked by Fable F5-A2.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1219

    July 2018: Appeal cut to Wed/Sat; Record-Courier to two days; Lahontan Valley News to one

    Effective July 16, 2018 (Swift/Sierra Nevada Media Group). R-C went 3→2 (Thu/Sat), LVN 2→1.

    Checked by Fable F5-A3.

  • ContestedV34 line 1219

    "The Carson Daily Appeal… for most of the next century and a half it came out six days a week"

    Sources confirm it was a daily and that in 2018 it went "from six days to two"; no source confirms six-days-a-week for "most of" 160 years (it was a Morning Appeal, at times 7-day, at times weekly during ownership gaps 1870-72). Safer: "a daily."

    Checked by Fable F5-C2.

  • AccurateV34 line 1220

    "back under local owners since January 2025"

    Eagle Valley Publishing (editor Adam Trumble) bought it from Pacific Publishing, Jan 2025. Chain: Swift 1995 → Pacific Publishing Aug 2019 → Eagle Valley 2025.

    Checked by Fable F5-A4.

  • AccurateV34 line 1220

    "spent that year printing its own history in installments for its hundred and sixtieth birthday"

    Eight-week serialization of the 1990 history book, spring 2025.

    Checked by Fable F5-A5.

    • same 2025 article
  • AccurateV34 line 1220

    "Medill counted 136 American papers that did not get another birthday in the year before its 2025 report. Two and a half a week."

    136 closures (up from 130); 136/52 = 2.6/week.

    Checked by Fable F5-A6.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 1220V34 #20 [8b]

    Was: The Appeal is still here, back under local owners since January 2025, and it spent that year printing

    Now: The Appeal is still here in 2026, back under local owners since January 2025, and it spent 2025 printing

    Page: “The Appeal is still here”, present tense. The site is publishing daily as of 2026-09-28. “that year” became ambiguous once 2026 was added, so it is replaced with 2025 (the 160th anniversary year: 1865 + 160).

    Flagged by Astra (V32 review).

  • AccurateV34 near line 1221

    Bank of England 1694; smallest note £10/£20 for most of a century; £1 notes 1797 and 1914

    £20 min until 1759 (£10), £5 in 1793, £1/£2 in 1797; Treasury £1 notes Aug 1914.

    Checked by Fable F5-A16.

  • AccurateV34 line 1221

    "August 15, 1971… stopped paying out gold for dollars"

    Correct.

    Checked by Fable F5-A17.

  • AccurateV34 line 1221

    "ninety-seven of every hundred pounds… bank deposits"

    97% figure is BoE's.

    Checked by Fable F5-A18.

    • BoE Q1 2014 "Money creation in the modern economy"
  • AccurateV34 near line 1221

    Federal Register 106,109 pages in 2024; 3,248 final rules

    Exact.

    Checked by Fable F5-A19.

  • AccurateV34 line 1221

    "roughly forty percent of American domestic corporate profits" to finance at early-2000s peak

    Johnson: 41% in the 2000s.

    Checked by Fable F5-A20.

    • Simon Johnson, "The Quiet Coup," The Atlantic May 2009
  • AccurateV34 near line 1222

    Scopus 3.3 million articles in 2022; literature doubles ~every 17 years

    Both correct.

    Checked by Fable F5-A21.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1222

    Bloom, Jones, Van Reenen & Webb, AER 2020; Moore's-law researchers 18×

    "More than 18 times."

    Checked by Fable F5-A22.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1222

    36% psychology replication; 11% preclinical cancer; Serra-Garcia & Gneezy 2021 nonreplicable cited more

    OSC 2015 (36/97 significant); Begley & Ellis 2012 (6/53).

    Checked by Fable F5-A24.

  • ContestedV34 line 1222

    "Four to five million academic documents published annually across more than 48,000 journals"

    Scopus indexes ~28-29k active journals; ~48k is an Ulrich's-style global estimate. Fine if the sentence says "worldwide"; give the source.

    Checked by Fable F5-C19.

  • ContestedV34 line 1222

    "ten scientific journals in the late seventeenth century"

    Fable's adjudication downgraded this to contested: the count depends on what counts as a journal; about thirty by 1700 is the usual figure. Fable's reading: Standard counts put ~30 scientific/medical periodicals founded by 1700. De Solla Price's log curve gives ~10 only around 1750.

    Checked by Fable F5-W7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1226

    Loren Graham: late USSR ran largest scientific establishment on earth and innovated little

    Graham's thesis.

    Checked by Fable F5-A25.

    • Graham, Lonely Ideas (MIT Press 2013
  • AccurateV34 near line 1227

    4.6% bachelor's 1940 → 38.7% today

    Census: 4.6% (1940); 38.3-38.7% (2024) depending on table.

    Checked by Fable F5-A26.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1228

    "A stranger picked up the phone… the greatest voice in cannabis… a three-hour time change and an eight-hour flight away"; Peter; "reading cripple"; Sacramento test; Nevada "did not test for the condition at all"; UNR limnology lab 2011

    Personal testimony. Michigan→Nevada is a 3-hour change; consistent. Nevada's dyslexia screening statute dates to 2015 (SB 391), "did not test" is plausible for the 1990s but "nobody in the room had heard [dyslexia] before" will draw fire (see holes).

    Checked by Fable F5-U2.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1230

    Hong Xiuquan failed four times 1827-1843; breakdown after 3rd (1837); Taiping ~20M dead 1850-64

    Attempts 1827, 1836, 1837, 1843. Death toll 20-30M+.

    Checked by Fable F5-A27.

  • AccurateV34 line 1230

    Exam ran "another forty years" after Taiping, throne fell 1911

    1864→1905 = 41 years; Qing abdication Feb 1912 (revolution 1911).

    Checked by Fable F5-A28.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 1233

    Lavoisier guillotined, Condorcet died in prison (Terror)

    1794, both.

    Checked by Fable F5-A29.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1234

    "server farms in Storey County, Nevada"

    Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center hosts Google, Switch, Apple etc.; frontier-model training there is plausible but unattributed.

    Checked by Fable F5-U7.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1238

    ~8 billion people; >5 billion internet users; ~4 billion smartphones; adult literacy >86%

    All within range.

    Checked by Fable F5-A30.

    • ITU 2024 (5.5B); UNESCO (~87%
  • AccurateV34 line 1239

    Hochschild: "well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of one kind or another" at end of 18th c.

    Verbatim from the book's introduction.

    Checked by Fable F5-A31.

    • Hochschild, Bury the Chains (2005), opening page

Chapter 25: The Dragon That Refuses to Die: Disruption, Division, Drugged and Despised… Yet Hoarding On

from V34 line 1246 · 2 corrected, 6 contested, 25 accurate, 2 unverified · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1246

    Yi Peiji was the director

    Director 1929-33, proposed the evacuation. (His cloak and watching every crate: unverifiable colour.)

    Checked by Fable F5-A46.

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1246

    Na went aboard for Taiwan "past forty"

    Born 1908; accompanied the Jan 1949 shipment; worked at NPM Taipei till retirement.

    Checked by Fable F5-A47.

    • Baidu bio
  • AccurateV34 near line 1247

    Ottoman medreses closed by the same reformers who replaced the alphabet

    1924 unification of education; 1928 alphabet.

    Checked by Fable F5-A56.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1251

    Justinian closed the Academy 529 CE; Gutas's translation movement ≈750s-end of 10th c.

    Standard dates.

    Checked by Fable F5-A34.

  • ContestedV34 line 1251

    "The edubba: roughly a thousand years, from the first school tablets at Shuruppak to the fall of Babylon."

    Shuruppak tablets ≈2600 BCE. "Fall of Babylon" reads to most readers as 539 BCE (≈2,000 years), which contradicts "roughly a thousand." It only works if "fall of Babylon" = the Hittite sack of 1595 BCE (end of the Old Babylonian edubba). Specify.

    Checked by Fable F5-C12.

  • ContestedV34 line 1251

    "The Chinese examination system ran from 605 to 1905, thirteen hundred years without a permanent interruption… the gaokao that replaced it in 1952 is structurally the same institution"

    The book itself says the Yuan let it lapse ~80 years (1234/1279-1315); the gaokao was suspended 1966-77; and it selects for university entry, not office. Also 605 (first jinshi) vs 587 (Sui) is arguable.

    Checked by Fable F5-C6.

  • ContestedV34 line 1253

    "Baghdad's House of Wisdom was a building. When the Mongols came in 1258, the knowledge system collapsed."

    Gutas and others argue the "House of Wisdom" was a modest palace library, not a research institute, and that Abbasid science had decentralised long before 1258. The Mongol-sack-as-end-of-Islamic-science trope is disputed (Saliba).

    Checked by Fable F5-C11.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1254

    Yuan let keju lapse until 1315; Ming rebuilt it 1370; eight-legged essay fixed 1487

    First Yuan metropolitan exam 1315; first Ming 1370; baguwen standardised 1487.

    Checked by Fable F5-A35.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1257

    Qianlong's 1793 letter to George III; 46 years to 1839

    Correct arithmetic.

    Checked by Fable F5-A36.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1257

    ~2,500 tons of opium in 1838; Lin Zexu destroyed 20,000 chests 1839; Treaty of Nanking 1842: Hong Kong, five ports, 21 million silver dollars; Second War 1856-60, Summer Palace burned

    40,000 chests × ~63.5 kg ≈ 2,540 t; 20,283 chests; $21M (6+3+12).

    Checked by Fable F5-A37.

  • ContestedV34 line 1258

    "estimates of habitual opium users in China ran between ten and twenty million"

    Sources give ~20M addicts (4.4%) by 1949; 19th-century estimates range from a few million to 13.5M (1906 Royal Commission era). Range is defensible but the "peak of the trade" date is vague.

    Checked by Fable F5-C7.

  • AccurateV34 line 1259

    Century of Humiliation 1839-1949, "a hundred and ten years"

    Arithmetic correct.

    Checked by Fable F5-A38.

    • ,
  • AccurateV34 near line 1263

    Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-45; 14-20M Chinese dead; Nanjing Dec 1937, 200-300k in six weeks

    Standard ranges (Nanjing toll disputed 40k-340k; 200-300k is the mainstream/PRC figure).

    Checked by Fable F5-A39.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1264

    Peking, Tsinghua, Nankai → Lianda in Kunming; ~300 students and 11 professors walked 68 days from Changsha; rest via Hong Kong and Haiphong; operated 1938-46

    1,600 km ≈ 1,000 miles; departed 19 Feb 1938.

    Checked by Fable F5-A40.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1265

    Yang Chen-Ning and T.D. Lee, Lianda alumni, shared 1957 Nobel for parity violation

    Yang BSc Lianda 1942; Lee studied there 1945-46. (See spelling note on "Li Tsung-Dao".)

    Checked by Fable F5-A41.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1269

    1933 evacuation: >13,000 crates left the Forbidden City; 2,972 crates to Taiwan (1948-49); NPM holds ~700,000 objects; museum in a hillside

    13,491 crates (or 13,427 crates + 64 packages); 2,972 NPM crates in three shipments Dec 1948-Feb 1949; 699,119 objects (Dec 2025); Waishuangxi, opened 1965.

    Checked by Fable F5-A42.

  • AccurateV34 line 1270

    Now we had to pack.

    Na’s role and the1933wartime evacuation are genuine. The Palace Museum/Durham exhibition documents Na and the southward/westward evacuation using collection photographs, including 1933 packing and his later escort work. Na’s memoir tradition also supports his 1925 entry.

    Checked by Astra #43.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1270

    Na Chih-liang: entered the palace January 1925 at seventeen on Chen Yuan's recommendation; counted for seven years

    Confirmed (born 1908; Chen Yuan's charity school).

    Checked by Fable F5-A43.

  • AccurateV34 line 1271

    Liulichang antique dealers taught packing; teacup thrown on floor; four words "steady, exact, tight, apart"

    稳、准、紧、隔; cotton-rope on handles, then paper, string, straw, wood.

    Checked by Fable F5-A44.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1272

    Feb 4, 1933 order; martial law next night; carts out through the Meridian Gate to the West Station; 2,118 crates that first night

    zh-wiki: first batch 2,118 (452+602+1,064), left Feb 5-6; Sixth Tone says 2,412, a known variant; 2,118 is the NPM/standard figure. Route via Zhengyangmen (Qianmen) West Station.

    Checked by Fable F5-A45.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1273

    Na's quoted lines: "Whenever the trains stopped we'd hop off…", the "bride's palanquin" joke at Pukou, "the objects had a life of their own," the 1939 tow-rope/sandbank incident near Leshan, "two trains," "a hundred military police," "what I remember is the silence"

    Consistent with Na Zhiliang's memoir (典守故宮國寶七十年) as excerpted in SCMP's 2019 "Wandering treasure" feature, but I could not retrieve the English text. Cite the memoir/SCMP in the notes. Note the scene is first-person in Na's voice.

    Checked by Fable F5-U1.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1274

    Route list: Shanghai, Nanking, then Changsha, Hankow, Baoji, Hanzhong, Chengdu, Emei, Yibin, Leshan; Sichuan temples

    Matches the three wartime routes (south via Changsha; middle via Hankou-Chongqing-Leshan; north via Baoji-Hanzhong-Chengdu-Emei).

    Checked by Fable F5-A48.

  • UnverifiedV34 line 1275

    where the boxes ended and I began

    Na’s closing interior monologue. No source located establishes this as Na’s own wording or remembered thought. The unannounced first-person passage invites the reader to mistake authorial reconstruction for translated testimony.

    Checked by Astra #50.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1277

    ByteDance HQ Beijing; Taiwan makes the majority of advanced chips; Taiwan 23M vs mainland 1.4B

    TSMC >90% of leading-edge; Taiwan ~92% of ≤10nm capacity.

    Checked by Fable F5-A54.

  • ContestedV34 line 1279

    "Taiwan's answer, measured by innovation per capita, patents per researcher, and Nobel laureates per million people, is not subtle."

    Taiwan's science Nobel count attributable to Taiwan is essentially one (Lee Yuan-tseh, 1986); Yang/Lee were ROC-era mainlanders working in the US. Per-million comparisons of 1 vs 1-3 laureates are noise.

    Checked by Fable F5-C4.

    • no data supplied in text
  • AccurateV34 near line 1282

    15th Five-Year Plan approved March 2026, 2026-2030; priorities AI, quantum, green energy, biotech, self-reliance

    NPC approved 12 March 2026.

    Checked by Fable F5-A49.

  • AccurateV34 line 1283

    China R&D "past two and a half percent of GDP"; most papers of any country

    2.68-2.69% in 2024; #1 in article output since ~2018 (NSF).

    Checked by Fable F5-A50.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1283

    ~800 million lifted from extreme poverty since 1980 (World Bank)

    World Bank says "since 1978"; fine.

    Checked by Fable F5-A51.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1284

    Song Dynasty produced movable type, paper money, magnetic compass (for navigation)

    Bi Sheng c.1040; jiaozi 1020s; compass navigation 11th c.

    Checked by Fable F5-A55.

  • Corrected in V34V34 line 1286V34 #19 [8a]

    Was: The gaokao sorts more than thirteen million candidates a year into a university system

    Now: The gaokao sorted more than thirteen million candidates in 2025 into a university system

    Page: “The gaokao sorts more than thirteen million candidates a year”, present tense. 2025 registration was 13.35 million (MoE via Xinhua); the figure matches the 2025 scene at line 415. Now dated.

    Resolves Fable F5-C5 (contested (stale for 2026)).

  • AccurateV34 near line 1293

    TikTok internal research: 260 videos to form a habit; <35 minutes at 8-second clips; Kentucky AG 2024, faulty redactions copy-pasted

    Kentucky Public Radio exposed ~30 redacted pages.

    Checked by Fable F5-A53.

  • AccurateV34 near line 1294

    Douyin under-14: 40 minutes/day, educational feed

    Sept 2021; also blocked 10pm-6am.

    Checked by Fable F5-A52.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1294V33 #40

    Was: The export version, the one shipped to the United States, to Europe, to every country that is not China, has no such lock. The same company, the same technology, the same algorithm.

    Now: The export version, the one shipped to the United States, to Europe, to every country that is not China, has no such lock, only a sixty-minute prompt a teenager can type a passcode past. The same company, the same technology, the same algorithm.

    Keeps the lock/no-lock contrast and the slot machine line; names what the export version has instead.

    Resolves Fable F5-C10 (contested); Astra #9 (wrong).

  • ContestedV34 line 1301

    "Chapter 24 caught the first one buying a library to feed the second" / opening warehouse scene

    Accurate as far as it goes (Alsup, 23 June 2025: destructive scanning of purchased books = fair use). Omits that the same order found 7M+ pirated books NOT fair use and that Anthropic settled for $1.5B in Sept 2025. A reviewer will call the "employees with a purchase order" image sanitized.

    Checked by Fable F5-C15.

  • AccurateV34 line 1305

    Dyslexia "looks different in girls… girls get caught later"; "before third grade the window is still open"

    Equal prevalence, boys referred more; early-intervention window is standard.

    Checked by Fable F5-A59.

Chapter 26: My Son Cannot Read

from V34 line 1307 · 1 contested, 2 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 chapter, from line 1307

    Methane "eighty times more potent than CO2"

    Correct on the 20-year horizon.

    Checked by Fable F5-A58.

    • IPCC AR6 (GWP20 ≈ 80-83
  • AccurateV34 near line 1330

    Nevada Millennium Scholarship

    Est. 1999 (first class 2000).

    Checked by Fable F5-A57.

  • ContestedV34 line 1347

    "Up to twenty percent of the population is estimated to be dyslexic"

    Yale's Connecticut Longitudinal Study gives 20%; most international reviews put dyslexia at 5-10% (up to 17% with broad reading-disability definitions). "Up to" covers it, but a critic will call 20% the high outlier.

    Checked by Fable F5-C8.

Afterword: A Note from the Author

from V34 line 1360 · 1 contested, 2 accurate · top

Field Guide

from V34 line 1389 · 7 corrected, 1 accurate · top

  • AccurateV34 near line 1409

    Britain's Order in Council 1855 and 1870; Lincoln admitted to Illinois bar 1836; observatory pulled down 1580; Sumerian King List first king 28,800 years

    All correct (Alulim, 28,800 years).

    Checked by Fable F5-A67.

  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1419V33 #5

    Was: Flood ratio is candidates against seats: four hundred thousand against two hundred under the Ming, two thousand to one.

    Now: Flood ratio is candidates against seats: more than half a million against fewer than three hundred a cycle under the Ming, near two thousand to one.

    Glossary now matches Ch 9.

    Resolves Fable F5-W6 (wrong (internal)).

    • Internal: V32 L426 (Ch 9: more than half a million licentiates against fewer than three hundred jinshi a cycle, near two thousand to one
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1420V33 #6

    Was: First appears: Prologue, by description; named in Chapter 16; the plow in Chapter 2.

    Now: First appears: Prologue; the plow in Chapter 2.

    Named in the Prologue.

    Resolves Fable F5-W3 (wrong (cross-ref)).

    • Internal: V32 L46 ('Call that kind cultural'
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1423V33 #7

    Was: First appears: Prologue, by description; named in Chapter 17.

    Now: First appears: Prologue.

    Named in the Prologue.

    Resolves Fable F5-W5 (wrong (cross-ref)).

    • Internal: V32 L47 ('Call that kind institutional'); zero hits for the phrase in Ch 17
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1424V33 #8

    Was: First appears: Prologue, by description; named in Chapter 9.

    Now: First appears: Prologue.

    Named in the Prologue.

    Resolves Fable F5-W4 (wrong (cross-ref)).

    • Internal: V32 L45 ('Call that kind overcomable'
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1428V33 #9

    Was: First appears: Chapter 4; defined in Chapter 10.

    Now: First appears: Prologue; defined in Chapter 10.

    The Prologue introduces corridors.

    Resolves Fable F5-W2 (wrong (cross-ref)).

    • Internal: V32 L29 ('Rivers are joined by corridors: a trade road, a shared language, a press'
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1430V33 #10

    Was: Stolen river. A river taken four ways: by slavery; by the dragon’s own body after the bite; by trade diversion; and by literal dam, the only one that is not a metaphor, which is how the Truckee left Pyramid Lake.

    Now: Stolen river. A river taken four ways: by slavery; by expulsion, poisoned at the spring by the dragon’s own decree; by trade diversion; and by literal dam, the only one that is not a metaphor, which is how the Truckee left Pyramid Lake.

    Glossary now matches Ch 11's four ways.

    Flagged by Sol (WRONG 4).

    • Internal: V32 L523, Ch 11 ('It can be poisoned at the spring by the dragon’s own decree, which is expulsion'
  • Corrected in V33V34 line 1444V33 #39

    Was: A burn leaves the seed bank under the ash and the forest comes back in seasons; a clear-cut removes the seed source itself, and the site depends on what arrives from outside.

    Now: A burn leaves the seed bank under the ash and the forest comes back in seasons; a clear-cut taken to the dirt removes the seed source itself, and the site depends on what arrives from outside.

    Glossary matches Ch 20.

    Flagged by Astra (WRONG 8).

The page reads one file. The whole ledger downloads below, and the method behind the book is on Method and Sources.