To err is not only human, it is absolutely crucial in the development of new ideas. No, I’m not referring to that obnoxiously necessary but tedious practice known as ‘trial-and-error’ according to which you do something, you fail and next time you do it better (or not and fail again). I am referring to the altogether more elegant notion of serendipitous erring when you make a mistake or do something rather stupid, but the outcome is unexpectedly and unfairly pleasant. Such as when yesterday when I was writing something, I typed ‘idiosyncretic’ instead of ‘idiosyncratic.’ It was late at night, so it took me a while to figure out what I had done wrong. Then I realized I liked the mistake: it speaks of a very personal notion of syncretism.
On the serendipitous nature of idiosyncratic typo’s
who braved the vagaries of Dutch public transportation daily (not anymore! Now I just cycle to the institute. Life is good, to quote what was once called Lucky Goldstar, yes, Lucky Goldstar – I wonder how many marketing millions went into trying the erase the memory of Lucky Goldstar, btw, but that is an entirely different matter), I probably have a tendency to underestimate (and severely so) 
just sent classified materials. 291 pages of classified, top secret data filled with numbers, analyses, tables, indexes. How do I know they are classified, you ask? Well, this here to the left is a dead give-away, the Chinese character equivalent of this immediately recognizable warning below:
