In my previous post, I told a little anecdote illustrating that when I was as a kid, I thought I was very smart, sometimes even smarter than adults, and yet I’d never heard of the concept of Ï€r². But I worried that some people might not get the joke, so I decided to sneak in a little explanation at the end of the post.

And I messed up.

I implied that Ï€r² belongs to algebra, when it really belongs to geometry.

I knew this, of course, but for some reason I was thinking of the wrong type of math.

The irony is that in writing a post about how this one time I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself, I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself.

I corrected the error so that nobody would ever know the difference. Except I know of at least one person who saw the error, because he e-mailed me to correct me, and therefore I worried that there might have been others who saw the error, so I felt compelled to write this explanation. Which means that those of you who hadn’t read the post before I changed it, or who don’t use RSS feed readers, now also know I made an error.

This whole post feels like something Faustus would write, except that I didn’t end it by saying that my error means nobody will ever, ever love me.

(I kid, Joel. I kid.)