Getting the Details Right

When the legendary judoka Keiko Fukuda, 10th dan, died earlier this year at the age of 99, the NY Times made what is obviously a gross error to anyone who knows something about judo. Here's their description of Ju-no-Kata in her obituary:

By the late ’30s, she had become an instructor and developed an expertise in ju-no-kata, a gentler form of judo.

Wikipedia gets it right:

Ju no Kata (柔の形 Jū-no-kata^?, "forms of gentleness") is a kata (a set of prearranged forms) in Judo. It is designed to teach the fundamental principles of judo, especially the principle of ju(yielding or gentleness).^[1] It consists in three sets of techniques and is performed by a pair of people one acting as an Uke and the other a Tori. The kata can be performed without wearing ajudogi and, as it doesn't involve the completion of any throws, does not need to be performed in a dojo.

You can see why the author decided to emphasize "gentleness" rather than "fundamental principles of judo," but it's still wrong.

I sent email to the author about this, and we had a polite correspondence that included my suggestion of an alternative, more accurate description of Ju-no-Kata, but his editors decided to let it stand.

This kind of thing happens in newspapers every day, of course: a reporter gets something wrong enough that subject matter experts notice the problem, but nonexperts don't. By and large, I think newspapers should be willing to issue clarifications or corrections in these cases.

But here's an obituary where the author gets a technical description right and was given enough space for a lengthy description:

Throat singing, also called overtone singing, is practiced in only a few parts of the world, mostly in Asia. The Tuvan variety, known as khoomei, is the most famous of all. 

Whenever someone sings a note, the column of air in the throat vibrates, producing both a fundamental tone (the note’s basic pitch) and a series of higher pitches — the overtones. 

In conventional singing, the overtones are largely inaudible, manifesting themselves as timbre. In throat singing, through careful manipulation of the mouth and throat, a vocalist can render certain overtones audible, resulting in two, three and even four pitches sounding at a time. 

Properly sung, khoomei sounds as though the singer has ingested a set of bagpipes, with a low drone and a high melody issuing simultaneously from the same mouth.

That's Margalit Fox, writing the obituary for Tuvan master singer Kongar-ol Ondar.