Leibson's Law

Symptomatic of the dumbing down of all media, I caught this laughable error in the latest issue of IEEE Spectrum. The article in question, written by Steven Cherry, discusses the use of 9V rectangular batteries as a source for AAAA cells to power a new generation of tiny consumer and medical electronic devices. The culprit quote:

Naturally, AAAAs don't last nearly as long. Eager says that in a 25-megawatt test at a continuous drain with a noise-canceling headset, “the run time for a AAAA is approximately 24 hours, versus a AAA at approximately 55 hours.” At about the same cost, that makes AAAAs relatively expensive to use.

The problem word here, of course: “megawatt” is used mistakenly for “milliwatt.” We can’t know if this is Cherry’s error or an error inserted by an overzealous copy editor substituting the expanded word for the abbreviation “mW.” This sort of error covering nine orders of magnitude ought not to happen in the IEEE’s flagship membership publication.

Too bad the figure isn’t right. We’d immediately solve the energy crisis.