parity errors

pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness,
usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day
hacking. I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity
errors. Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable
transient error in memory hardware. It predates RAM; in fact, this term is
reported to have already have been in use in its jargon sense back in the
1960s when magnetic cores ruled. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage
and serial communication lines; this is more serious because not always
correctable.

