My knowledge of history is a bit patchy, but I'm more prepared to believe you than him.

In fact, given some of your previous posts in the forum, I'm prepared to accept what you say about him without any further corroboration. Whereas I shall now view his take on history with as much scepticism as I view his take on science...

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

[blush]

Well, thank you! Likewise, I'm more inclined to trust the thoughtful program with Tony Robinson hosting than I am to trust Dan Brown.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I read Davinci Code about a month ago. It was a fun read and I got through it in 2 days.

As to why it sold so many copies is likely related to the controversy it inherently brings up with respect Christian history and beliefs. Controversy sells.

Its pretty much a classic conspiracy theory wherein the main characters have been graced with "the truth" and are trying to thwart the powers that be (in this case the Roman Catholic Church).

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Earth First! We'll mine the rest later.

I think Eco's novel FOCAULT'S PENDULUM is far better--the first few paragraphs are superb, as is the brief blurb about how a vanity press is run.

Quite funny.

Name of the Rose didn't do well, and his novels don't exactly lend themselves to movie adaptation. I'd like to see some short stories from Borges done for Sci-fi or in an Anime. The Book of Sand and The Library of Babel come to mind.

Much better than anything Dan Brown will ever do. For controversy, nothing beats "Three Versions Of Judas"

I read Angels & Demons, the thing that I found hardest to understand was this - they managed to make a reasonable amount of antimatter, this was stored in a (I think magnetic) container which needed power to keep the stuff from going bang. The whole plot rests on the fact that the container is removed from it's power source and is running on batteries, when they run out ....BANG!
Firstly why design a container than needs a special power source, why not plain 12 volt, or mains supply? (Stupid design for such a dangerous device!)
Second, the container has a counter showing how many seconds until the battery runs out and the thing explodes, what sort of battery is it than you can say to the second when it will run out?

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The meek will inherit the earth ... the rest of us will go to the stars.

A movie battery.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.

No, a novel battery

When I read it, I considered the whole battery-powered antimatter-containment thing to be simply a plot device.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

[off topic but speaking of batteries]

In Stephen King's the Tommyknockers--only towards the end did the one "immune" character realize that the Tommyknocker-stage humans could have built all their cool stuff and used the mains instead of batteries....

[/off topic but speaking of batteries]

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"Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." — Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

441!!!! :)

Hoo, man, "Angels and Demons" was my first Dan Brown experience, and boy did I goggle in disbelief.

(spoiler, sort of)

They have a remote camera somewhere underneath the Vatican, transmitting a picture of a bomb. And NOBODY THINKS TO TRIANGULATE ON THE CAMERA'S SIGNAL or even get a frikkin' RF meter and walk around!! AAAGGGRRRRRGGGHGHGH!!

I pretty much blew the book off after that... and I actually *like* Clive Cussler novels, so that's pretty sad!

It's been a while since I read the book, but I seem to remember that that was discussed, and explained away.

Sadly, it really wasn't. They said they couldn't triangulate the camera signal because there was too much RF noise in the building. Then they turned off all possible power to cut the RF noise. So they could attempt to detect the bomb itself, and not the camera...

Good point. I didn't spot that one when I read the book.

Plus, if there's too much RF noise to DF the camera, there'd be too much to receive the picture. Duh!

And there's more: a TV signal is very, very wide (FM voice can be transmitted in 25 kHz of bandwith, or about 3 kHz if you use SSB {single side-band with supressed carrier} instead - a typical TV signal would be hundreds of kHz wide). So, I'm sure they could have acquired a spectrum analyser and connected it to a highly directional antenna to DF the camera's signal through any amount of noise. Any amount of RF noise that doesn't actually swamp the camera's signal, that is.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Michael Crighton's "State Of Fear"


No argument Mathew Riley's science is atrocious but at least his books are worth reading.

In "State of Fear" he goes to great lengths to find references for everything he says, making the book seem like a research paper with a story tacked on.

[Spoiler]




But then he introduces these little devices that are hidden in the heroes' cell phones to attract lightning. That's right, mobile phones that attract lightning. Products of "military research", that he doesn't seem to have referenced...

Even ignoring Crichton's global warming stance, the book is pretty far-fetched as a conspriacy thriller. There are some ridiculously predictable scenes, and he stops the action to give us lectures (literally). With graphs. I bet even the Da Vinci Code doesn't have graphs.

As far as I can tell, Crichton for a big part just keeps writing the same novel over and over, a la "The Andromeda Strain". More successful with something like "Eaters of the Dead".

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

I only read one Michael Crighton novel, and that was Jurassic Park. But I wished I hadn't read it because it spoiled the film.

What I mean is, I went and read the book just before the film came out. The story was basically the same, except that two characters in the book had been conflated into one in the film, but the four protagonists (the "family unit") had totally different characters in the film. In the book, Sam Neil's character didn't start out hating children. That was added to the film to give his character some fortune-cookie psych-type "development". Plus, the kids in the film were really annoying. I found myself wanting the velociraptors to eat them.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

Oh, and of course Ian Malcolm died, which made for a very irritating discussion in line for The Lost World with someone who'd seen the first movie and read the first book. Other people in line agreed that he looked mighty good for a dead man, but the guy we were with refused to admit that we who'd read the first book could be right.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

That's a phenomenon I've noticed - the first version of something one encounters tends to take on a "definitive" status in one's mind. This seems to apply to more or less anything - different versions of the same story, different spellings or pronunciations of the same word, or any scenario that has no objective "right" answer.

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The quarrelsome oarsmen were rowing,
The great violinist was bowing;
But how is the sage
To tell, from the page:
Was it pigs or seeds that were sowing?

They did chop out the whole "stop the dinosaurs on the boat from getting to land" plot thread from the movie, and I was disappointed that Sam Neill didn't roll any poisoned eggs at the velociraptors.

Easiest example of that is to ask people who is the real Doctor for them, ie. for me it's Tom Baker since he was the first I saw.

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An emperor without enemies, a king without a kingdom, supported in life by the willing tribute of a free people.