Authors' Mistakes #15 - Daniel Silva

Daniel Silva has written more than a dozen spy novels. I had never read any of them and only picked up The Fallen Angel because it had Saint Peter’s basilica on the front cover.

Silva’s character Gabriel Allon was interesting and I found Silva’s writing style to be fluid and easy to read. But, once more, a book published by Harper Collins turned out to contain some mistakes that could have been eliminated with careful editing.

On page 13, Silva wrote that Giacomo Benedetti was a Caravaggisto. It should have been Caravaggista, come artista (artist), paesaggista (landscape painter), etc. He must have thought that the ending in ‘o’ was necessary because Benedetti was a man, and many Italian masculine nouns end in ‘o’, but that is no good excuse.

On page 82, to make the plural of capozona (area boss), Silva wrote capi zoni. Besides the fact that he broke the noun into two parts, he got it wrong because the plural of capozona is capizona. Building the plural of a noun consisting of two parts by changing the ending of the first part is a quirk of the language that sometimes causes problems to Italians as well. For example, some people erroneously write the plural of capostazione (station master) as capistazioni, while it should be capistazione. But if Silva had made the equivalent mistake with capozona, he should have written capizone because the plural of zona is zone, not zoni. Therefore, by writing capi zoni, Silva managed to cram three mistakes in a single noun!

A mistake of a different type appears on page 87, where Silva wrote that the Carabinieri, the Army service with police functions, have blue uniforms, while in reality their uniforms are – and have always been – black.

I also detected an inconsistency on page 384, where General Ferrari responds to Allon’s “I had nothing to do with it” with “And I still have a perfectly good right hand”. Clearly, the general wanted to express the fact that he didn’t believe Allon. But the problem with such a statement is that the general, as far as we know, indeed had a perfectly good right hand. What he had lost in an assassination attempt was his right eye, not his right hand, as explained on page 74! Therefore, the general’s statement only makes sense if you replace hand with eye.

Einstein's Puzzle

I saw an informal IQ test that is fun to do. It is called Einsteins’ Puzzle, although it is not clear whether it was Einstein who actually invented the test. I found it in http://sesquiq.thelogics.org/freeiqtests.html together with other tests, but a Google search for “Einstein’s test” will take you to many pages on the subject.

According to Larry Neal Gowdy, who wrote the page where I found the test, the time people take to solve the test is linearly correlated to their IQ percentile. Apparently, unless you are in the top 2% of IQ percentile (the level that qualifies you to join Mensa), you will never succeed in solving the puzzle!

Here is a graphic representation of what Gowdy said:

That is, according to Gowdy, somebody who scraped through the Mensa qualification test takes two hours to solve Einstein’s puzzle. If you want to try it out, start your timer immediately before reading the text of the test.

Here it is:

There are 5 houses in 5 different colors. In each house lives a man with a different nationality. The 5 owners drink a certain type of beverage, smoke a certain brand of cigar, and keep a certain pet. No owners have the same pet, smoke the same brand of cigar, nor drink the same beverage.

The Brit lives in the red house.

The Swede keeps dogs as pets.

The Dane drinks tea.

The green house is on the left of the white house.

The green house's owner drinks coffee.

The person who smokes Pall Mall rears birds.

The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.

The man living in the center house drinks milk.

The Norwegian lives in the first house.

The man who smokes Blends lives next to the one who keeps cats.

The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.

The owner who smokes Bluemasters drinks beer.

The German smokes Prince.

The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.

The man who smokes Blends has a neighbor who drinks water.

Who owns the fish?

If you give up and want to know how I solved it, keep reading.

First of all, I expressed the statements of the test in a compact form:

A. Brit - red

B. Swede - dogs

C. Dane - tea

D. green | White

E. green - coffee

F. birds - PallMall

G. yellow - Dunhill

H. center - milk

I. first - Norwegian

J. (cats) | Blends | (cats)

K. (Dunhill) | horse | (Dunhill)

L. beer - Bluemasters

M. German - Prince

N. (blue) | Norwegian | (blue)

O. (water) | Blends | (water)

I did it because I wanted to avoid being distracted by the wordiness of the original statements.

Then, I made a table with one column for each house position, from left to right.

We can immediately use I, H, and N to begin populating the table:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour		blue
citizenship	Norwegian
pet
drink			milk
cigars

After combining D with E and J with O, we are left with:

A. Brit - red

B. Swede - dogs

C. Dane - tea

DE. green - coffee | White

F. birds - PallMall

G. yellow - Dunhill

JO. (cats) - (water) | Blends | (cats) - (water)

K. (Dunhill) | horse | (Dunhill)

L. beer - Bluemasters

M. German - Prince

DE tells us that green and coffee are on the left of white. This means that green cannot be in first position because otherwise it would have blue on its right. Obviously, it cannot be in second position either because it is green and not blue. And it cannot be in third position because its occupant drinks coffee and not milk. This means that green is in fourth position:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour		blue		green	white
citizenship	Norwegian
pet
drink			milk	coffee
cigars

Then, red must be in third position because only two positions have an undefined colour, the first position is occupied by a Norwegian, and, according to A, red’s occupant is a Brit. Before redrawing the table, we can also write yellow in first position (the only position with undefined colour) and apply to it G:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian		Brit
pet
drink			milk	coffee
cigars	Dunhill

The remaining statements are:

B. Swede - dogs

C. Dane - tea

F. birds - PallMall

JO. (cats) - (water) | Blends | (cats) - (water)

K. (Dunhill) | horse | (Dunhill)

L. beer - Bluemasters

M. German - Prince

Now, statement K forces us to write horse in the second house because we know that Dunhill is in the first one:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian		Brit
pet		horse
drink			milk	coffee
cigars	Dunhill

And we are left with the statements:

B. Swede - dogs

C. Dane - tea

F. birds - PallMall

JO. (cats) - (water) | Blends | (cats) - (water)

L. beer - Bluemasters

M. German - Prince

According to C, Dane/tea can either be in the second house or in the fifth one. The same applies to beer/Bluemasters according to statement L. Therefore, we have two possible situations:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian	Dane	Brit
pet		horse
drink		tea	milk	coffee	beer
cigars	Dunhill				Bluemasters

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian		Brit		Dane
pet		horse
drink		beer	milk	coffee	tea
cigars	Dunhill	Bluemasters

The following statements remain to be applied:

B. Swede - dogs

F. birds - PallMall

JO. (cats) - (water) | Blends | (cats) - (water)

M. German - Prince

In either case, water must be in first position. This makes the second situation impossible, because statement JO stipulates that water is neighbouring Blends, while with the second situation the neighbour would be Bluemasters. Then:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian	Dane	Brit
pet		horse
drink	water	tea	milk	coffee	beer
cigars	Dunhill	Blends			Bluemasters

We still don’t know whether cats are on the left or on the right of Blends. Therefore, we have to keep the J part of JO:

B. Swede - dogs

F. birds - PallMall

J. (cats) | Blends | (cats)

M. German - Prince

Statement M can only apply to the fourth position, because it is the only one with both citizenship and cigars undefined. Then, the Swede of statement B can only be in fifth position:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian	Dane	Brit	German	Swede
pet		horse			dogs
drink	water	tea	milk	coffee	beer
cigars	Dunhill	Blends		Prince	Bluemasters

The two statements left are:

F. birds - PallMall

J. (cats) | Blends | (cats)

PallMall of condition F can only be in third position, which means that the Brit owns the birds. This resolves statement J because the only unknown pet neighbouring the Blends is in first position:

	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th
colour	yellow	blue	red	green	white
citizenship	Norwegian	Dane	Brit	German	Swede
pet	cats	horse	birds	fish	dogs
drink	water	tea	milk	coffee	beer
cigars	Dunhill	Blends	PallMall	Prince	Bluemasters

And it is the German who owns the fish!

I did waste some time at the beginning, before finding the right way of organising the information, but it took me 31 minutes to solve it. This is equivalent to an IQ percentile of 99.58, not inconsistent with what I had scored in the five IQ tests I had previously completed (from the most recent to the oldest: 99.96, 99.98, 99.82, 99.89, 99.87, 99.50).

Authors' Mistakes #14 - Dean Crawford

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If you care about Science (capital initial intentional) do not buy Apocalypse by Dean Crawford.

People who don’t understand science shouldn’t write about it. After reading 146 of the 553 pages of the novel, I gave up.

The first problem I encountered was on page 86. Crawford writes: “a young Air Force ensign”. He should have known that “ensign” is a rank exclusively used in the Navy. OK. It has nothing to do with science, but it was annoying nonetheless.

It is when Crawford starts writing about science that he really gets onto my nerves. On page 95, he writes:

If an object starts moving at high velocity, then time begins to run more slowly compared to another object that remains stationary. The discrepancy was predicted by Einstein in his Theory of General Relativity.

The first sentence, although not entirely rigorous (and not written in the best English) is acceptable in a novel. But “General Relativity” is wrong, as it is “Special Relativity” that explains time dilation when objects move fast.

Then, on page 96, Crawford claims:

Mercury orbits very close to the sun and always seemed to appear slightly out of place. It turned out that the sun’s mass curved the light reflected from Mercury’s surface when seen from the earth, making it appear in a different place to where it actually was.

Wrong. Even ignoring the mixed-up tenses, Crawford’s statement is incorrect. The anomaly in Mercury’s orbit that Newtonian Physics failed to correctly predict is the perihelion precession (i.e., how fast the point of the orbit closest to the sun moves). This is a real effect, not something that is explainable away with curved light paths.

One page later, on page 97, Crawford makes another blunder. After explaining that the presence of a large gravitational field has a dilation effect on time similar to that caused by high speeds, he goes on saying:

Sergey Avdeyev [...] orbited the earth almost twelve thousand times over 750 days whilst aboard the Mir space station. At such velocity, and farther from the mass of the earth than those of us on the ground, the time dilation he experienced sent him 0.02 seconds into the future, because time passed slower for him than for the rest of us.

Wait a minute! If the cosmonaut was subjected to a lower gravitational force, the resulting effect was to reduce the time dilation caused by the earth, not to increase it. Therefore, “despite being farther” would have been correct, not “and farther”.

Incidentally, the author also shows his poor command of English by inserting a comma between “velocity” and “and farther”.

Crawford proves beyond any doubt that he has not understood Relativity when, on page 113, one of the characters explains what a scientist had thought:

his idea was to place some kind of camera aboard a spaceship and send it into orbit around the sun for long periods of time at a very hight velocity. [...] The ship would then return to earth [...] the high velocities and close presence of the sun’s immense mass would allow the cameras [wasn’t it singular at the beginning of the paragraph?] to peek into earth’s future, just by a few minutes.

Baloney! If the ship’s time slows down, it means that it will fall behind earth-based clocks. That’s all.

What made me stop reading the novel was the explanation given by Crawford of a machine capable of filming the future (chapter 22). According to Crawford, you can peek into the future if you hold a camera very close to a black hole and point it towards a TV set located further away from the black hole. The camera will film future news shown on the TV set.

This is complete nonsense.

There are also other misconceptions, like the following one, expressed on page 156:

jets of steam hissed and enveloped the entire device in thick water vapor [...] A precautionary measure, to wash away any particles irradiated by the immense energy within the chamber.

“Irradiated by the energy”? Give me a break! And again, a misplaced comma (after “measure”).

In case you are wondering about the fact that at the beginning of this article I claimed to have read 146 pages while the last quotation refers to page 156, it is because I skipped chapter 21 in order to read the description of the “time machine”.

Crawford appended to the novel an Author’s Note where he claims: “all of the science within my novels is real, [his italics] but some of it is stretched to embrace the extreme events that are part and parcel of thriller fiction”. Clearly, he hasn’t simply stretched the science. He has broken it in a bad way. In the same Author’s Note, Crawford also states:

If one were able to stand alongside the event horizon of a sufficiently massive black hole, then time would indeed be dilated in the manner described.

He really hasn’t understood Relativity. And, what’s worse, his book got published by Simon & Schuster and sold well, otherwise it would have not been printed in Australia. How many thousands of people read it and were misled by Crawford’s bad science?

It makes me angry that ignorance, once more, has prevailed.

In any case, Crawford’s prose is also not satisfying. His writing is flat and banal with the pretence of being interesting or educational. He writes sentences like “The warbled tones of a despatch officer replied to his question across the radio waves.” (page 1). “Across the radio waves”? Please!

Authors' Mistakes #13 - John Stack

Master of Rome is John Stack’s third novel placed in ancient Rome.

I picked it up at a remainders’ bookshop for ten Australian dollars.

The story, with lots of naval battles between Romans and Carthaginians and Senate intrigues is nice enough, but I was appalled at the poor quality of the editing. And I also detected some inexcusable mistakes.

The first thing that caught my attention was that the protagonist travelled from Ostia (the Roman harbour) to Rome on the Via Aurelia. But the Via Aurelia doesn’t pass through Ostia and never has. The first part of the Via Aurelia exits Rome on its western side and runs from east to west before turning north, while Ostia is almost exactly south-west of Rome.

Then, throughout the book, the author talks about Fiumicino (where Rome’s major airport is currently located). But in Roman times, the place was called Portus, not Fiumicino. And, in any case, Portus was founded and built by the Emperor Claudius (41-54 CE), while the story of the book is placed in Rome’s republican period at the time of the first Punic war, around 250 BCE.

Another major blunder I noticed was that, according to Stack, the Romans had the concept of minutes (pp. 129, 228, and 249) and even seconds (p. 129). That was not the case. The most accurate way the Romans had to measure time was with sun dials and water clocks, and they were certainly never used aboard ships! Water clocks were only used in some patrician houses and sun dials were only in public places. Therefore, the Romans mostly relied on the position of the Sun to time their daily activities.

And there is more: one of the characters of the book uses paper. But paper is a Chinese invention that only reached Europe in the middle ages (come on! Everybody knows that the Chinese invented paper!). The closest thing to paper the Romans had was papyrus.

Then, I detected a mistake in the construction of the story: on page 219, two Roman siege towers are burned down by the Carthaginians. Three days later (on page 261), the protagonist sees a dozen soldiers searching the towers’ charred remains for salvageable iron. They couldn’t possibly have searched the burned-down towers for three days (and counting), could they?

In one occasion, Stack referred to the Mediterranean Sea as the ocean (p. 293), which it certainly isn’t and wasn’t.

Then there is a major language mistake: classis is the Latin word for fleet and, according to Stack, it is a masculine noun, because he systematically wrote classis romanus. But classis is feminine, and he should have written classis romana.

Finally, I noticed a series of typos that the proofreaders should have corrected:

• Page 182: “exploiting” should have been “exploited”.
• Pages 166-168: the name of the protagonist’s ship, which is Orcus, is mistyped as Corus.
• Page 241: omitted “been” in “had been beaten”.
• Page 247: an “at” should have been “as”.
• Page 326: “You weapons, Prefect” sould have been “Your weapons, Prefect”.
• Page 328: in “for a people who despise you”, “despise” should have been “despises” you, as the subject is singular.

How could Harper Collins release a hard-cover book with so many mistakes? Its price in the UK was GBP 14.99 and in Canada CAD 28.99. In Australia, where books tend to be more expensive, the Recommended Retail Price was AUD 49.99. I would expect something better for such a price.

Actually, I would expect something better for any price.