I use this blog as a soap box to preach (ahem... to talk :-) about subjects that interest me.

Saturday, July 20, 2013

Authors' Mistakes #20 - Donna Leon


I just finished reading yet another Brunetti novel by Donna Leon: Fatal Remedies.

This is the 8th Story with Commissario Brunetti and it was, as usual, entertaining. But, you guessed it, I detected in it some mistakes that could have been easily avoided.

The first mistake is on page 45, where Leon states that the 1st November is in Italy the “day of the dead”, while the day of the dead is in fact the second day of November. This mistake is surprising for several reasons. First of all, Donna Leon has lived in Italy for many years. Secondly, “All Saints’ Day” is well known in the English world, where it precedes “All Souls’ day”.

On page 133, Leon mentions “Ponte dei Greci” (Bridge of the Greeks), but spells it “Ponte dei Grechi”, which is wrong. This is a funny mistake, because the word “grechi” exists in Italian, but is used as an adjective. For example, “gli antichi greci” (the ancient Greeks) but “i vasi grechi” (the Greek vases). In fact, many (most) Italians erroneously use the noun when they should use the adjective, and even think that you are an ignorant if you use the adjective correctly. It is therefore common to hear and read expressions like “attori greci” (Greek actors) and “ruderi greci” (Greek ruins), which are incorrect. Donna Leon is the only one who swap noun and adjective the other way around!
On page 144 and some additional times on later pages, Leon uses the word “embarcadero” and italicises it to indicate that it is Italian. But the problem is that the word is Spanish. To indicate a pier, she should have used the word “molo”.

Finally, on page 235, Leon refers to the wife of a murder victim as “Signorina”. This is clearly wrong, as in Italian a married woman is a “signora”, not a “signorina”. In fact, the term “signorina” is nowadays used very seldom because the term, like “Fräulein” in German, “Miss” in English, and, I believe, “mademoiselle” in French, is considered to be less respectful.

As it often happens, these are not mistakes that detract from the readability of the story. Nevertheless, I’m always surprised that so many well-known authors (and their editors and copy editors) very often make easily avoidable mistakes.

For your reference, here are the links to all past “Authors’ Mistakes” articles:




Posted by Locutus at 13:35 0 comments
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Thursday, July 18, 2013

Authors' Mistakes #19 - Brian Christian


I just finished reading The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian, one of those books that are at the same time thought-provoking and entertaining.


It is about Christian’s preparation for and winning participation to the 2009 Loebner Prize.

At its core, the purpose of the Loebner Prize is to check whether and to what extent computer programs are able to fool a panel of judges into thinking that they are communicating with human beings. It is inspired by the well know Turing Test.

But Hugh Loebner also finances a simultaneous competition, in which AI programs are replaced by human beings. It is not uncommon for judges to think that one or more human contestants are computers. Christian’s book is interesting because, to prepare himself for the prize, he examines in depth what it means to be human.

I strongly recommend the book. It is therefore with sadness that I have to report a couple mistakes. They don’t compromise the validity of the book in any way, and one can only wonder why they were made. But they are definitely there.

Towards the bottom of page 209 (in the hardcover version), Christian writes: Latin speakers needed a term to describe the relationship they had with their dining partners, the folks they broke bread with: the custom of simply calling such people one’s “with-breads,” or (in Latin) “com panis,” caught on, a phrasing that eventually became our word “companion.” First of all, the Latin equivalent to the preposition “with” is “cum”, not “com”. Secondly, “cum” requires the noun that follows to be placed in the Ablative case. Now, “panis” is indeed the Latin word for “bread”, but in the Nominative and Genitive cases, not in Ablative. The correct Latin expression is “cum pane” (“with bread”) or “cum panibus” (“with breads”).

Still on page 209, there is another mistake. Christian states: as misfortunate events were believed in the sixteenth century to have astrological roots, speakers of Old Italian took to calling such an event a “bad-star,” or “dis-astro”: hence “disaster.” What Christian says is correct in content. Indeed, when somebody systematically appears to be lucky/unlucky, he/she is said in Italian to be “born under a good/bad star” (“nato/nata sotto una buona/cattiva stella”). But Christian refers to Old Italian, while the term “disastrum” already existed in Latin. OK. I agree: not a big deal. But why should one say something when it is not correct?

For your reference, here are the links to all past “Authors’ Mistakes” articles:


Posted by Locutus at 22:23 0 comments
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Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Frequency of family names


In five previous articles I talked about power-law distributions. I don’t know why I am so fond of them, but I do. Perhaps because I find them intriguing.

But while in all previous occasions I used power-laws to fit distributions related to networks, in this case I use them in connection with the frequency of family names. I looked up the frequencies of the most common family names in Italy, USA, Germany, and France (I also wanted to find Australia, but I didn’t find anything suitable). Then, I binned the frequency in doubling intervals, so that they would appear uniform in a logarithmic scale, and plotted them with Excel. Here is what I got:


As you can see, France, with an index of 1.8383, shows the steepest slope, followed by Italy with 1.7241, USA with 1.3593, and Germany with 1.3166.

What does it mean? I don’t know. The slopes are quite close to each other, but those of countries with Latin-derived languages (France and Italy, 1.8 and 1.7) are steeper than those where Anglo-Saxon languages are spoken (USA and Germany, 1.4 and 1.3). Is this significant or is it only a coincidence?

I should do the same for Spanish, Portuguese, Rumanian (all Latin languages), and Dutch, Danish, and Swedish (all Anglo-Saxon).

And what about Slavonian languages like Russian, etc.?

Also, I had 4991 names for Italy, 2128 for Germany, 1818 for France, and 961 for USA. It would be interesting to see how sensitive the slopes are to the size of the samples.

These lists of names are probably derived from census data. It is inevitable that they will include foreign names in addition to the domestic ones. Has that a significant effect? In any case, America is a melting pot of immigrants from all over the world. How many American family names are actually of Anglo-Saxon origin?

In case you are curious, in my previous examples, the indices were 1.526 (Network of Feedbacks on eBay), 0.7262 (The small world of this blog), 1.1685 (More on visitors to this blog), and 1.2507 (A real small-world network #2).
I also had a further article on small-world networks but without power-law distributions (Small-world networks (or not?)).
Posted by Locutus at 00:14 0 comments
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Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Authors' Mistakes #18 - Douglas Preston


Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have written together more than a dozen very good thrillers. But they have also authored books on their own. I just finished reading Impact, by Douglas Preston, a gripping Science Fiction story.


I found the story very good and free from all small typos and mistakes that so often mar paperbacks.

But, unfortunately, Preston made a huge mistake that actually invalidated the whole story. I know, “suspension of disbelief” and all that, but this mistake also causes a completely unacceptable inconsistency within the story.

WARNING: Spoiler. In the rest of this article, I’m going to reveal some key elements of the plot and hit at how it ends.

The premise of the whole story is that an alien race, around 100 million years ago, placed an intelligent machine inside the Voltaire crater on Deimos, the smaller of the two moons orbiting Mars. Awakened by an exploration probe, the alien AI sends to Earth a sort-of asteroid entirely made of strange matter. It then sends another, bigger, asteroid, also entirely made of strange matter, to the Moon, almost destroying it.

The first asteroid reaches Earth on April 14. Its speeds is measured to be 48 km/s (page 10). When, days later, the second asteroid hits the Moon with devastating results, the US top military brass wants to nuke the machine and be done with it. But they are told that it would take at best nine months for a space mission to reach Mars, and, in any case, the next window of opportunity for a Mars launch would be almost two years off (page 442).

On page 439, the US president is told that “the Deimos Machine can’t fire unless Voltaire crater is oriented toward the Earth. And since it’s a deep crater, the orientation has to be fairly close. [...] It was aligned in April [...]. The next alignment was tonight. You saw what happened to the Moon”. When the president asks “When’s the next alignment?”, the reply is “Three days from now”.

Do you see the mistake?

No?

Think about it: Earth and the Moon were struck on the same nights when the crater was aligned, first in April and then less than a day before the meeting described on page 439. But how could that be? Strange matter or not, an asteroid travelling at 48 km/s takes at least three months to travel from Mars to Earth. Actually longer, when considering that the asteroid’s speed must have been highest when it was measured on Earth, because it was moving toward its perihelion.

How could an asteroid possibly reach Earth shortly after leaving Mars? Preston could have had the president ask that question. Then, a scientist could have said something like “The Deimos Machine must be able to operate some sort of teleportation mechanism. Perhaps it can open a wormhole and send the asteroids through it. After all, these aliens can travel between the stars. That’s probably why we didn’t detect the large asteroid that hit the Moon”.

But that would have not worked either, because on page 463 (the second last of the novel) one of the main characters says “Last week, one of the satellites in place around Deimos by chance intercepted a powerful burst of radio noise from the artifact. Evidently a communication of sort”. In other words, the machine didn’t use wormholes or other fancy stuff to send a message to its constructors. It only used a burst of radio waves. And if the machine doesn’t have any “subspace-like” capability of sending information, it doesn’t make sense to hypothesise that it has it for an asteroid.

Then, we can only conclude that Preston just screwed up.

And obviously, without a “magic” quasi-instantaneous travel from Mars to Earth, the story becomes impossible. By the time the first asteroid hit Earth, there might have been dozens of them on their way. It would have been too late for one of the protagonists to stop the machine and save the planet.

For your reference, here are the links to all past “Authors’ Mistakes” articles:
Posted by Locutus at 11:45 0 comments
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Sunday, June 30, 2013

Authors' Mistakes #17 - Peter David


As far as I know, Peter David has written 95 novels, mostly SF, and won 10 awards. I know him from his Star Trek books, of which, between 1997 and 2002, I read 19. I am now reading After Earth, the novelisation of the recent film with Will Smith, and discovered in it an appalling (and certainly unexpected) mistake.


On page 101, he wrote: A parsec, she recalled, was a measure for the speed of light, how far it would travel over one hundred years.

The sentence is at best awkward. What does it mean “A parsec [...] was a measure for the speed of light” when in fact a parsec is a measure of distance, as David writes in the next sentence?

But the problem is that a parsec is only 3.26 light years, not 100!

If you draw two lines from a point in interstellar space, one passing through the sun and one passing through Earth, when the amplitude of the angle between the two lines is one second of arc, the object’s distance is by definition 1 parsec. The “par” in parsec stands for “parallax” and the “sec” for “second”.

Imagine making two observations of a star with a six months period between them. During the six months, Earth will have moved half of its orbit. As a result, you will have to point the telescope in two slightly different directions. If you know the radius of Earth’s orbit, you can use the angle between the two directions to calculate the star’s distance.

Here is how you do it.

Earth’s distance from the sun (i.e., the radius of Earth’s orbit) is approximately 150 million km = 1.5 x 108 km.

A second of arc is 1/3600 of a degree and there are 360 degrees in a full circle, which is 2π times the radius R of the circle. This means that 2π x R / 360 / 3600 is the length of a second of arc = R x 4.85 x 10-6.

If a star has a parallax angle of two seconds (not one second because the two lines of view are through opposite points of Earth’s orbit, rather than one though Earth and one through the sun), to calculate its distance in kilometres you only need to imagine a circle of radius D centred on the star and passing through the sun. Then, the diameter of Earth’s orbit is given by:

1.5 x 108 km x 2 = 2 x D x 4.85 x 10-6

That distance will be 1.5 x 108 km / 4.85 x 10-6 = ~3.1 x 1013 km.

As the speed of light is 300,000 km/s = 3 x 105 km/s, 1 light year is 3 x 105 km/s x 3600 s/h x 24 h/d x 365 d/y = ~ 9.46 x 1012 km (actually, the light is 0.07% slower, but the year is 0.07% longer, so it works out just fine! :-) .

Then, 1 pc = ~3.1 x 1013 km / (9.46 x 1012 km/ly) = 3.28 ly. Close enough, considering the approximations.

There is no star at 1 pc from Earth, but Proxima Centauri, the closest star to Earth, is 1.3 pc away.
Posted by Locutus at 20:31 0 comments
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Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Mac X error code -8084


Since when I tried out the very first Macintosh, in 1984, Apple has always impressed me with the quality and the cleverness of its products. But yesterday, while I was backing up to a new flash key my Firefox profile, I got the following error alert (the grey highlight is mine):

In itself, to get a cryptic error message was not a big deal. It only meant that a check had caught a very unusual error condition for which no explicit message had been created. I did what I always do when confronted with something unknown: I copied the error message into the clipboard and pasted it in Google’s search field.

It turns out the nowhere is error code -8084 to be found. Apple in 1998 published a list of errors, but it stops at -5553 and is pre-system X.

I discovered that the problem disappeared after quitting Firefox. The most logical explanation is that Firefox had opened a file with an exclusive lock, thereby preventing the system from reading it.

But it is a disappointment that Apple no longer publishes a detailed list of errors, even if it might be partially obsolete as soon as it is written.
Posted by Locutus at 10:35 3 comments
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Monday, June 10, 2013

Authors' Mistakes #16 - Tom Clancy


I have read one and a half dozen books written by Tom Clancy, but I don’t recall having ever found in any of them as many mistakes as in Locked On. Perhaps it is because Mark Greaney wrote it and Clancy only lent his name to the book in order to sell more copies.


If you are into military and spy action, you will probably forgive Clancy and Penguin Books. It’s annoying though...

On page 17, we learn that a tourniquet had been cinched tight high on the right leg of a man. Then, the same man was stripped to his underwear. I bet it was difficult without disturbing the tourniquet!

On page 67, Clark and Chavez, after renting a car in Germany, travel to France. Clancy states that they had picked a cheap rental because it would attract less attention. Clancy writes: it would take only one set of curious eyes to pick out this vehicle, to spend some time, looking it up and down, and to realize that it was not from around here. Spend some time? What about throwing a glance at the German licence plates? No way that a cheap rented car from Germany could possibly have French licence plates!

On page 86 (line four), the full stop at the end of a sentence in the middle of a paragraph is missing.

On page 119, here is what Clancy has to say about European-style floor numberings: he began sprinting to the third floor, which was, in the European system, four flights of stairs up from ground level. This is wrong: in Europe, the third floor is three flights of stairs up from ground level. Clancy got confused by the fact that in the US the floor at street level is called “first floor”, while in Europe the same floor is called “ground floor”. The European “third floor” is therefore what the Americans call “fourth floor”, which is three flights of stairs up from street level. If Clancy had been correct, what number would the European assign to the floor at ground level? -1?

On page 197, when describing the tight security at a prison, Clancy writes: She would carry a purse with nothing of value in it because she would have to leave it in a locker, and she would not bother entering with her laptop or cell phone, because these would be taken from her immediately if they were on her person. This is an unfortunate sentence, because it implies that the guards in a top-security prison might steal from her purse if she left it in a locker. Also, “if they were on her person” is redundant and not convincing, as “on her person” seems hardly applicable to a laptop. But the real problem of this sentence is that it sets up a contradiction with what the author writes on the following page: the guard did not offer to help the much older woman carry her briefcase or pull her laptop bag. So, now she can take with her into the prison two bags while on the previous page she couldn’t even carry a purse?

On page 359, Clark climbed out of his waders. Then, two pages later, he shed his waders. Well, I assure you that he had not put them back on in the meanwhile.

On page 432, Clancy shows some knowledge of German when he writes “gottverdammt door” [his Italics]. Perhaps he used the German word because he didn’t want to upset some readers’ sensibilities by writing “goddamn door”. But he makes a mistake, because “door” in German is a feminine noun. Therefore, he should have written “gottverdammte door”. This is what people who speak multiple languages do: their adjectives always agree with the gender of the nouns, even in mix-language sentences.

On page 477, Clancy shows us an excess of political correctness: It was a man, Ding knew this instinctively, though he could not take the time to try to identify who was plunging before him to their death. Come on! We know it is a man. Why not say: plunging to his death? I hate this way of using “they” as a gender-neutral way of referring to a single person. I know: I will probably have to get used to it. But in this case, it is ridiculous.

On page 620: he felt thick snowflakes on his beard and lips. Having had a full beard for decades and having experienced how it feels to go out when it is snowing, I can testify that beards are totally insensitive to snowflakes.

On page 684, Clancy refers to Colonel Gummensson, who was a General on page 637.

On page 686, the missile silo number106 is mentioned for the first time, while we know from a few pages earlier that the missiles are in silos 103, 104, and 109, because that is where guards were posted.

There are also several awkward or wrong expressions that a good author shouldn’t have used. Here are those that I found inexcusable.

On page 4, Clancy writes: He pulled the wool blanket over his shoulder and flicked the straw from his beard that came with it. Since when do beards come with wool blankets? I would have written: He pulled the wool blanket over his shoulder and flicked from his beard the straw that came with it. Even He pulled the wool blanket over his shoulder and flicked the straw that came with it from his beard would have been better than what he wrote.

On page 45, the former President of the US is identified as Jack Junior’s father. Why not Jack Senior, or Jack Ryan Senior?

On page 180, Clancy writes: no record of his visit was recorded. This is awkward English. What about: no record of his visit was made?

On page 183, another “pearl”: Other than administering an X-ray that revealed a hairline fracture of the bone, then handing over a removable cast, a sling, and a course of antibiotics, Hendley’s surgeon had little to do other than to remember to keep quiet about the entire matter. Clearly, Clancy wrote such a long and convoluted sentence that, buy the time he arrived to “little to do”, he felt he needed to sneak in another “other than”. He could have started the sentence with “After”, rather than with “Other than”. It would have remained “heavy”, but at least it would have been correct.

On page 184, a “nifty” piece of dialogue: “Would that it always worked like that,” Gerry said to the room. No, I haven’t omitted or overlooked any word. What does it mean? I don’t understand it.

On page 224: exploit some intelligence find by American intelligence. Besides the ugly repetition of the word “intelligence”, the sentence seems at best awkward. Come on, Tom. You can do better than that!

On page 231: to become an agent of, but not an employee of, the ISI. This is correct, but the following would have been better: to become an agent, but not an employee, of the ISI.

On page 300: They learned pomp and circumstance from we English. Since when do we use “we” instead of “us” after a preposition? I hope that the practice doesn’t take hold. But perhaps it’s already too late and, unbeknown to me, most Americans already speak like that...

On page 309: we want to put our strength behind our friends and pull support for our enemies. I see what he means, but pull support from our enemies would have been better.

On page 332: he worried about the American who he had promised to protect. I understand that some readers might find whom too highbrow, but he could have dropped who (or whom) and live happy thereafter.

On page 355: he hiked through a small wood of loblolly pine where the slope of a hill led down into a tiny valley where a shallow creek wound from north to south near the fence line. Twice “where” in the same ugly sentence. The sad thing is that the details are totally irrelevant. With a 713-page novel, who would have missed them if Clancy had dropped this sentence?

Perhaps you are thinking that 22 mistakes and bad sentences in 713 pages are acceptable. I don’t. But then, I’ve always been a perfectionist!
Posted by Locutus at 13:53 0 comments
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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

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.
Posted by Locutus at 22:48 0 comments
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Monday, May 27, 2013

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).
Posted by Locutus at 16:54 0 comments
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Thursday, May 16, 2013

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!
Posted by Locutus at 22:28 2 comments
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Thursday, May 9, 2013

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.
Posted by Locutus at 17:21 0 comments
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