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KEV67

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Everything posted by KEV67

  1. KEV67

    Rob Roy

    Another similarity between Rob Roy and Waverley is that the narrator is a young Englishman. First he goes north to Northumbria. If it's like Waverley he crosses the border to where the wild men live.
  2. KEV67

    Rob Roy

    I have started reading this. I have read one other book by Scott, Waverley, which I thought was a great book. I quite like Walter Scott's style. It is rather dense, but it is almost cinematographic. In the first couple of chapters the protagonist is holding an argument with his stern father. The protagonist does not want to be a merchant like his father. It is sort of like accountancy. The protagonist wants to be a poet. At this point there is no indication where the story is going. We just know the young fellow has a romantic and independent streak. I especially liked the bit where the lad's father found a poem his son has wrote and critiques it. It seemed like quite a reasonable poem to me.
  3. I attended a Unitarian meeting online a fortnight ago. They seemed pleased with Adrian's birth. The average age of the Unitarians is about 65 by my reckoning. It might be higher than that. The pastor (I am not sure that is position) was intrigued to see a room full of Kazakh surrogate women.
  4. I have not been to any Orthodox Church services, but I have poked my head in. They don't have stain glass, but they have a lot of religious paintings. They tend to use metal in their religious art. I am not sure whether it is all silver and gold, but it looks like it. They don't have pews neither. Everybody stands. This is one of their cathedrals. I can see it five miles away.
  5. There have been two or three film adaptions of Journey Into Fear. One did have Orson Wells, but he was playing Col Haki.
  6. I thought this was going to turn into something like Death on the Nile or Death on the Orient Express, but it took a different turn. I am afraid my knowledge of 1930's black and white film actors is not extensive. So far I have cast: Mr Graham, engineer protagonist, David Niven Dr Haller, elderly German historian, ? Banat, Romanian hit man, ? Josette, nightclub dance, Marlene Dietrich Jose, her boorish husband, ? Kurtvetli, Turkish businessman, Peter Lorre, M. Mathis, French passenger, ? Mme. Mathis, his wife, ? Signora Baronelli, Italian widow, ? Signor Baronelli, her son, ? Purser, ? Steward, ? Col Haki, Turkish head of secret police, ? Kopeikin, Turkish agent, Orson Wells Maria, nightclub hostess, ? I can cast Orson Wells, but I don't think I can cast American actors such as Humphry Bogart. Marlene Dietrich is almost too glamorous.
  7. This is my second Eric Ambler book. It was written in the late 30s. Like the other one I read, The Mask of Dmitrious, it is about an Englishman who finds himself in deep water in Eastern Europe. Eastern Europe in Ambler's books starts around Paris. I quite like all the clipped English speech, and the courteous language, which somehow sounds threatening, when spoken by a member of the underworld or secret police. Think Peter Lorre, think Orsen Wells, think Marlene Dietrich.
  8. There have been eight Clive Cussler books since he died. The titles are proceeded with "Clive Cussler's" He was 88 when he died. It must have been that dangerously young girlfriend that did for him.
  9. Maybe that explains why it was written by Graham Brown. The copyright page says it was first published in 2022.
  10. Finished it. Glad to report that Also glad to report So, not exactly like a Joseph Conrad book or a Thomas Hardy. But that is why Conrad and Hardy are great authors, but Cussler probably has his own executive jet, a superyacht and a very pretty young girlfriend. I don't know any of the above is true. If Clive Cussler is reading this then I withdraw all these remarks without reservation.
  11. KEV67

    Graveyards

    And some have Georgian writing on them. The Georgian language has its own alphabet.
  12. KEV67

    Graveyards

    I preferred the black and white pictures. Some of them have Russian writing.
  13. KEV67

    Graveyards

    I was passing a graveyard in Tbilisi, so I had a look around. I was impressed by the pictures on the tombstones. I do not know how they transferred the images, but they did a really good job at catching the person's appearance as well as personality.
  14. I was thinking about the supercomputer McGuffin. Unless these computers were a huge leap in technology it hardly seems worth the bother. I seem to remember a time when people talked about these amazingly powerful computers, but a year or two later there would be even more advanced computers. I saw a supercomputer at Reading University. I think it was used for predicting the weather. It was a basement full of racks of PCs all connected up together. There are technologies like quantum computing and parallel processing. I have not been keeping up, but I think the idea of quantum computing is that the bits can have more states than 1 and 0. Not sure about that. Anyway, I would have thought the designs were more important than the actual computers. I would think it was pretty difficult to reverse engineer a supercomputer with a novel architecture. The book talks about trading one or two of the computers for the operating system and source code. There are people around clever enough to write operating systems. Again, I would have thought it would be even more difficult to do without the designs. I used to work at a company where one of the brainier engineers wrote the operating system to a product. How do you even go about doing that? Then the company hired an even brainier engineer to write code for its successor product, including its operating system. I sometimes saw job adverts for bare metal micro-controller coders. Micro-controllers are easier than micro-processors, but still take quite a lot of knowhow. I attended a public lecture by one of the academics from Cambridge University who designed the Raspberry Pi. He intended it as an educational tool. He recounted how he was initially disappointed when one of his students said she could not get on with its operating system, so she coded her own!
  15. Definitely Tom Cruise material. TBF it would make quite an entertaining film.
  16. This is the first Clive Cussler book I have started reading. I thought I would give one a go. Only I noticed it was written by Graham Brown. So how does that work then? Actually it is quite a good story. It is fairly cinematographic. I could imagine Tom Cruise in it. A freighter carrying two supercomputers has been sent to the bottom of the sea. You would think that would be be bad for the computers, but no, because they are liquid cooled anyway. I wondered about that, because water is not very good for integrated circuit boards, especially salt water. You would think it would short circuit the PCBs. I suppose the PCBs were coated with some waterproof covering.
  17. My entire knowledge of this comes from a woman off YouTube. She could have been telling me anything. It reminds of a Hawkwind album I had. It was about these 2 dimensional alien invaders. You could see them on the album sleeve.
  18. Good point. But in a 4D space you could see inside a 3D box without lifting the lid.
  19. Netflix has filmed The Three Body Problem. I think they are streaming it soon. I doubt the Chinese will be happy. The Chinese film/broadcast industry has attempted to film it twice, but they did not have the resource.
  20. There was a fair bit of science in this. Mention of the strong nuclear force reminded me of a booked by Isaac Asimov called 'The Gods Themselves'. The McGuffin in that was the strong nuclear force. That is the force that keeps all the photons and neutrons in the kernel of the atom together. There is also the weak nuclear force. I am a bit vague about that. It has something to do with beta radiation. A level physics was not entirely wasted.
  21. When I was a teenager in Hove, we had a physics student from the University of Sussex as a lodger. He talked a bit about multi-dimensional space. He said there were ten or eleven of them, but most of them were curled up on themselves. I don't know what he is talking about. There are some mind-bending videos on YouTube about 4 dimensional space (not including time). You can make representations of four dimensional objects in three dimensions, just like you can represent a cube on paper. IIRC you can even represent a four dimensional cube on paper. As the book says, an interesting thing is that if you lived in four-dimensional space you would be able to see inside three-dimensional objects.
  22. I am interested in this self-interpreting code used to transmit interstellar messages. Are these a thing? Self-correcting protocols are used in telecommunications. If a bit within a byte gets flipped then at the end of the message there is a code which will not add up properly. In a lot of cases the erroneous bit can be identified and flipped back. Self-interpreting, though? Would that not imply some universal language? The only universal language I can think of is mathematics, but how would you translate any mathematical symbol or equation to any everyday word? Interesting idea, however. Maybe I was not paying enough attention in the chapter in which two protons were sent across interstellar space. How were these protons detected and identified.
  23. This book reminds me a little of a book by Michael Crichton called Climate of Fear. They both have environmental terrorist groups. Michael Crichton was not a great believer in climate change.
  24. I am progressing with this. It is written in Old English on one side of the page, modern English on the other. It was translated by John Porter and it is a fairly literal translation. My step-mother gave me a translation by Seamus Heaney once, but I never read it. I suppose the translation was a little more free. I think the story is jolly good. There is quite a lot of preamble. Beowulf does not just turn up and start fighting monsters. There are lots of pleasantries and formalities. You can't just turn up and fight monsters without a by-your-leave, particularly if you turn up in a boat full of armed men.
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