Am I the only one who found this to be very poorly written? Its like the author keeps telling me how cool and mysterious this story is, why doesn't he just tell me the story and I'll decide if its mysterious or not?
"Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture."
He keeps going on about how unrelated these events are, and how mysterious it is they are happening all over the world - well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!
> well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!
This made me laugh so hard. You're completely right, it's like someone setting up a joke by saying "THIS IS HILARIOUS YOU'RE GONNA LOVE IT" why don't you just get on with it then
Don't forget a full page about that Filipino garbageman, that ends in him basically knowing nothing, seeing nothing and being completely irrelevant character to the whole story...
Oh man that part was ridiculous. Its like, you could spend a whole page talking about some guy taking a dog for a walk and talking about how he bagged up the dog poo and put it in a bin. Then say "little did I know this dog poo was actually related to the murder of a journalist in Australia... The dog belonged to an infamous hitman who hired a dog sitter to look after his dog while he was in Australia on a job".
The whole thing sounds like it was written by a 15 year old.
I actually enjoyed it; although usually I'd agree. It was like reading a fictional book where the author's purpose is to entertain rather than to inform. I saw it as a story following a reporter around and the allusions to the mysterious nature of everything were like how a movie would play a mysterious sounding background track while the main character followed a new lead.
Huge pet peeve of mine is when writers use analogies to describe technology or science instead of writing what actually happened.
I think I read somewhere once, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." which seems to ring true with these artful descriptions of mechanical things.
I think that’s probably a rephrasing of Einstein’s alleged quote, ”It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.” That quote as relayed by de Brolgie seems to have mutated quite a bit, changing the meaning to something more general. Of course it’s also worth pointing out that Quantum Mechanics sort of throw a superposition of wrenches into that puppy.
"Quantum mechanics pop up because the stuff we're made of isn't very small balls. It's really a manifestation of waves. How can something that's made of waves behave like particles? Let me show you:
[proceeds to pull out a length of cable, tying one end of it to some structure]
[proceeds to wave the other end, creating a wave on the cable, pointing out how the peaks move forward]
[proceeds to wave faster, creating a standing wave, pointing out the nodes]
Roughly like this. You can think of the moving peak, or the standing node, as particles - stationary or in motion. They're not really there, but you can point to them and name them. Now all the weird stuff that quantum mechanics is about - quantum tunneling, double slit experiments, etc. - appear when you stop looking at particles, and start doing the math on the underlying waves."
"Like a handful of random jigsaw-puzzle pieces, each one was incomprehensible without an understanding of the larger picture."
He keeps going on about how unrelated these events are, and how mysterious it is they are happening all over the world - well if you don't know whats going on of course you will not know that two things are related?!