Someone is wrong on the internet

and I am hopping mad about it. I spend a lot of my time hopping mad about people being wrong on the internet, but I'm trying to wean myself off it with my doctor's help.

Herewith I present to you the Official Website of Best-Selling Author Dan Brown. Mr. Brown is perhaps best known for his work in the field of cryptosymbological fantasy, and has made a very great deal of money off his opus The Da Vinci Code and its sequel Angels and Demons. In Mr. Brown's fiction, a lot of emphasis is placed on technologies that purportedly exist in the real world. As he does, in fact, write fiction, I can accept that he gets things wildly wrong in his books. On his website, however, he presents them as fact.

Setting this aside for a moment, here's why I don't like his website. It's utterly predictable. It's all over Flash; it has cutesy little animations of books sliding around on a bookshelf and a dramatic ray of sunlight spearing in from the right side of the screen, as if a mysterious door has been opened somewhere near the Spotlight button. The quality of the illustration/animation is pretty much early-nineties Disney background paintings--I'm pretty sure I saw that bust somewhere in Ariel's cave of knick-knacks.

Navigation is reasonably simple, through a series of links to the left of the main animation frame, and clicking on any of them opens a submenu of links which then show up in the frame itself.

I give him credit for at least keeping the theme consistent and not embedding MIDI files, but it's still a smug self-indulgent site which I think would have been a lot more interesting if it were done with some more imagination. For example if he really wanted to use Flash he could have had his links be all scrambled up in some mysterious code or symbol or something and then have them rearrange themselves into the name of the link whenever someone moused over them. Still annoying but at least more fun to watch.

What I really detest is the fact that he is lying to you. Right there on his webpage as if it ain't no thang. He is lying to you about his "Bizarre Facts."

Here, for example, he tells people that a mysterious chapel somewhere in England contains an unbreakable cipher carved into its ceiling which nobody has ever been able to work out, and also it has a great big mysterious vault space underneath it which the chapel isn't letting anyone dig into.

Meet the Rosslyn Hoax website, which debunks all of Brown's assertions one by one.

Or here, he claims that the X-33 a) exists as a manned craft and is b) capable of flight at Mach 15 (in the novel, at 60,000 feet, which is not going to work cause of air friction).

In the real world, the X-33/VentureStar project was cancelled in 2001 over issues with the composition of its fuel tanks; after several failures the project was nixed and in fact was never even manned. It was a collaboration between NASA and Lockheed Martin, not Boeing as Dan Brown implies in his book. And the purpose of the project in the first place was not to ferry cryptosymbology professors around the world so much as to replace the Space Shuttle on its retirement.

And finally, here he suggests that antimatter can be used to create bombs of incredible destructive power and that it can be measured in "droplets." There are not enough fail macros in the whole of the internet to explain why this is wrong, so I'll just let CERN's rather weary FAQ page do it for me:

Can we make antimatter bombs?

No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.

Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.