Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 34

Wine, Art, Thrillers & Music: Smells Like Beethoven, Sounds Like A Forgery

A current article from The Economist provokes some intriguing questions about wine tasting, synaesthesia and environmental influences on perception of taste and quality.

It's one of my favorite topics. In one of my best-selling thrillers, Daughter of God, my heroine was an art expert with an uncanny ability to detect forged paintings. Her secret weapon: she was a synaesthete and every painting created music in her head. And forgeries were discordant.

But back to wine and Beethoven

Using the word "note" to describe an odour may be more than just metaphor — From The Economist

"THAT some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even been given a name: synaesthesia. Odd as it may seem to those not so gifted, synaesthetes insist that spoken sounds and the symbols which represent them give rise to specific colours or that individual musical notes have their own hues.

"Yet there may be a little of this cross-modal association in everyone. Most people agree that loud sounds are "brighter" than soft ones. Likewise, low-pitched sounds are reminiscent of large objects and high-pitched ones evoke smallness. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University think something similar is true between sound and smell."

First popularized by Richard Cytowic's book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, synaesthesia is theorized to be the results of non-typical brain development in infants.The theory goes that as most brains develop, perception sorts itself out into distinct senses: smell, touch, hearing etc. Jumping that track creates synaesthesia.

But, it seems that some level of sensory comingling persists in all of us. Just think about the words sharp and flat and how they can apply to music, shapes and tastes.

A more recent book adds to Cytowic's work: Tasting the Universe: People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows in Symphonies.

SYNAESTHESIA & WINE TASTING

Professional wine tasters and academics who study the perception of taste and smell have long know qualitatively that the environment in which wine is tasted can affect the perception of quality and other characteristics.

As The Economist article points out, cross-sensory perceptions have a significant impact on taste perceptions. Using scent vials from a teaching kit used in wine-tasting:

"Sweet and sour smells were rated as higher-pitched, smoky and woody ones as lower-pitched. Blackberry and raspberry were very piano. Vanilla had elements of both piano and woodwind. Musk was strongly brass. It is not immediately clear why people employ their musical senses in this way to help their assessment of a smell. But gone are the days when science assumed each sense worked in isolation."

The real wine tasting take-away from The Economist piece can be found in an experiment where volunteers tasted toffee while listening to different types of music (read the entire Economist article for details.

"Volunteers rated the toffee eaten during low-pitched music as more bitter than that consumed during the high-pitched rendition. The toffee was, of course, identical. It was the sound that tasted different."

Now, think about what the outcome might be like for tasting wine. Sounds like a fun Ph.D. thesis to me, only exploring the other senses to get an idea of the overall synaesthetic component of wine tasting.

A final thought holds huge complications for the 100-point system, wine critics and almost every other rating scheme: individual intensity and variety of residual synaesthesia combined with environmental factors just add infinite variations to basic genetic differences in taste and smell.

Two More Reasons To Go Indie – Print Units Fell 9% in 2011

No additional commentary needed. These excerpts are from Publisher's Weekly and show why legacy publishing is sinking.

Print Units Fell 9% in 2011

"The final numbers from Nielsen BookScan are in for 2011 and they show that print sales through the outlets it tracks fell by just over 9% in the year. Total units sold were 651.2 million. The decline in 2011 was about double that of 2010 and reflects the closing of Borders and rise in digital sales."

Adult fiction and mass market paperbacks hit hard times

"After falling 7.2% in 2010, unit sales of print adult fiction tumbled 17.7% last year, to just over 160 million units, by far the steepest drop of the four major categories as more and more consumers turned to e-books for their fiction fix. Similar to 2010, sales of adult nonfiction took much less of a hit in 2011 than fiction, with units off 3.1% compared to 1.9% in 2010. The difference in the rate of decline between adult fiction and nonfiction rose significantly between 2010, when the difference was about six percentage points, and 2011, when the spread was more than 14 percentage points."

 

Why Would A NYTimes Bestselling Author Go Indie? (Losing A Million Dollars Is Just The Start)

People have asked me: why have I decided to go indie with Die By Wire. Why — when I have had books that made the NYTimes, USA Today and other bestseller lists the traditional way — did I decide to take this course?

Well, to start with, I've already lost a million dollars with a traditional publisher. And maybe more, but I'll never know given the obscurity and dog-in-the-manger secrecy of the industry's accounting.

Some of my other answers are below.

Die By Wire is my first independently published original novel.

Over the past couple of years, I've obtained the rights back from most of my other books and with the help of William my secret weapon, have made them available as e-books and, in some cases, as quality-format paperbacks available through Amazon's Createspace service or through Google Books. (You can find a list of all those at Lew's Books.)

In addition, the experience of  my friend Lee Goldberg and colleagues Barry Eisler and Joe Konrath have encouraged me. They all have explained their own reasons on their sites.

This piece - Barry Eisler Explains Self-Publishing Decision – from The Daily Beast, explains much of my inspiration and deals with a lot of overall industry details.

PUBLISHERS GREAT, GOOD, BAD, UGLY, WORSE

I've been fortunate. And not so much.

I've had bestselling books via the traditional process as far back as the early 1980s and as recently as 2005.

The first publisher earned it. The second one simply piggybacked on my earlier success.

That first publisher (the former Pinnacle Books) went Chapter 11 just two weeks after my accountant showed up at their door to audit my royalty account. Might have been coincidence, but even the beginning of the audit showed the company owed me just a hair under a million dollars. Obviously they couldn't pay it then and never did.

Despite that debacle, I was fortunate to have had superb editing (Patrick O'Connor & Kathy Gordon) and promotional support that was stunningly good. By the time Pinnacle Books went belly up, my thriller, The Delphi Betrayal, had sold more than 750,000 copies. And that was just what they would admit to.

KEEP BOOKS IN STORES SO YOU CAN SELL BOOKS IN STORES

Some of my early bestseller success was due to having written a pretty good (and well-edited)  book. And a lot of the success came from great publicists, superb distribution, creative marketing, and a killer sales team (headed by Jim Redam).

All that made it impossible to go into a book store, news stand, airport or grocery store without seeing my first bestseller,  The Delphi Betrayal on the shelves and racks.

A succession of new printings meant that they didn't run out of books. In other words, they were smart enough to recognize that you needed to have books in the store in order to sell books in a store.

Seems pretty basic, but many traditional publishers (including those selling hard copy through Amazon)  are still struggling to get their minds around the rocket science behind that concept.

PUBLISHING SUCCESS MURDERED BY CORPORATE RAIDERS

Other bestsellers followed The Delphi Betrayal: Queensgate Reckoning and then The Da Vinci Legacy. My fourth book with them, The Tesla Bequest, barely got into the stores before Pinnacle died. Despite the fact that the company was on its deathbed, The Tesla Bequest sold out its first printing of more than 100,000 copies and then sales died with the company itself.

At the same time, the .357 Vigilante series (re-titled The Jury series) also died. Fortunately Lee Goldberg resurrected that series and has turned it into an Amazon indie ebook hit … which is further proof that going indie shows just how short-sighted traditional publishers can be (white cane anyone?)

Pinnacle Books failed not because it was unsuccessful, but because it had been ambushed by corporate raiders.

Pinnacle bled to death because its assets were looted in a corporately legal but ethically questionable scheme. Michigan General, a penny-stock insurance company, used a  leveraged buyout scheme to suck the cash out of Pinnacle, essentially stealing my money and that of hundreds of other authors.

A leveraged buyout is where a group of unscrupulous yahoos with no money of their own borrow money from other unscrupulous yahoos (usually banks), then promise to pay back the loan using the cash  and other assets already owned by the unfortunate company being taken over. Once the takeover target has its assets looted, it then struggles to survive. Some do. Many don't.

At the very least I decrease the risk of that. After all, Amazon's not likely to go belly-up any time soon. That's a lot more than you can say about any number of today's financially uncertain traditional publishers, distributor and book stores.

FUNKY ACCOUNTING & NO TRANSPARENCY

Transparency is non-existent with traditional publishing companies. Everything is concealed behind a Wizard of Oz curtain. What are they afraid of? Is it that their accounting is still stuck in the 19th Century, or that they simply want the freedom to be sneaky and, occasionally, dishonest?

One big example: royalty statements from traditional publishers typically appear a year or so after the books concerned are sold. But only in six-month time periods unrelated to when the book is first sold. Clear?

Yep, clear as Hollywood accounting.

And years after a book has earned out its advance, and even when the royalty statements show continued sales, somehow publishers fiddle the books to avoid paying money owed.

There are enough accounting loopholes and antiquated practices to make Bernie Madoff flinch. Not only that, but publishers NEVER, EVER tell you how your book is selling. No numbers.

But Amazon, the iBookstore, Nook, Smashwords and others give me instant access to sales statistics and pay promptly. Funny what kind of good can happen when you actually use technology invented in the last half of the last century to run your accounting.

CHANGE OR DIE

The world changes. In fact, the only organisms or systems that don't change are the ones that are dead. The publishing industry and book stores, like music and movies before them, has been slow to embrace or even deal with the digital revolution that started toward the end of the last century.

One thing I learned from bestsellers at Pinnacle was the value of promotion, creative marketing, proper distribution and learning who your customers are and how to reach them. Sadly, too many publishers seem to have lost sight of that. To their detriment and to their authors'.

I learned this at my last publisher when they went through four publicists (who left for better jobs) during the time when Perfect Killer launched. Never in the course of 20 books had a publisher failed to get review copies to Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews. All of my books had received great, starred reviews.

But  the Perfect Killer publicist turnover meant they missed two of those three. Many other dropped balls (including the inability to utilize a real-life custom wine to bring to life a fictional one created in the book) convinced me that they had abrogated one of the key duties of a publisher.

Hell, I figured that I couldn't do worse even if I did nothing. Thus, another brick in the pavement toward independent publishing.

HIGHWAY ROBBERY ON E-ROYALTIES

Traditional publishers typically offer 17.5 to 25% royalties. I make 70% doing it myself. Plus, once a publisher has your ebook rights, they own you forever. That differs from print publishing where — if the book goes out of print for a certain period of time — the author typically gets the rights back.

But an ebook never goes out of print, so the publisher locks up your work forever, no matter how pathetic they might be at selling it.

AWOL PUBLISHERS

Increasingly publishers don't promote, don't edit and don't develop authors. All that falls on the shoulders of the author. So, if we have to do that anyway, why do we need a publisher?

In addition, the three books I still have in print with a traditional publisher keep going out of print.

I have offered — at my expense — to turn all of the books into hard-copy books using Amazon's Createspace print-on-demand service. And I've offered to share the net with them.

Amazingly, the publisher won't even discuss the option. That means that Amazon customers and those in physical book stores have no option but to buy used copies. I am astounded how publishers would rather lose sales than actually do their jobs … which is to publish.

CLUELESS EBOOK PRICING

The pricing is all screwed up too. Just look at this recent screen capture from Amazon: It's INSANE to price the ebook and the paperback the same. It's just clueless marketing given that the paperback costs money to publish and the ebook costs nothing.

With print sales dropping and ebook sales rising, the entire landscape is changing. Publishers have shown that they do not yet know how do deal sanely or intelligently to the changes.

I do believe that an enlightened cadre of publishers will arise from this chaos and will be able to work intelligently and fairly with authors.

Having been the beneficiary of a good publisher and a victim of the bad, I recognize the advantages of having a publishing house that actually earns the money they make from me.

I do look forward to that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

How To Send A Kindle Book As A Gift

Sure, Christmas and Chanukah are behind us (or way, way, ahead) but here comes Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays etc.

And because there were a record number of ereaders sold over the holidays, giving someone a Kindle book as a gift fits the bill … especially if you've waited until the night before … or even the morning of. This video shows you how.

Of course, I'd recommend that you gift my new thriller, Die By Wire or any of my other books and thrillers. But you expected me to say that, right?

NOTE: The actually valuable information starts about 20 seconds in, so you can skip ahead to that point if you want.

Ground The Airbus A380: Not sky-worthy, say engineers

This is not Die By Wire's precise reason for calling fly-by-wire aircraft "death traps." But it does emphasize that we should not be gullible when it comes to accepting the airline industry's assurances

Ground The Airbus A380: Not sky-worthy, say engineers

"Australian aircraft engineers have called for Airbus A380 – the world's biggest passenger aircraft – to be grounded, after Singapore Airlines and Qantas found cracks in the wings of their super-jumbos.

"'We can't continue to gamble with people's lives and allow those aircraft to fly around and hope that they make it until their four-yearly inspection,' said Steve Purvinas, secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association."

Read the rest

Is Islam Evil?

Or does the evil done in the name of God/Allah simply arise from those who distort religion and abuse spirituality to justify their own political, cultural and dictatorial agendas?

Image adapted from www.religioustolerance.org/

In all my other thrillers, my characters grapple with issues that run deeper than the plot and the action.  Die By Wire  continues that tradition. In deed (not a typo), Holy scriptures are, often, thrillers in their own right. Every time I read the Bible or the Qu'ran, I am amazed at the plots, the action, the cliffhangers and, of course the tragedy, triumph,  bloodshed and high body count.

Few subjects in public affairs and politics today arouse more controversy and dissension than the nature of Islam as practiced in today's global theater.

SEE ALL EVIL

Many hold the extreme opinion that terrorism, global jihad and violence are inherent in the religion. We'll call this group the "See All Evil" contingent. They reason that Islam is an inherently evil religion and see only institutionalized violence, the oppression of women, gays, minorities.

They submit that Islam not only justifies– but compels a religious duty — the brutality and murder of all who believe differently. They point to blood-thirsty passages in the Qu'ran demanding the death of infidels and the degradation of women, gays, and non-Muslims. As a result, this fraction rejects all Muslims as evil and demands zero tolerance and zero immigration.

SEE NO EVIL

On the other extreme are the proponents who reject any open discussion of violence done in the name of Islam and consider the open discussion of violent acts a form of cultural repression. They point to passages in the Qu'ran that emphasize charity, mercy, the duty to care for the less-fortunate.

Many "See No Evil" adherents believe that Muslim immigrant communities should be allowed to establish a system of religious laws — shariah — that should take precedence over the civil, secular courts that govern their adopted countries. They counsel tolerance of practices that would be intolerable in their own societies: the subjugation of women, "honor" killings, violence against gays, "improperly dressed" women, and in some Muslim immigrant communities, the sale, human trafficking and subsequent rape of child brides.

A recent Pew Survey found that — depending upon the nationality — up to 80 percent of Muslims believe in stoning adulterous women to death.

Both generalizations — like most polemics that tar a heterogeneous population with the same brush — are wrong. Both sides fail to see that cultural practices, not religion, account for the reprehensible practices.

D[EVIL] IN THE DETAILS

The d[evil] is in the details and those have mostly ignored by both extremes.

At a much deeper level the debate within the world's liberal democracies over whether to accept — or outlaw — burqas, shariah courts, child marriages and the marginalization of women and other minorities are peripheral arguments that miss the entire argument.

The real argument rests on the concept of the separation of church and state because democracies, freedom of expression, individual fulfillment and the tolerance of differing ideas and peoples have never existed in a theocracy or any other form of government where religion has ultimate authority over all matters of law and behavior.

This is because true belief is absolute, allows no argument, prohibits doubts and questions about doctrine, defends dogma to the death and tolerates no dissent. And while Islam, Christianity and Judaism have made claims regarding mercy, their histories show an absolute absence of human kindness — as evidenced by blood-soaked, scorched earth legacies.

EVIL ARISES FROM HUMAN INTERPRETATION

The problem lies in the interpretation of scriptures and religious tradition. And while religion may be the province of God, its application on Earth lies in the hand of humans: fallible, often venal, power-hungry, greedy, delusional and sometimes downright evil. When their interpretation of the divine is allowed to become government, the result has always been bloody and evil: genocide by early Israelites, Christian Crusades, current-day violent jihad.

With the exception of small pockets of mentally unstable extremists who are punished when apprehended, Judaism and Christianity have moved past their blood-soaked legacy and have accepted that God's other people also have a right to live and prosper. It is no accident of history that this tolerance developed along with the fall of monarchs — secular and religious — and the rise of modern liberal democracies.

BLINDNESS ALLOWS EVIL TO PREVAIL

Regrettably, today's liberal democracies have failed to see the evil which can arise from their tolerance of intolerance. They have failed to see that sanctioning evil in the name of tolerance does not actually equal tolerance. Sanctioning the violation of human rights in the name of religious tolerance is an abdication of responsibility. The liberal democracy becomes a tool of oppression.

The fundamental problem is that liberal democracies have allowed the extreme, totalitarian elements to define the debate. Failing to separate the religious aspects of Islam from its cultural expression results — among many other evils — in violence and genocide toward unbelievers, the second class treatment of women, prohibitions against homosexuals and marriages of young girls.

Equally important is liberal democracy's failure to recognize that today's Islam resembles almost perfectly Eleventh- or Twelfth-Century Christianity and Judaism in the first millennium B.C. and has not had the time to come to grips with its own history and legacy.

ISLAM NO MORE INHERENTLY EVIL THAN JUDAISM OR CHRISTIANITY

Islam is no more inherently evil or violent than Judaism and Christianity before them. Indeed, the most egregious atrocities in all three Abrahamic religions have resulted more from cultural expressions and the political abuses of holy scripture rather than any fundamental religious evil.

Many of the most brutal and onerous practices of Islam imitate the adolescent era of Judaism and Christianity which sanctioned genocide, oppression and colonialism as the will of God. Indeed, today's angry Islamic jihadists walk the well-trod path of the other Abrahamic religions in the degradation of women, their genocidal, sectarian hatred of other cultures and a totalitarian ban on questioning the divine character of every word in the officially sanctioned versions of holy scriptures.

HOLY SCRIPTURE: A CONVENIENT JUSTIFICATION OF SECULAR EVIL

Whether Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Iranian mullahs or other despots, Islamic despots find the Qu'ran a convenient took to justify purely personal power trips, mass murder, oppression and empire building. Today's global Islamic jihad is identical with the Old-Testament Israelite's slaughter of Canaanites and the Christian Crusades.

Just as with early Christianity and Judaism, today's global Islamic jihadist finds a way to interpret his holy scripture to continue brutal and oppressive cultural practices that have no spiritual basis.

The only difference is that Christianity and Judaism have matured and developed a self-confidence in the strength of their faith that allows them to see other religions as different manifestations of God rather than as threats to survival. Inherent in this tolerance is the recognition that true faith comes not from intimidation, violence, death and oppression, but from within.

TRUE FAITH DOES NOT REQUIRE TOTALITARIAN VIOLENCE

A religious faith that can only spread and maintained at the muzzle of a gun or flying body parts of a suicide bomber is no faith at all. Obviously, ignorant, venal, evil and power-hungry people still exist outside of the Jewish and Christian mainstream. But those extremists are condemned rather than being encouraged and applauded.

For all these reasons, Die By Wire grapples with the issues of culture versus religion in the context of a thriller which aims first to entertain and secondarily to inform.

Both the thriller and the informative context focus on the growing problem of the accepted practice of trafficking, sale, rape and virtual slavery of child brides. The Netherlands has been chosen as the setting because it has led the way in its tolerance of intolerance and has begun to reap tragic dividends from its short-sighted actions.

Is Islam More Evil Than Christianity?

Or does the evil done in the name of God/Allah simply arise from those who distort religion and abuse spirituality to justify their own political, cultural and dictatorial agendas?

In all my other thrillers, my characters grapple with issues that run deeper than the plot and the action.  Die By Wire  continues that tradition. In deed (not a typo), Holy scriptures are, often, thrillers in their own right. Every time I read the Bible or the Qu'ran, I am amazed at the plots, the action, the cliffhangers and, of course the tragedy, triumph,  bloodshed and high body count.

Few subjects in public affairs and politics today arouse more controversy and dissension than the nature of Islam as practiced in today's global theater.

SEE ALL EVIL

Many hold the extreme opinion that terrorism, global jihad and violence are inherent in the religion. We'll call this group the "See All Evil" contingent. They reason that Islam is an inherently evil religion and see only institutionalized violence, the oppression of women, gays, minorities.

They submit that Islam not only justifies– but compels a religious duty — the brutality and murder of all who believe differently. They point to blood-thirsty passages in the Qu'ran demanding the death of infidels and the degradation of women, gays, and non-Muslims. As a result, this fraction rejects all Muslims as evil and demands zero tolerance and zero immigration.

SEE NO EVIL

On the other extreme are the proponents who reject any open discussion of violence done in the name of Islam and consider the open discussion of violent acts a form of cultural repression. They point to passages in the Qu'ran that emphasize charity, mercy, the duty to care for the less-fortunate.

Many "See No Evil" adherents believe that Muslim immigrant communities should be allowed to establish a system of religious laws — shariah — that should take precedence over the civil, secular courts that govern their adopted countries. They counsel tolerance of practices that would be intolerable in their own societies: the subjugation of women, "honor" killings, violence against gays, "improperly dressed" women, and in some Muslim immigrant communities, the sale, human trafficking and subsequent rape of child brides.

A recent Pew Survey found that — depending upon the nationality — up to 80 percent of Muslims believe in stoning adulterous women to death.

Both generalizations — like most polemics that tar a heterogeneous population with the same brush — are wrong. Both sides fail to see that cultural practices, not religion, account for the reprehensible practices.

D[EVIL] IN THE DETAILS

The d[evil] is in the details and those have mostly ignored by both extremes.

At a much deeper level the debate within the world's liberal democracies over whether to accept — or outlaw — burqas, shariah courts, child marriages and the marginalization of women and other minorities are peripheral arguments that miss the entire argument.

The real argument rests on the concept of the separation of church and state because democracies, freedom of expression, individual fulfillment and the tolerance of differing ideas and peoples have never existed in a theocracy or any other form of government where religion has ultimate authority over all matters of law and behavior.

This is because true belief is absolute, allows no argument, prohibits doubts and questions about doctrine, defends dogma to the death and tolerates no dissent. And while Islam, Christianity and Judaism have made claims regarding mercy, their histories show an absolute absence of human kindness — as evidenced by blood-soaked, scorched earth legacies.

EVIL ARISES FROM HUMAN INTERPRETATION

The problem lies in the interpretation of scriptures and religious tradition. And while religion may be the province of God, its application on Earth lies in the hand of humans: fallible, often venal, power-hungry, greedy, delusional and sometimes downright evil. When their interpretation of the divine is allowed to become government, the result has always been bloody and evil: genocide by early Israelites, Christian Crusades, current-day violent jihad.

With the exception of small pockets of mentally unstable extremists who are punished when apprehended, Judaism and Christianity have moved past their blood-soaked legacy and have accepted that God's other people also have a right to live and prosper. It is no accident of history that this tolerance developed along with the fall of monarchs — secular and religious — and the rise of modern liberal democracies.

BLINDNESS ALLOWS EVIL TO PREVAIL

Regrettably, today's liberal democracies have failed to see the evil which can arise from their tolerance of intolerance. They have failed to see that sanctioning evil in the name of tolerance does not actually equal tolerance. Sanctioning the violation of human rights in the name of religious tolerance is an abdication of responsibility. The liberal democracy becomes a tool of oppression.

The fundamental problem is that liberal democracies have allowed the extreme, totalitarian elements to define the debate. Failing to separate the religious aspects of Islam from its cultural expression results — among many other evils — in violence and genocide toward unbelievers, the second class treatment of women, prohibitions against homosexuals and marriages of young girls.

Equally important is liberal democracy's failure to recognize that today's Islam resembles almost perfectly Eleventh- or Twelfth-Century Christianity and Judaism in the first millennium B.C. and has not had the time to come to grips with its own history and legacy.

ISLAM NO MORE INHERENTLY EVIL THAN JUDAISM OR CHRISTIANITY

Islam is no more inherently evil or violent than Judaism and Christianity before them. Indeed, the most egregious atrocities in all three Abrahamic religions have resulted more from cultural expressions and the political abuses of holy scripture rather than any fundamental religious evil.

Many of the most brutal and onerous practices of Islam imitate the adolescent era of Judaism and Christianity which sanctioned genocide, oppression and colonialism as the will of God. Indeed, today's angry Islamic jihadists walk the well-trod path of the other Abrahamic religions in the degradation of women, their genocidal, sectarian hatred of other cultures and a totalitarian ban on questioning the divine character of every word in the officially sanctioned versions of holy scriptures.

HOLY SCRIPTURE: A CONVENIENT JUSTIFICATION OF SECULAR EVIL

Whether Taliban, Al-Qaeda, Iranian mullahs or other despots, Islamic despots find the Qu'ran a convenient took to justify purely personal power trips, mass murder, oppression and empire building. Today's global Islamic jihad is identical with the Old-Testament Israelite's slaughter of Canaanites and the Christian Crusades.

Just as with early Christianity and Judaism, today's global Islamic jihadist finds a way to interpret his holy scripture to continue brutal and oppressive cultural practices that have no spiritual basis.

The only difference is that Christianity and Judaism have matured and developed a self-confidence in the strength of their faith that allows them to see other religions as different manifestations of God rather than as threats to survival. Inherent in this tolerance is the recognition that true faith comes not from intimidation, violence, death and oppression, but from within.

TRUE FAITH DOES NOT REQUIRE TOTALITARIAN VIOLENCE

A religious faith that can only spread and maintained at the muzzle of a gun or flying body parts of a suicide bomber is no faith at all. Obviously, ignorant, venal, evil and power-hungry people still exist outside of the Jewish and Christian mainstream. But those extremists are condemned rather than being encouraged and applauded.

For all these reasons, Die By Wire grapples with the issues of culture versus religion in the context of a thriller which aims first to entertain and secondarily to inform.

Both the thriller and the informative context focus on the growing problem of the accepted practice of trafficking, sale, rape and virtual slavery of child brides. The Netherlands has been chosen as the setting because it has led the way in its tolerance of intolerance and has begun to reap tragic dividends from its short-sighted actions.

Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge

In Die By Wire, I talk about the software and hardware vulnerablities inherent in fly-by-wire computer systems. In that book, the villain, through a series of corporate shells, buys a reliability testing company that services airliner computer systems. His aim: even if you can't eliminate all the bugs (like the Aussie A330′s) you can exploit bugs that you do detect.

This Register article yesterday about a real near-disaster offers a look at the problem:

Software bug fingered as cause of Aussie A330 plunge:

"On 7 October 2008, the Australian-owned A330-303 aircraft was cruising at 37,000 feet when the autopilot disengaged and the aircraft rose, before plunging downwards sharply, injuring 110 of the aircraft's 303 passengers and three-quarters of the cabin crew. Three minutes later the aircraft did it again, and the flight crew was bombarded with warnings from the instrumentation – almost all of them false.

"The Australian Transport Safety Bureau's (ATSB) final report found that one of the three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs) installed on the A330-303 aircraft began to malfunction and went into failure mode before the incident.

"It then began feeding false information into the flight control systems, and the software algorithms designed to handle the information couldn't cope, causing the erratic behavior."

The bolding in the last paragraph is mine. If you knew of the vulnerability, you could make that happen on demand. Is that how Die By Wire's villain did it? Is that really what happened to Air France 447?

And how could you do that in order to make 24 aircraft drop out of the sky at the same moment?

Those would be a spoilers, now wouldn't they?

NOTE: The small excerpt, above, doesn't do the full article justice.Read the rest.

The Prelude To Fictional (And Real-Life) Aircraft Disappearances: Unencrypted GPS:

"Civilian Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are vulnerable to a number of different attacks such as blocking, jamming, and spoofing. The goal of such attacks is either to prevent a position lock (blocking and jamming), or to feed the receiver false information so that it computes an erroneous time or location (spoofing). GPS receivers are generally aware of when blocking or jamming is occurring because they have a loss of signal. Spoofing, however, is a surreptitious attack. Currently, no countermeasures are in use for detecting spoofing attacks."

– Los Alamos Labs, Publication LAUR-03-6163

That Los Alamos Lab publication was  one important inspiration for Die By Wire.

HOW DID A SCIENTIFIC PAPER COUNT AS "INSPIRATION?"

By way of a little context here: I was the science geek in high school, built ion rockets, plasma engines, and a linear accelerator (atom smasher), Neon-Helium gas laser, other fun stuff, did the international science fair gig.

But later, even with great grades in the hard sciences at Cornell, I became a writer instead. However,  I  never lost my love for science, and so I filter-feed the techno-krill of the internet. And every now and then, the "what if" I ask becomes a thriller. In some cases, the thriller's "what if" accurately foretells subsequent events. But that's the subject of a future post.

To avoid spoilers that can ruin the reading, I'll just say that spoofing of GPS signals is simply one of the events that allowed Die By Wire's villains to construct a plausible way to make 24 fully loaded fly-by-wire aircraft fall mysteriously out of the sky over the deep water of the Atlantic.

DIE BY WIRE WRITTEN BEFORE AIR FRANCE 447

And, yes, the first draft of Die By Wire was written before the mysterious disappearance on  June 1, 2009 of Air France flight 447.

While Flt 447′s cockpit and data recorders were eventually recovered on May 1 and 2, 2011, no cause has  been released. Investigators have said that they know what happened, but not why or how.

Chillingly, all the phenomenon they have deduced from the data recorder would be consistent with the manner that Die By Wire's villain had developed for his own plot.

A COVER-UP WOULD BE INEVITABLE

I'm not asserting that 447 was brought down by a hack or a spoof.

But, the realization that hackers and spoofers had the ability bring down a modern fly-by-wire aircraft would shake global air travel to its foundations. The Icelandic volcanoes cost airlines alone $200 million per day and that was localized to Europe and did not count the collateral losses to other businesses.

A global shutdown by people unwilling to fly in die-by-wire aircraft would cost trillions and probably plunge a shaky world economy into a deep depression.

My guess is that even if hackers have brought down an airplane, we'll never know it because the industry and governments have way too much at stake and would cover it up very, very thoroughly.

EVEN ENCRYPTED MILITARY GPS MAY BE VULNBERABLE

Danger Room, one of the very best national defense blogs on the planet, looked at this issue on Dec. 16: Iran's Alleged Drone Hack, Tough, but Possible

"Take everything that Iran says about its captured U.S. drone with a grain of salt. But its new claim that it spoofed the drone's navigational controls isn't implausible. Although it's way harder to do than the Iranian boast suggests, it points to yet another flaw with America's fleet of robot warplanes."

Read the rest

Read Die By Wire

 

Modern Fly-By-Wire Aircraft Could Be Die-By-Wire Death Traps: News Release

Today's modern, fly-by-aircraft could become die-by-wire death traps, needing nothing more than a clever computer hack to make it drop out of the sky.

That real possibility drives the plot of Die By Wire, the latest thriller from New York Times best-selling author Lewis Perdue.

"Anyone who's tempted to dismiss the idea of digitally hijacking flight control computers need only look at the fly-by-wire hack of America's most advanced stealth drone by the Iranians, probably with the help of China or Russia," said Die By Wire author Lewis Perdue, a technology entrepreneur and former investigative journalist who began programming computers on mainframes in the late 1960s. "Don't forget that the videofeeds from our mainstay Predator drones were previously hacked with a handful of electronics you could buy at Radio Shack or your local computer recycler.

"Given the will, the resources — and a slightly different method from that used to snatch the drone — the successful hacking of a modern wide-body airliner is all but inevitable," Perdue added. "With our most advanced aircraft totally dependent upon computers, cyber-warfare is no longer just digital clashes and crashes on a screen. They can have direct, immediate, real-world consequences."

THE PLOT BEGINS IN AMSTERDAM

In Die By Wire, guardian sniper Mira Longbow arrives in Amsterdam to take out the head of a global child-smuggling ring, but quickly stumbles across a plot to make two dozen modern, wide-body aircraft simply disappear over the Atlantic with no warning and no known cause.

The villain of Die By Wire, Khan Nasiri, is an international cargo shipping tycoon who noted that the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in south-east Iceland in April 2010 caused the worst disruption to international air travel since 9/11 and wreaked billions of dollars worth of damage on the world economy in just one week. Airlines alone lost $200 million per day.

But Nasiri and his radical Islamist allies are in the game for more than the perversity of killing more people than 9/11. Their advance planning for the global economic disaster will allow them to reap vast profits with which to further their own personal and ideological goals.

And unlike the adolescent boasting that follows terror attacks, there will be no egotistical gloating, no footprints, no one to claim blame. The causes of the crashes will remain unknown even after the (unlikely) recovery of the black boxes. And the resulting fear and uncertainty will cripple the global economy by paralyzing international air transport. Finally, the lack of a responsible party thwarts any attempt at retaliation or psychological closure.

HOW COULD THIS POSSIBLY HAPPEN IN REAL LIFE?

All you need to think about is the highly advanced American RQ-170 stealth drone the Iranians just snatched in flight.

"The modern fly-by-wire cockpit is just a massive version of Flight Simulator with an airplane attached," said Perdue. "No cables, no hydraulics — nothing physical connects the cockpit wheel and pedals to the aircraft control surfaces. Just low voltage signals from the aircraft's computers traveling along wires to servos and motors that operate the rudder, flaps and other moving parts.

"Using wires saves a lot of weight over traditional cables and hydraulics," Perdue said. "That translates to fuel savings which connects very well to the bottom line.

"In fact, aircraft manufacturers are currently experimenting with eliminating even more weight by using WiFi instead of wires," said Perdue. "That offers even more opportunities to hack the system from a distance.

"And don't forget, today's most modern airliners can land themselves without a pilot, thanks to the computers and signals from the ground," Perdue said. "Insinuate yourself into that system and you have control of the aircraft. Or enough influence to create a disaster. You don't have to fly it to crash it."

Aircraft manufacturers have tried to prevent computer malfunctions by using as many as three different types of computers running different operating systems in order to keep a virus or failure in one system from spreading to another. But the flight control computers and their other connected systems are massively complex, and that opens them to chaotic unpredictability.

"A more familiar example of a chaotic failure cascade happened in 1996," Perdue said. "In that case, a tree branch in Oregon  brushed against a power line, that shorted out a transformer that brought down another transformer. Then an unexpected swing in the electrical frequency provoked a chain reaction that blacked out much of the West Coast.

"The American electrical grid is far less complex than a modern aircraft's fly-by-wire system, but it's still too complicated for the best minds to predict every possible failure mode."

"You can test and test and test, simulate and simulate, but you can never say a complex system won't fail," Perdue said. "You can often reduce the mean time between failures to a very small number, but it is never, ever zero."

AND THE CLOCK STARTS TICKING DOWN

Shortly after Mira receives her assignment to take out Nasiri for the child bride smuggling operation, she unexpectedly crosses paths with Jackson Day, an unwanted visitor, and would-be lover from her turbulent past in Iraq. He's there to enlist Mira's gift for languages in order to decipher a tangle of voices he has recorded of a high-level terror meeting at a remote Iranian safe house

Mira wants nothing to do with him, but, after the heat of their first encounter, they put aside their simmering differences when it's clear that Khan Nasiri is behind both evil enterprises.

And they are the only two people on the planet who can stop it in time.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lewis Perdue on the way to Granite Chief Wilderness area, Lake Tahoe, California. Click image for high resolution photo.

New York Times best-selling author Lewis Perdue's twenty published books have sold more than 4 million copies and have been translated into every major language in the world.

Perdue studied physics and biology in college and usually works those into his books. He received his B.S. (1972) with distinction from Cornell University and graduated sixth in his class.

He has served on the faculties at UCLA and Cornell University, founded four companies including two technology firms, a wine company and a magazine, and has been a top aide to a U.S. Senator and a state governor.

He has also run political races for Congress, worked as a Washington (D.C) correspondent (Ottaway/Dow-Jones, States News Service, Winston-Salem(NC) Sentinel), a columnist for Gannett, The Wall Street Journal Online, CBS Marketwatch and TheStreet.Com. More information is available about Lew here.

 

ABOUT THE BOOK

Die By Wire, A Thriller

By Lewis Perdue

Published by Sudden Pacific Publishing

Quality trade softcover

List Price: $14.99

6″ x 9″ (15.24 x 22.86 cm)

Black & White on Cream paper

320 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1468018813

ISBN-10: 1468018817

BISAC: Fiction / Thrillers

Kindle: www.amazon.com/Die-By-Wire-ebook/dp/B...

Buy Kindle Version
Buy Kindle .mobi
Buy LRF (for Sony Reader)
Epub (open industry format, Stanza reader, others)
Buy PDF
Buy Palm Doc
Buy for Online Reading (HTML & JavaScript)