Saturday, June 03, 2006

Take some Myths, add some other and make a best selling book

Well, this was the thought I had when I was read the DaVinci Code By Dan Brown, a novel based on Myths, non of them are proved right, some ARE PROVED WRONG, and he makes facts out of them, good way to get money.
I just would like to mention some points from this book, which other people (who advised me to read it) thought that this book has told the untold truth.

The first point is regarding the Last Supper, when Leonardo Davinci painted it, he wanted to experiment a new style he had invented, the usual way to do such a painting was to make the plaster wet and then the painting is done on on the wet plaster which is called a Fresco (as Dan Brown claimed that this painting is), this style of painting is limited in it's colors and cannot be retouched, So Leonardo invented another style - Tempera (egg yolk and vinegar) plus oil painting ON dry plaster - so he could use more colors and redo portions if necessary. Unfortunately it was a disaster, the humidity was causing the paint to separate from the plaster on which it had been painted which made it fall of the plaster. Over the years, the piece has been vandalized and nearly fell apart completely.
A 20-year effort by art experts was made to recreate what they thought the painting must have looked like, so actually we don't know if the experts really fixed the painting or if they changed its meaning by making changes in color and detail. there is no way to tell.

The other point is regrading the Priory of Sion, well there was an organization called The ORDER of Zion in the middle ages, but Prieure du Sion actually started in 1956 as a joke, as four guys wanted to have some fun, and made a group and called it after a near by mountain, they've filled the proper papers, and the French government listed them as an organization in 1956. a member of this group André Bonhomme in 1996 said to the BBC
"The Priory of Sion doesn't exist anymore. We were never involved in any activities of a political nature. It was four friends who came together to have fun. We called ourselves the Priory of Sion because there was a mountain by the same name close-by. I haven't seen Pierre Plantard in over 20 years and I don't know what he's up to but he always had a great imagination. I don't know why people try to make such a big thing out of nothing."
However, Pierre Plantard was a con-man who went to jail for 6 months for his games. Back in 1942 he had formed the Order of Knighthood called the Alpha Galates, to take advantage of people. He decided to do the same thing with his new Sion group. While the group was really about low-cost housing and put out a little leaflet called "Circuit" to talk about it, Pierre decided to do bigger and better things with his newly formed group.
Pierre developed a whole storyline, claiming he was descended from kings and that there were secret documents in the Rennes-le-Château. Unfortunately for him, he ran completely afoul of the law in his forged documents and was brought to court. Here he admitted that they were forgeries. In fact, his genealogy that tied him to French kings was stolen word for word from a history article.

My last point I'd like to mention is Fibonacci and the golden ratio, well if you have took some math classes, and went back in history you would know that this ratio was known about since the Greeks.
If you don't remember math classes I would gladly point it out here.
PHI (Φ) the golden ratio has to do with spirals (like PI (π) and the circles), which is the solution to the equation X2 - X - 1 = 0, which can tell us that X2 = X+1, and as we can clearly see that x ≠ 0, we can easily note that 1/X = X-1. The Fibonacci sequence implies that each number is the sum of the two that came before it, if you divide a number by the one before it, you would start getting values closer and closer to PHI as you walk in the sequence which is something close to 1.618033, now with a little bit calculus, we can represent the Fibonacci sequence in the form of
f(n+2)= f(n+1)+f(n) => f(n+2)/f(n) = f(n) +1
if we imply that g(n) = f(n+1)/f(n) "The Golden Ratio" => g(n+1) = 1/g(n) + 1
now if we take the limit when n -> ∞ we'll have g(n+1) = g(n)
and the limit would be L = 1/L + 1 => L2 = L + 1 & 1/L = L -1 #

The point is that Fibonacci didn't discover this ratio, he just put a way to find it.
Also I've heard that "Fibonacci" Leonardo de Pisa of the family Bonacci named him self "Fibonacci" when he wrote his groundbreaking books in order to honor his father who had taken him as a young boy on his many travels; the name meaning "son of Bonacci". he was never intended to be called "Leonardo Fibonacci" as Dan Brown mentioned him.

A lot and a lot of other Myths, you can find combined in this novel, I guess I'm going to collect some Myths, and combine them with each other, maybe I code write a best selling book, who knows.

I just find this book a waste of time.

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