The scariest tall storeys
QUESTION Skyscrapers are a popular setting for films such as Die Hard and The Towering Inferno. Do any high-rises feature in novels?
NothiNg Lasts Forever by Roderick thorp has retired cop Joe Leland visiting his family at Christmas and getting caught up in a terrorist attack on an office party in a high-rise. if this sounds familiar, that’s because the film Die hard was based on this 1979 book.
Joe Leland became the rather younger John McClane, played by Bruce Willis. Most of the famous scenes from the film originated in the book, such as the hero jumping off the roof wrapped in a fire hose.
the book was the second to feature Joe Leland. the first, the Detective, was released as a film in 1968 with Frank Sinatra in the lead role. Nothing Lasts Forever was reprinted in 2012 to tie in with Die hard’s 25th anniversary in 2013.
Matt McLean, Odiham, Hants. SkySCRapeRS are a plot device in several great sci-fi novels. the best has to be J. g. Ballard’s high-Rise, published in 1975. Ballard was interested in the psychology of inner space rather than the outer space of conventional sci-fi.
high- Rise charts the descent into anarchy of the residents of a brutalist tower block. the novel begins with the remarkable sentence: ‘Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.’
the house of a thousand Floors by Czech author Jan Weiss is one of the earliest sci-fi novels in european literature. it was published in 1929, four years after Franz kafka’s the trial, which clearly inspired it. the novel describes the fever dream of an injured World War i soldier. he finds himself in the stairway of a skyscraper, used as a metaphor for modern society. he must rescue princess tamara from Muller, the lord of the edifice.
Robert Silverberg is a well regarded american sci-fi author whose 1971 novel the World inside explores the harsh realities of life in mega skyscrapers. the novel is set on earth in the year 2381, when the population has grown to 75 billion. the action takes place in Urban Monad 116, a 3km-high skyscraper.
a nod must be given to the 2000aD comic character Judge Dredd. Following a series of nuclear wars, much of the planet has become a radioactive wasteland, so people live in enormous skyscrapers, or blocks, in mega-cities.
to control Mega- City one, law enforcement officers called Judges have been given the powers of judge, jury and executioner — Judge Dredd is the hardest of the lot. the dystopian character was played in a movie of the same name in 1995 by Sylvester Stallone.
Most of the blocks in Judge Dredd are named after people of note from the 20th century, often to comedic effect: there is plenty of mayhem in the benignly named Des o’Connor and enid Blyton blocks.
Justin Davies, Kidderminster, Worcs.
QUESTION Are there collective nouns for groups of dinosaurs?
SpeCiFiC terms for groups of dinosaurs have not been adopted, other than that it is convention to split them into herds for herbivores and packs for carnivores.
Birds are considered to be living dinosaurs, so it has been suggested we adopt terms for dinosaurs such as flock, gaggle, colony and murder. the recent discovery of fossilised footprints in Canada suggest tyrannosaurs worked together to stalk prey. palaeontologists who favour this theory have taken to referring to hunting packs as terrors of tyrannosaurs.
Martin Lang, Lyme Regis, Dorset.
QUESTION Has a circle always had 360 degrees?
the short answer is yes. the ancient egyptians were the first to divide a circle into 360 degrees, but they inherited their numerical system from Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamia was the area along the tigris and euphrates rivers that makes up a sizeable portion of modern-day iraq. Regarded as the cradle of civilisation, it was where farming, written languages and mathematics began.
the best known ancient civilisation from Mesopotamia is the Babylonians, and their first use of mathematics dates from between the fifth and third millennium BC.
the Babylonian system of mathematics is built on a base of 60 (we use a base of ten). From this we get 60 seconds in a minute and 60 minutes in an hour.
if we didn’t have this base of 60, the design of clock faces would be very different. With a circular clock face of 360 degrees, each minute division equals 6 degrees exactly.
the Babylonians had a love of the number 60, perhaps because it can be divided in so many ways (by one, two, three, four, five, six, ten, 12, 15, 20 and 30) and still leave a whole number.
they passed this love of the number 60 to the ancient egyptians, who found it worked for dividing a circle.
and 360 is also useful when it comes to division. Divide a circle into six and you get six equilateral triangles, each with three internal angles of 60 degrees. a right angle, important for building pyramids and temples, is a quarter of a circle and is a convenient 90 degrees.
the first calendars, also created by the egyptians, had 360 days in a year, though this became problematic because it didn’t match the earth’s orbit.
Bob Cubitt, Northampton.
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