Tom Clancy Is Dead At 66 236
guttentag writes "The author of The Hunt for Red October and many military and espionage novels which inspired a number of movies video games died last night in a Baltimore Hospital. The news was first reported by Publishers Weekly's Twitter account this morning and confirmed by New York Times Book Reporter Julie Bosman's Twitter account."
Re:Unhealthy Americans vs. Veganism (Score:4, Informative)
Michael Clarke Duncan was a Vegetarian and he died at 54.
http://www.peta.org/features/Michael-Clarke-Duncan.aspx [peta.org]
*toasts* (Score:4, Informative)
[R]ed Storm Rising
[I]nto the Storm
[P]atriot Games
Tom Clancy :'(
***
And lets not forget his depicting an aircraft being crashed into the capitol building years before it was attempted in real life.
Re:We lost a good one here. (Score:4, Informative)
"Red October", the story of the largest magnetic anomaly in the ocean, that for some reason was undetectable by the US Navy, because. . . Well damnit because I said so.
Soviet "Alfa" class submarines have titanium hulls, which are non-magnetic.
Who is to say if the fictional advanced Typhoon-class submarine in HfRO has the same feature? Also, if you have you ever done search-and-rescue, you'd know that the "mowing the lawn" pattern takes a very long time to cover any area, and it assumes that the target isn't moving. With the target traveling at 25 knots, you'd need a really good knowledge of the planned course plus hundreds of airplanes just to have any chance. Add in the problem of lots of false positives (including all the other subs and ships searching), and it's not nearly as easy as you seem to think.
Re:We lost a good one here. (Score:4, Informative)
The thing with Sullenberger is that he was always involved in industry safety programs and such. He is very knowledgeable about those aspects, it also so happens that he got to put them into practice. In another life, he might still be someone that you would bring in as an expert speaker on certain airline safety topics even without his dramatic landing. It's just that it would have been at industry conventions, as opposed to live TV. As TV goes, they lucked out on him as a hero.
Clancy was less of an expert than that, but as others have said, he either did his research or hob-nobbed with people who just gave him material, so he certainly wasn't the worst person they could have picked. And do remember, his initial research got him his first book and deal, he didn't get actual access until he was more popular (and beloved of the Defense Department).