Murder by Death

I've just read through chapter 5 again.  This chapter was one of the most conflicting for me.  On the one hand, sorry, waves are kind of boring once you get to the light waves and sound waves part; on the other hand, they're not actually boring at all when you're talking about lightning, why water looks blue, or how cell towers work.  So, overall, a mixed bag in terms of my attention span.

I still take exception to two things she says at the start of the chapter though (that bugged me the first time around):  that water doesn't move as waves pass - waves don't move stuff, and that waves never come in sideways to the shore. 

With the first one, I get at a basic level what she's saying, but I wish she'd phrased it differently, because the way she writes it is, at face value, wrong.  Waves do move water, although not in the sense that a wave is always made of the same water molecules.  If they didn't we wouldn't have shells, sea glass, or sharks teeth to find on our beaches, and we wouldn't have to worry about beach erosion or tsunamis.

With the second one, I grew up on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico and more often than not the waves did come in at an angle.  I'm sure there were a lot of very rational reasons for this including wind patterns, water currents and off shore geographical formations, but her emphatic statement that they always come in parallel to the shoreline is, again, not true as she states it.  (I tried to find pictures to prove my point, but I grew up on the beach so I don't actually have many pictures of the beach.)

I'm certain her science is sound, and that it's more just a narrative choice over over sight, but they still bug me.