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"Reading Jurassic Park"
On 6/19/2015 at 9:34:20 PM, Seth Rex started the thread:
So I'm reading Jurassic Park for the first time and enjoying it.
Msg #1: On 6/20/2015 at 2:32:59 AM, Darth Chicken replied, saying:
The prologue still stands as one of the most mysterious and terrifying scenes in literature. A scene that still hasn't made it to the screen. I suppose now that the cats out of the bag it wouldn't resonate properly in any upcoming Jurassic movies.
-DC
Msg #2: On 6/20/2015 at 3:16:35 PM, Ostromite replied, saying:
For the first time? What the heck?
Msg #3: On 6/20/2015 at 3:30:42 PM, Narrator replied, saying:
I've never read it either. I might have to try it out.
Replies: 4
Msg #4: On 6/20/2015 at 3:32:13 PM, Ostromite replied to Msg #3, saying:
What the fuck is going on here? I thought everybody on this board had read it. Even Monkipzzle did, I think. Jesus, I read it probably fifteen times before I was in seventh grade.
Replies: 6
Msg #5: On 6/20/2015 at 3:35:52 PM, Trainwreck replied, saying:
I read it at my sister's wedding because I couldn't be fucked to pay attention to anything else.
Msg #6: On 6/20/2015 at 7:18:17 PM, Carnotaur3 replied to Msg #4, saying:
"Come on, guys, it's not a race."
Msg #7: On 6/20/2015 at 8:04:19 PM, Raptor Vinny replied, saying:
Seth wtf... you write a million JP fanfics but you haven't read the novels?
Replies: 9, 10
Msg #8: On 6/20/2015 at 11:27:51 PM, AngelsPhoenix replied, saying:
Yay you, but what took so long?
Msg #9: On 6/20/2015 at 11:38:32 PM, Seth Rex replied to Msg #7, saying:
I never said I didn't read The Lost World. I've just never had a valid copy of Jurassic Park until now. So that's why it's taken so long.
Msg #10: On 6/21/2015 at 12:30:36 AM, Trainwreck replied to Msg #7, saying:
To be fair, I'm convinced Trevorrow, et al did the same.
Replies: 11
Msg #11: On 6/21/2015 at 9:23:02 AM, RezForPrez replied to Msg #10, saying:
BaZINGa!
Msg #12: On 6/21/2015 at 9:24:14 AM, RezForPrez replied, saying:
And lol read, yeah, read the inside of my butt
Msg #13: On 6/22/2015 at 9:23:32 PM, Bryan replied, saying:
You never had a viable copy? The thing has been constantly in print production for 25 years and they're a dime a dozen at used book stores. For shame.
Replies: 14
Msg #14: On 6/22/2015 at 11:01:35 PM, Ostromite replied to Msg #13, saying:
LOL I was thinking the same thing. I've probably seen a copy in almost every thrift store I've ever been in my life, not to mention every book store and public library. You can get it at Wal-Mart for three dollars.
Msg #15: On 6/23/2015 at 12:01:36 AM, Trainwreck replied, saying:
I found a copy of The Lost World in goddamn Manas Air Base, Kyrgyzstan:
And that's not even the popular novel of the series. AND that bed was encrusted with the ejaculate of thousands of transient troops going in/out of Afghanistan. AND I slept on it that night.
Msg #16: On 6/23/2015 at 7:48:42 AM, fordprefect replied, saying:
I read JP and TLW obsessively when I was like 6-9. I still remember a lot of it verbatim like Gennaro's threat to the dock workers or something: " you could be subject to revocation of license and/or penalties in excess of..." which I used to repeat to anyone who annoyed me as a kid, because I was a loser.
Malcolm's dumb chaos theory rants about blackbodies and gaussian population plots also had a huge effect on me smh.
Replies: 17
Msg #17: On 6/23/2015 at 1:05:19 PM, Narrator replied to Msg #16, saying:
I've never read the book, but what made malcolms rants dumb in the book?
Replies: 18, 19
Msg #18: On 6/23/2015 at 6:54:54 PM, Trainwreck replied to Msg #17, saying:
They sound smart to me because I'm dumb. I hope ford isn't about to ruin the books for me.
Replies: 22
Msg #19: On 6/24/2015 at 1:48:17 AM, Bryan replied to Msg #17, saying:
Replies: 21
Msg #20: On 6/24/2015 at 2:02:23 AM, RezForPrez replied, saying:
guys my favorite movie is jurassic park tied with the lost world tied with jurassic park 3
i've been on a message board for these movies for 15 years
of course i haven't read the book lol, but man harry potter is awesome... no way it's better than that
Msg #21: On 6/24/2015 at 6:31:35 AM, Narrator replied to Msg #19, saying:
Msg #22: On 6/24/2015 at 11:36:24 PM, fordprefect replied to Msg #18, saying:
I don't remember it that well, and my copy is stuffed in storage somewhere. Malcolm's explanation to Gennaro of what Chaos Theory actually involves is pretty accurate. It's much better than what's in the film at any rate.
But then he goes on to conclude all kinds of ridiculous things. Any time anything unexpected happens Malcolm claims it's chaos at work, when really the whole theme park as a system is extremely complicated and the unpredictability of it all could be simply due to the inherent randomness of a bunch of environmental factors that is utterly intractable to model. One of the key ideas in chaotic systems is that you can have a system that we understand very well but we find that it's unpredictable because very slight differences in initial conditions can trigger an entirely different set of outcomes.
For a system like a pendulum attached to another pendulum (a double pendulum) it's easy to write down all the equations that govern its behaviour so, in theory, if you set it off you'll know exactly what it's going to do at any moment - maybe it's slowly oscillating on the left for instance.
However it turns out if you start off with a value that's like 0.000001% different, your pendulum starts doing crazy loops on the right. That's chaos. In a perfect world we'd be able to predict what our pendulums do, but we don't live in a world where we can measure the precise starting positions of the pendulum so we have no idea what it's going to be doing ten minutes from now.
However a dinosaur theme park is not one of these systems, it's a massively complicated system already so we can't very well claim anything unpredictable that happens is due to chaos. Half the stuff that goes wrong is entirely foreseeable.
Also the stuff about his black suit being cooler in the heat is dubious, and has nothing to do with blackbodies. If he was wearing loose black robes that's one thing, but he's wearing a black suit, or black shirt. Besides, the colour of your clothes aren't a good indicator of their ability to absorb and emit in the IR range which is probably where most of your heat is given off.
Replies: 23
Msg #23: On 6/25/2015 at 2:54:33 AM, Raptor Vinny replied to Msg #22, saying:
Malcolm's main point was that dinosaurs would start breeding and it wasn't predictable how it would happen. You can't predict that a portion of an animal's DNA will be the exact one needed to change sex. They thought they had it under control but they didn't.
Replies: 24
Msg #24: On 6/25/2015 at 8:29:50 AM, fordprefect replied to Msg #23, saying:
I think his point was grander than that, I don't think he specifically insists they'll start breeding but I'd have to look at the book. In any case none of it is really chaos theory except in the most tenuous sense.
Now that I'm thinking about it, towards the end of the book Malcolm has a long speech about climate and oxygen being a corrosive gas and humans not having the ability to really harm the Earth. Given the bizarreness of State of Fear it would be interesting to see how people interpret that speech now.
Replies: 25
Msg #25: On 6/26/2015 at 4:45:42 AM, Raptor Vinny replied to Msg #24, saying:
What's to interpret...? In State of Fear he argues climate change was still in its scientific infancy and thus should be under more scrutiny, and that he doesn't believe humans can harm the earth as much as people think, which is exactly what Malcolm says in JP.
I agree that some of the Chaos Theory he explains doesn't really work the way he describes it, but he used it in a context that people could understand. Crichton was a genius at conveying science to the layman and providing real world examples of how it can be applied.
Replies: 26
Msg #26: On 6/26/2015 at 8:55:09 PM, fordprefect replied to Msg #25, saying:
In State of Fear he argues climate change was still in its scientific infancy and thus should be under more scrutiny
When I read the book it seemed his message was a lot stronger and controversial than 'climate change should be under more scrutiny'. It came across, to me at least, that he was suggesting that much of the evidence was faked or misinterpreted, often intentionally.
His message in Jurassic Park is a lot tamer: humans can only damage themselves with their actions and that the Earth as an ecological and geological system will continue on unaffected. People would never disagree with that, but it's very different from what he's trying to say in State of Fear. In one book he's saying that no matter what nuclear annihilation we bring upon ourselves in the future, life will find a way. In the other he's saying that humans will be fine and that global warming is scaremongering paranoia invented to replace terrorism and the Cold War.
he used it in a context that people could understand. Crichton was a genius at conveying science to the layman and providing real world examples of how it can be applied.
I'm not just nitpicking here - chaos has almost nothing to do with what Malcolm talks about for the entire book. 'Complicated systems are unpredictable' is not a scientific insight. He didn't explain anything for the layman at all except in the brief description he gives Gennaro, a description that he spends the rest of the book undermining. The park was an example of the exact situation where chaos should NOT be applied. I'm all for accessible science fiction but there really wasn't any chaos in the story at all, except when he namedrops it in support of something irrelevant. Crichton was good at using science, particularly science with recent media exposure, to make his stories more plausible, but it was all still technobabble to set his story, nothing more.
Msg #27: On 6/26/2015 at 11:10:22 PM, Ostromite replied, saying:
State of Fear is basically straight-up paranoid conservative conspiracy theory propaganda, just a few notches above those novel Glenn Beck pays ghost writers to write for him.
Msg #28: On 6/27/2015 at 8:56:09 AM, Narrator replied, saying:
I just picked JP up and I'm gonna read it soon. I did a talk on chaos theory recently and used sexy Ian Malcolm in a slide... are you telling me I shouldn't have done that?
Yes, a real talk that really happened.
Replies: 29, 31
Msg #29: On 6/27/2015 at 11:57:36 AM, Bryan replied to Msg #28, saying:
Are you telling us natural selection hasn't violently removed you from the gene pool yet?
Replies: 30
Msg #30: On 6/27/2015 at 12:04:41 PM, Narrator replied to Msg #29, saying:
My life, specifically.
Msg #31: On 6/27/2015 at 12:48:25 PM, fordprefect replied to Msg #28, saying:
Assuming the research for your talk involved more than watching Jurassic Park a lot then I'm sure it was fine. There isn't a chaos textbook out there that doesn't mention him.
Replies: 33
Msg #32: On 6/27/2015 at 3:36:49 PM, Compy01 replied, saying:
My copy of Jurassic Park mysteriously appeared in my primary school drawer. To this day I'm still not sure who left it for me. I've probably read it 3 times. I loved it when I was younger, but I read it maybe two years ago and I didn't think so much of it.
Msg #33: On 6/27/2015 at 3:43:44 PM, Narrator replied to Msg #31, saying:
"Assuming the research for your talk involved more than watching Jurassic Park a lot...."
... are you saying that's not what I should have done?
Msg #34: On 8/21/2015 at 3:27:46 PM, Rick Arnold replied, saying:
It's like a million times better then Peter Benchley's Jaws. I'll give it that.
Robert Muldoon pretty much kills the t-rex by drowning it in a pond, blows up a velociraptor with a grenade launcher, gets drunk and yells shit at Ellie and threatens Gennaro with a stun gun if he doesn't go into the raptor nest. He just may be the greatest character in literature.
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