If I remember correctly, the book opens with a prologue describing the business/finance hype in biotech, where a bunch of startups are raising funds and racing to get rich revolutionizing how to commercialize the exciting cutting edge in biological science in that era. It has nothing to do with the plot and the characters of the book, except that it establishes the tone, the background, and the incentives at play.
My favorite moment in the book is where they realize that the computer program for tracking populations had an incorrect assumption and just returned the full count if it counted the expected population for an enclosure. Only, the dinosaurs were breeding, so the system didn’t catch that the populations were actually higher than expected, and therefore didn’t notice when some dinosaurs escaped from their enclosures.
I didn’t get what chaos theory was until like 10-20 years later, but to my 12-year-old self it was the first time I learned about how bad assumptions can cascade in real world failures.
Michael Crichton was a successful novelist, and his first foray into show business was writing the screenplay for Westworld, about a park where everything goes wrong. It flopped commercially but basically planted the seeds for him to try it again, but with dinosaurs. Spielberg directed the adaptation and then there was a rush to adapt a bunch of other stuff. He was also an executive producer for ER, as it was adapted from a pilot he wrote, based on his own experience from med school (he graduated with an MD but never practiced).
The text gave me those vibes at first, but a closer look makes clear it’s actually a font that is intentionally misaligned. The As, Ns, and Es look exactly the same as each other, in a way that doesn’t happen with hand lettering or even AI generated text. The bad spacing around each character is consistent, too. It just looks like a poorly designed font.
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Now Dennis, I hear speed has something to do with it.
It’s too hard to try to manually control a fast breath rate like that. What you want to do is to naturally push that up by doing a bunch of physical work so that you’re breathing heavily. Then you’ll be exhaling lots of carbon dioxide!
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
In theory we can break down the sense of sight into subcomponents, too. It’s only the visual cortex that processes those raw inputs into a coherent single perception. We have two eyes but generally only perceive one image, even if the stereoscopic vision gives us a good estimate of distance, and one eye being closed or obscured or blinded fails pretty gracefully into still perceiving a single image.
We have better low light sensitivity in our color-blind rods but only have color perception from our cones, and only in the center of our visual field, but we don’t actually perceive the loss of color in those situations.
So yeah, someone putting a warm hand on my back might technically set off different nerve sensors for both temperature and touch, but we generally perceive it as a unified “touch” perception.
Similarly, manipulating vision and sound might very well throw off one’s proprioception, because it’s all integrated in how it’s perceived.
Nero
The dude who fiddled as Rome burned?
Didn’t Mitsubishi make kamikaze fighters before pivoting to automobiles and air conditioning units and excavators?
It’s interesting because it’s very obvious, biologically, that the panda has a digestive system that has a carnivore past, and yet, the very plentiful biomass in bamboo forests just waiting to be eaten rewards the animals that can make use of it. So the giant panda may or may not be “optimized” for meat, but has generations that came out of the free food that is bamboo, so that their very survival depends on a herbivore diet.
I remember reading that the common ancestors of all birds was carnivorous. Basically every herbivore bird descended from carnivores.
See also the giant panda and the red panda.
someone who knew the male in this meme
How can you tell that the Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis is male?
Half plus seven is just a rough rule of thumb, that tries to capture some different concepts at play.
Personally, I never liked dating across major life milestone ages like 22, college graduation. The mid 20’s are just an important phase in developing one’s personality and sense of self, and being outside of the school environment is an important transition to learn. So when I was 30 I had a hard cutoff at 25, as I didn’t want to be with anyone who still identified with being a recent college student.
I felt like a very different person as between 18 and 22, and between 22 and 26. But 26 wasn’t that different from 30, and 30 to 35 only saw some slight changes. It’d be hypothetical because I was already in a committed relationship after 32 or so, but when I was 35 my cutoff probably would’ve been late 20’s, and when I was 40 my cutoff would’ve probably been around 30.
The ball gave a big chunk of its energy to the hammer. The ball doesn’t have the density that the hammer does (we think of the hammer as much heavier as the ball, but in reality that big yoga ball might be around around 2/3 the weight of the hammer), but it’s the overall weight that matters.
So if 40% of the weight/momentum of the whole system is in the ball going down, and half of that gets transferred back to the hammer coming up, while the hammer has 90% of its momentum (originally 60% of the system) preserved in the bounce, we’re talking about enough roughly 74% of the original momentum (54% of the original system momentum plus 20% of the original system momentum) pushing 60% of the original system mass, enough to exceed the original height.
Some of the height is lost to the angular momentum of the spinning hammer, but one can see how this experiment could’ve bounced the hammer higher than it started, even without any downward momentum being contributed by the guy pushing it downward.
Like the Kumail Nanjiani joke about a new drug called “cheese,” made by mixing Tylenol PM with heroin.
This particular fantasy (one day I’ll get to reject the women who rejected me first and they’d never be able to handle it as gracefully as I did) seems somewhat common among young men who have trouble connecting with women.
But the false premise at the center of it is that the man is such a good friend to the woman, and the woman’s dating/romantic life hasn’t found anyone nearly as understanding or kind or empathetic. And part of that belief is some kind of assumption that life is an RPG where everyone is allotted the same number of points to distribute, and anyone who is maxed on charisma must be less intelligent or empathetic or something.
Realistically, men who are friends with women tend to do better with dating and relationships than men who aren’t close to women. The friends of friends angle is a great pipeline for searching for partners, assuming your personality makes your friends comfortable connecting you with their friends.
Even with anaerobic metabolism, the process produces lactate and pyruvate as a byproduct that the body needs to clear that out, which generally involves oxygen consumption. So the energy expenditure might spike in that moment without a corresponding spike in oxygen in that moment, but the amount over time should increase to where the overall amount should still correlate with total calori expenditure.