📚 Jurassic Park

My Review

★★★★½

This is shockingly the first book I’ve re-read. I originally read it as a ~12 year old, and though I remember absolutely loving it, I knew even back then how much of it was going over my head. Really loved this re-read, getting as much from the science and theory as I did from the exciting dinosaur action sequences. I had a realization halfway through that so much of what Ian Malcolm talks about is largely what we describe and understand data science to be today.

Highlights

But as Hammond talked about the elephant, he left a great deal unsaid. For example, Hammond was starting a genetics company, but the tiny elephant hadn’t been made by any genetic procedure; Atherton had simply taken a dwarf-elephant embryo and raised it in an artificial womb with hormonal modifications. That in itself was quite an achievement, but nothing like what Hammond hinted had been done.

Very Theranos / Elizabeth Holmes

“But don’t you find it boring to wear only two colors?” “Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don’t want to waste it thinking about clothing,” Malcolm said. “I don’t want to think about what I will wear in the morning. Truly, can you imagine anything more boring than fashion? Professional sports, perhaps. Grown men swatting little balls, while the rest of the world pays money to applaud. But, on the whole, I find fashion even more tedious than sports.”

When did Steve Jobs start doing this / talking about it? Wonder if this is inspired by him, or inspired him.

“We live in a world of frightful givens. It is given that you will behave like this, given that you will care about that. No one thinks about the givens. Isn’t it amazing? In the information society, nobody thinks. We expected to banish paper, but we actually banished thought.”

“Chaos theory says two things. First, that complex systems like weather have an underlying order. Second, the reverse of that—that simple systems can produce complex behavior. “”

A day is like a whole life. You start out doing one thing, but end up doing something else, plan to run an errand, but never get there.… And at the end of your life, your whole existence has that same haphazard quality, too. Your whole life has the same shape as a single day.”

Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encounters in which one event may change those that follow in a wholly unpredictable, even devastating way.”

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something.

Strong AI in 2025 vibez

Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

“All major changes are like death,” he said. “You can’t see to the other side until you are there.”