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Scientific breakthroughs inspire science fiction. But that door swings both ways, because popular science fiction and its reception also affect scientific research and its reputation, as the general public is more likely to read a science fiction novel or see a movie than to discuss the merits of the latest genetic studies. The most popular science fiction comes from someone who follows science and thinks, “What could possibly go wrong?” The classic example is the group of young educated writers who got together around the time Luigi Galvani was getting publicity for his experiments in animating frog muscles with electricity.
While the group of friends at Lake Geneva imagined the ghoulish possibilities of galvanism, one young woman was so horrified by the idea of reanimating corpses that she subsequently had a dream in which she saw “the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.” This dream inspired her to write a horror story in which a “mad scientist” creates a monster out of dead body parts, a monster that wreaks havoc and kills innocents. The author is Mary Shelley. The story, of course, is Frankenstein. Considered by many to be the first true work of science fiction, it was certainly the world’s first cautionary tale about the perils of science messing around with life.
There are other examples in a post at Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Author Laura H. Kahn wants to encourage scientists to write more fiction, so that stories about science could be more informative, and maybe a little less horrifying. Link -Thanks, Janice!
Erin Pearce’s Etsy store is called “What the Hell Is This?” That’s the best possible name for an Etsy store. Or a blog. Or a restaurant. It’d be a terrible baby name, but a great restaurant name. Anyway, she sells beetles that she’s dressed up like Jurassic Park characters.
Link -via The Mary Sue
In most films, the audience knows who is going to survive way before the plot makes it obvious. It takes the characters a little longer to figure out how important they are. -via Buzzfeed
Of course, that’s the normal state of affairs anyway, so one shouldn’t be alarmed. Dan Ryckert spotted this apparition and quite properly tweeted:
Dear dude in the Jurassic Park jeep that’s transporting a massive companion cube: Can we be best friends?
Link via Geekologie | Photo: Dan Ryckert
Yes, there’s a musical version of the science fiction movie Jurassic Park. It was written by Phillip Malcom and Aaron Holmes. The play has been occasionally performed since 2009 by college students in Lincoln, Nebraska. It’s about an hour long, and you can watch it in the links below.
via Nerd Bastards | Official Website
Sculpture: Tyler Keillor, Photo: Ximena Erickson, Image modified by Bonnie Miljour
When University of Michigan professor Jeffrey Wilson stumbled upon fossilized dinosaur eggs, he discovered something quite remarkable – a death scene best described as "Anaconda" meets "Jurassic Park":
"It was amazing," Wilson recalls, "because we realized that not only do we have an egg, not only do we have a chain of vertebrae, but they are arranged in a coil, and on top of the coil was a skull."
The snake was coiled around the broken eggshell. "Next to that coil, eggshell, skull, was a solid egg, and another solid egg, and then some larger bones," says Wilson.
Those bones belonged to a baby sauropod. Full-grown sauropods were the vegetarian 100-ton giants of the dinosaur world. But the baby was only about a foot-and-a-half long. It had apparently just hatched from that broken egg. The snake, about 11 feet long, had been waiting for the baby to hatch in order to eat it.
Randall Munroe of xkcd has posted intricate movie graphs that help explain the sequence of characters for those who have trouble figuring out what went on over a long narrative. The most helpful is the largest graph, which deals with the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Grouping of lines shows which characters are together over time. There are also graphs for the original Star Wars trilogy, Jurassic Park, 12 Angry Men, and Primer. Only a small portion of the LOTR graph is shown here. Link -via reddit
The Raptor is a short yet clever video clip (1:37) about Jurassic Park, but without any real dinosaurs. Just a hallway and two dudes who managed to be quite entertaining!
Link [embedded YouTube]
