Disbelief

[Darick Chamberlin <drogue@eskimo.com>]

RE: Jurassic Park in toto and the Lysine Question


So, for many months I have sifted the perforated steel dish that contains 
the remains and residues of responses from within a community that is by 
definition issuing pronouncements and exchanging focussed information and 
even relaying song lyrics for children all from an apparent love for or 
interest in Dinosaurs.

I feel everyone's anxieties. I hear your particular stories and note each 
particulate fact, assembling and accreting as they still do, to a 
zentithless pitch of dissatisfaction. 

I also get a good many doses of 'the cringe'.

On something like the Lysine business, I can't help but notice that, 
connected to my initial acceptance of the premise of the film (A. THAT IT 
IS A FILM and B. that it is about people in the 'present' who 
artificially engineer,live, from the goldurned level of subcellular 
subsubcellular level, extincted creatures from in some cases 65 million 
years ago) that, well, if one can engineer a living dinosaur at all in 
such a story, one might possibly be able to also deliberately tamper with 
its biological preconditions (like number or type or amount of amino acid 
usage or manufacture or need from diet) in such a way as to have it be 
'just as they say'. Remembering, my sour hand in a 4 dollar envelope of 
puffed popcorn, that again A and B moreover are part of what I signed on 
for....


Now specifically, also: does anyone among us not feel the pervasive 
increase, additively, of dinosaur enthusiasm and talk as a result of the 
film? I by no means think the movie is even good... although I like it 
alot because i already liked Dinosaurs. But surely, those of us who are 
tour guides notice slight increase in numbers, slight increase in 
enthusiasm? More better 'toys' are made possible for us all by even 
wildly unscientific movies. If there is a way, can someone estimate, from 
some Harpersian Indexing, the net increase in library book circulation 
and booksales, as a result of the film? 

I am no scientist, but even a fleck, even a fossilized twink of 
pragmatism will discern that the motion, however apparent or only in many 
cases superficial, towards dinosaur thoughts, are in fact then thoughts 
that are good for people who already, or who "used  to use" - as they say in 
the detergent commercials - dinosaurs.

It just... I mean if I sound like I am parading an outsider's brutal 
facticity and sourness I am not. I have read countless emails from 
everyone who submits  these and have been enriched; enriched as a soil 
can be enriched, even by the stored infinitesmal ergs of potential in 
added compost posts...

but i at last apparently have decided i guess to dredge up the 
possibility that so much gnashing of fuss is too much protestation. Methinks.

Maybe?

As educators too, not just as empiricists, you and we and i should not 
fail to notice how little you can ever educate someone who doesn't 
actively seek the right knowledge out anyway... so that's not a huge 
disinformation problem there, is it? 

The feeling I get is that the astounding cultural boost to dinosaur 
science that an artfully and technically rare and gigantic thing like a 
Hollywood movie gives can be seen, over geologic or at least Culturally 
Historical Timescales (into which Science itself is embedded, we know), 
as a pretty good thing.

Let's talk about other possibilities besides estimates at chances the 
number of toes in longshots will be corrector.



Now - feed me to the Raptors.


with "willing supensions",


darick chamberlin
subscriber for more'n'a year now